The 40k Lorecast - Episode 16 - Dark Angels - The rise of the 1st legion under the Emperor and their reunitment with the Lion.

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

On this episode we cover the dark (get it) origins of the 1st Legion. Their usage by the emperor as his secret death force during the Great Crusade. We then dive into the rise of the Lion and his arrival into the legion. Also we will have a discussion on how much Luther over-valued himself to the Lion.... that bit may be a tad on the side of a diatribe. PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast, me John Barciotti and Brad Jester. This guy. The orc one is completed, so we have to another faction focus. Where else are you going to go, then Imperium? Because it's about two-thirds of the Codexas? You know what we should probably do? How about the First Legion?

Well, yeah, you start with number one. That's probably good idea. So for those who don't know what that means, today we're going to jump into Dark Angels. And we're going to start in the Dark Angels at the beginning. But I want to, before we get into this, talk about more of my personal story for here. As a competitive player,

I hate the Dark Angels. I've played against them for a number of years, and I always play against them, and it's either an auto win or an auto lose. I think the Dark Angels are cool as shit. Well, their lore is incredible. Well, I've also played them, but I also think I played them

at the Cali Cup and did very well, thank you very much. And the last time I know that you played them, you went to the hospital after. Well, I mean, sometimes the Dark Angel's secrets are Hard to hold. Okay, dark angels are cool as shit. You know what, screw this.

I'm going into full why I like dark angels before we get into the whole thing, which is, here's the reasons to like dark angels. Dark angels were they not the space was the emperor's assassins. The dark angels are the emperors. We don't need to talk about this anymore, guys. Their prime mark just came back from a 10,000 year hiatus and was like, hey, man, how's it going? is that a demon primark?

How about if I crush his skull? I've been off. Do I have any ring rust? Apparently not. I just yolo swag. A thing. Also, they have the most unique factions within their faction, which is, oh, you want to play dark angels?

Cool. We have all these ways to play them. Oh, did I mention that we have Deathwing? Oh, the Terminator? Oh, the only Terminator version of, the chapter. Oh, do you want to go fad? You want to Ricky Bobby it? Ravenwing, bikes, speeders. These are wildly different armies. And you can also play the regular. You can play kind of regular Marines because they have an entire legion of guys to pull from. But also,

they have these crazily different. You can play Dark Angels in wildly different ways. Even in today's rules, we still have that. We're getting a new. Well, we might have a new. It depends on when you listen to it. But we have wildly different ways to play Dark Angels in the game, which is really exciting, and it comes with really great lore. So if you're a Dark Angels fan, you can fanboy out whatever way you want to play them. And I actually think that's a really big deal because one of the biggest complaints I have currently, and I've had for a while, is I can't play the legions, the factions, the Dark Angels,

is when I want to play a space marine. I want to play them, and I want to feel like I'm playing the lore. Dark Angels are one of those chapters that you still can do that. Yeah, very much. So the Dark Angels are, from a competitive standpoint, and we're going to get into their lore. You could play them in 9th edition.

I believe in, we haven't seen the 10th edition Codex yet, or maybe we have heard this. And I, well, I haven't seen the 10th edition codex yet. Let's put it that way. But the 9th edition, the 8th edition codexes, you were able to play them the way that if you really isn't Dark Angels lore, they are. My complaint about Dark Angels has been some of the ways you could play them. Boring.

Oh, God. And we'll cover that on our third episode. But our first episode is we want to talk about the origins of Dark Angels. And for those of you who know Dark Angels, you want to understand how badass this is about to be. For those of you who don't know anything about Dark Angels, you're about to learn how incredibly badass. Okay. Because there's a lot of people that don't know. Everybody knows.

I feel like a lot of people know about. about the Dark Angels after the Lion. Yeah. Before the Lion, sorry Dark Angels fans. Holy shit were these guys' dicks. But honestly, I think they were cooler, if I'm being honest. They were vengeful. So, they were, you know what?

They weren't just vengeance. They were what Batman wanted to be. I am vengeance. So let's take into that. Dark Angels were the first legion, which is because they were literally the first ones. The Emperor killed all the Thunder Warriors. Well, small aster. Kind of.

We're going to get to that in a second. Let's not spoil the cast, the beginning of the cast, Brad. But he kills them off. He's got this Primark project. And the first Legion he begins bringing up out of this is of course the First Legion, who were later named the Dark Angels.

They are, I would call them an unperfected at this point. He still, in my opinion, leaned pretty heavy thunder warrior on some of his original idea? Because he's looking, I still think when he first met the Legion, when he makes the First Legion,

the Dark Angels, before they met the Primark, which things change wildly, but before, he's still looking for just results. Yep. And unfortunately, I think this translates in forever. This set the tone for the Dark Angels

until the, forever. Before we dive into this piece of the Emperor, is that to remember, the Emperor set out in the Great Crusade with all 20 legions. Yes, he did start with all 20. Only 18 of them came back. But he left with all 20. When he left, he had no prime marks. So all 20 legions only reported to him. What makes the dark angels interesting is that it was obvious historically at this point that he had different plans for each of the legions. And he looked to one legion to do the thing that he couldn't let anyone else know was being done.

And that was the dark angel. You know, I'm doing that, you know what? Screw it. I'm going right into it. The dark angels are agent from Serenity. They are the people that take care of the shit to make society. The emperor wanted to make this. Pause there. For those you don't know what Serenity is, Google it

and go watch it. It was incredible. Also, and watch 13 episodes of Firefly and then ban everything from Fox. It was incredible. So effectively, the emperor has this vision for this idealistic society. He's going to conquer, which is just part of what goes on. He's rationalizing every action. And the ultimate rationalization is the dark angels, who are the guys, I want to make this

unbelievable society. You probably can't live in it. But I need you to do these horrible things. and the dark angels do horrible, like a lot of bad, bad things. But he's like, I have this problem. These guys are going to cause a problem. I need them to never exist ever again problem. You need to, I don't need you to defeat them.

This is where the dark angels come in. You call the space wolves when you need somebody killed. You need a guy killed. You need John is taking over a segment. I got a problem over there. Can you go deal with, deal with him so we can bring them back into compliance? You need to defeat someone. You bring the, the lunar wolves.

You bring the space wolves. If you need a problem, gone. I mean, gone. Like there's no, we took the books, we burned them. We erased all history of them. That's when you sent the dark angels in. The dark angels took care of shit. Well, we covered on the horse heresy, the beginning of the horse heresy.

you're not actually before that. We just, during the, about the Great Crusade, about the term imperial compliance. And so imperial compliance is what the emperor discussed doing, which is I'm going to, we're going to, we're going to go out from, from Terra and Soul, and we're going to reacquire all of our lost, all of our lost brethren, all our lost humanity,

and we're going to bring them into imperial compliance, where they're going to be part of the Imperium, they're going to pay a tie to the Imperium, they're going to do all these things. But, but in this time, though, there was still, the view that being brought into imperial compliance, even if it was against your will, was a good thing.

It was a good thing. And it was going to be better for you than what you had right now. However, the emperor had a secret. And he had a lot of secrets. I shouldn't use the word. He had one? Yeah. So one of the secrets the emperor had, and this was that not all worlds and he knew were

viable for imperial compliance. And that is what the dark angels were for. They had to go to planets before. Anyone knew that they were there or systems and remove everything. Not just, again, they weren't there to win. They were there to exterminate. Also, it wasn't, again, that they killed everybody. They had to erase whatever the thing was.

So when people showed up to that planet many years later, they went, oh, this civilization lived here, they must have gotten killed by Zenos or something. Whatever could have happened here. There's no history whatsoever. That's what they did. They took care of it. And the thing is, is that that's how we started with dark angels secrets. Dark angels are known for keeping their secrets.

And they've taken that to the next level. Oh, yeah. But whatever. Frankie foreshadow time. Dark angels and secrets, good friends. Yeah, they're pretty big. Good friends. At this time, they were actually known internally amongst the other legions as the emperor's angels of death.

That's what they called them. Angels of Death, by the way, for Space Marine players, was Dark Angels things. If you're Dark Angels player, you can pat yourself on your back. I can't because my arms are too short. And your shoulders are too busted. Either way. It's a combination of both.

But Angels of Death were first, that Dark Angels were first. Now, everybody's Angels of Death. No, Dark Angels are the first people to be known as this. And they were known. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wildly known. Again, before the Lion met them, before they made contact with their prime mark,

they were known as a get it done, did not care what happened. Yep. Legion. They did some crazy shit, even in the early days. They put things down. But the thing is,

is that in the Dark Angels defense, that's what they were assigned to you. Yeah, the Dark Angels weren't, we should be fair to them. They weren't like world leaders where they were brutal because they were brutal. Yeah. They were told.

brutal because I got a specific set of directions and it says, hey, man, we got to be assholes. Like, this is just what's happening. This is to me when I talked earlier about I talked shit on the Dark Angels. My viewpoint, my shit talk on Dark Angels excludes, it's exclusive to competitive play 40K. The lore of Dark Angels, they are amazing. Because as we're talking about this, there were 20 legions and only one of them the emperor used to do this level of stuff. The other 19 legions were told to go places. I mean, yeah, the space walls did a bit more aggressively than others, but they were all

sent to places and their job was remove the problem, uplift the citizenry, bring them back to us. And the Dark Angels were on team. Yeah, that world can't be saved, burn it. But also, they got handed all of those things. So that's a big thing on psychology-wise because they never got the easy ones. They never got the, hey, take this great world and make them part of them, period. I've been like, okay, you're ready for your 400th in a row shitty task?

You're like, I guess. Like, this is just kind of what we, you're like, hey, man, I was looking over what every other Legion did. All of them got zero of what we do. Yeah, the 12th Legion showed up. And when they got there, they were like given like rings of laurel. Yeah, they gave them a parade. And they got fed. and I went somewhere and had to murder every single thing.

You had me killing the bugs, like, for whatever reason. I shot so many puppies. Yeah, like I burned an entire planet because you asked me to. Yeah. There's not a lot of parades. Obviously, one of the big pieces about the emperor that we discuss over and over and over again is the secrets that he kept from everybody else. And so few of his secrets that he had to deal with,

the first one were, in my opinion, were Zenos. everyone was aware that there were aliens, but not that the aliens were equal or superior to them. This is one of the biggest things. The emperor kept that there was civilizations of sentient, like, I'm just living my best life aliens. Emperor did a lot of cool things. Emperor did a lot of bad things.

One of the biggest things was he was wildly xenophobic. It was humanity first, and then there was toasters, microwaves, about 600 other things, and then it was anybody else that wasn't human. And that's kind of how he viewed everything on that. And he treated it as that, though, because he went,

I don't think if there's other Xenos out there, I can impose my empirical edict. And the thing about that was, it wasn't, and Brad said it really well there, is that there were civilizations. It's easy to explain orcs to the, hey, there's an orcheteer. it or whatever. Orcs are evil. You bump into orcs and they just try to kill you and until you

kill all of them, they keep trying to kill you. What's harder to explain is a seemingly peaceful civilization. Which they encountered a multiple. And again, the Tao weren't there yet, but we can use early Tao would have been a good example of this where they're just trying to live their life and their system. We're not bothering anybody. That changes this, this, you're saying, well, we could trade with them. We've discussed very briefly before rogue traders. We could do all these things with them. The emperor is like, well, we can't do that. And the easiest way for him to do that was rather than try to explain to everyone here's a little dangers of work with Zenos. It's just make it so no one ever meets a Zeno civilization.

So how do you do that? Dark angels. You send them. You have one of your allegiance who's in charge of all of these expeditions. And you go out there and you remove them. Another one that falls into this is the mutants, which did come up a lot through the dark age of technology. True, because you had people, well, they also, mutants is a wildly wide scheme. Because a lot of mutants, I'm doing air quotes right now, are people that adapted to live on the world that they were on.

They did bioengineering. They literally made people. Yeah. Question mark. Yeah. But, I mean, there was multiple races that were left alone for thousands of years. And they just basically engineered the populace to be. better at the worlds that they were on.

Was it high gravity? Was it this? Was it low gravity? Do we have to deal with radiation? They just made their populace. They either adapted, you know, they basically got radiated and just things happen. Or because this is the dark age of technology, they had the technology to just go, it would be way cooler if our bones were thicker and we were shorter or we were taller or we were faster. We were whatever we were. And they had a lot of ab-humans. And for whatever reason, the emperor decided a couple of them were okay. And the ones he decided that weren't okay,

the dark age just showed up. The issue, again, though, is for the emperor, is these are very much so humanoid. They look very much so like humans. They behave like humans. And a lot of them were peaceful and had no ill will towards humanity. That is not. an easy war to wage if anyone knows you're waging it. It's a very easy war to wage if no one knows you're waging it. And it's also okay if everybody that's a part of that just accepts the fact that sometimes you got to do some terrible, terrible, terrible, wait a second, terrible shit. One of my favorite ones that they hunted down, though, and this is actually a little bit complicated to me from a lore, linear lure standpoint, was Thunder Warriors. Because we're

Weirdly enough, the Thunder Warriors didn't all get killed. Well, and they also were all only on Terra. And then it seems like some of them got a little bit of a heads up and got on spaceships. Just dused out. Been dused out. But it's also, you have to, well, they've done a weird bit of, I don't even say retconning. There's just a lot of weird stories that go along with it. Yeah, because there's no actual linear story on this.

Yeah, but like some of the Thunder Warriors were, like, it looked like that some of the Thunder Warriors were wildly more intelligent than some. of the other other fire warriors. And yes, in a gene pool, but they were engineered. So you would think that they would be similar, but it seems like the average Thunder Warrior was barely functional. Yeah. And just was there to the mouth, I'll go stab things. Right.

And then there was like your Plato of Thunder Warrior. And those guys were like, hey, man, I'm pretty sure this guy's going to be real done with us real soon. And they buggyed out. And what's cool about this is, and the story's changed depending on what there's a bunch of stories. It seems like some Thunder Warriors effectively went off to become planet system-wide warlords who are running things, and they weren't alone. But the problem with Thunder Warriors is they can fight. And so what do you do about him?

I mean, they were still full, they were everything a Marine was. They just weren't. What they weren't equal was the intellectual. Yeah. We give you, we give the Marines, do you never really give that enough credit? An individual Marine is still able to instantaneously. take in terabytes of data instantaneously and assimilate, Thunder Warriors weren't doing that.

They were super fast, super strong, super agile, great combatants, but they were also, my opinion, actually, I think the Thunder Warriors were actually better combatants. When you look at what they did on. We'll focus, tell you the truth. Yeah, I'm the thing is, I think a Thunder Warrior versus a Space Marine, I think the Thunder Warrior wins. I think, I think in a combat scenario, I think the Thunder Warrior defeats a Space Marine in combat.

The problem is that a platoon, a squadron, a legion of Thunderworths loses brutally to that level. Yeah, it's the same thing when you're like, hey, what happens when a Roman Legion fought a bunch of tough individual dudes? Well, they lost every time. The Roman Centurians would lose to the barbarians, but the Roman Legion itself would conquer the barbarians. Every time. Yeah, one-on-one. This sucks. Exactly.

It's a cool side story that the Thunder Warriors do reappear in Dark Angel lore, as a-exel lore. say, well, we have to go deal with this. I mean, they reappeared. And then they quickly removed from the lore again. They were like, hey, guys, we're not done with our story. And the dark angels went, yeah, you are. Like, you're real done. One side note here with this, and we've touched this a few times,

the emperor made weapons illegal. There were certain things that space marines weren't like that. No one was supposed to work. Well, that's a, whoa, whoa, whoa. One of us is really just kind of rolling over some shit. Hey man, we found some weapons of mass destruction. The Dark Angels had access to Iron Men, for one, which were, you know, the thing that was outlawed, the thing that almost destroyed humanity completely, the AI versions that were, I don't know,

invulnerable to all psychic attacks could literally go through any defenses. They had a bunch of those. They also had a whole shitload of bombs. which were like, they went, hey, bad, the Geneva Convention says we're not allowed to use these. And everybody went, yes. And the Dark Angels left and looked at the Emperor and went, we're still going to use those, right? So here's the thing. Like, no one knows we use them because everyone we use them on is dead.

It's like a tree falling in the woods if no one's around, right? Ooh, you'd give this to culture, though. Only the upper people know that we're using these two. The rest of the Dark Angels do not know that this shit exists. they just know that sometimes shit went down and we won. You're like, yeah, we can leave now. You're like, yeah, we're just about to fight. You're like, yeah, we're not going to anymore.

Why? You don't need to ask those kind of questions. And Brad touched us earlier and was talking about how they would just go and wipe out planets. Like one thing they would do is they just irradiate an entire planet. People would come through later, like, oh, there must have been an issue with their sun. No, the dark angels came through and used rad weapons and irradiated the entire. plant so everything's dead. I'm going to say that if I had an option of

being irradiated with a rad weapon, which were, by the way, not supposed to be used. Yeah. You know what I'd rather have happened than that? I'd rather not have you virus bombed. The other very fun one. Which basically made VX gas look like Kool-Aid.

The virus bomb we did cover during Horace Heresy, but just as a recap, virus bomb goes down. It takes the, any organic material it touches, it turns into methane. Then they drop a fire bomb, after that. So the whole planet turns into a cloud of flammable gas that

they then light on fire. And yeah. It's pretty effective. Very effective. It's a good system. These are things. They also would use nuclear weapons, I guess, when they were being cute. Which is funny because no one used those anymore. Because one, they weren't as

effective as most of the other shit they had. But also, nuclear weapons, newsflash, in case you didn't know, are kind of shitty and dirty and wrecked things. And most people didn't want to use them because they wanted the planet after. Even like virus bombing something destroyed everything. He still just had a planet. Yeah, well, you go through you terraform it. That's what you do. I virus bomb it and I go through later, bring some terraform machines. You bring a bunch of machines down and you drop it down. You're like,

cool. You're like, if I dropped a nuke down, it makes everything suck for a while. Well, they did also use rad. They also did irradiate the planets, which probably. I mean, that is also that again is because you're supposed to be, that's when you're, you're playing hitman and you're supposed to make it look like an accident. Yeah. You're like, oh, their sun must have went supernova. Yeah, that's somewhat supernova. Weird, I guess.

Well, don't worry, guys. We'll build a new radiation shield. Yeah, like, I don't know what happened. That's crazy, guys. But that was, that exactly line that at Brightest Heaps. That's exactly what the Dark Angels did. Their idea was someone would come through later that'd say, man, something bad must have happened here.

It's so unfortunate for these people. And they have no idea, we did it. Yep. And a lot, by the way. Yeah. So one of the biggest things is, if you want to talk about coolness of the chapter, because they were the first, they just invented a bunch of the tactics. Yeah.

They had a bunch of good tactics. They had a bunch of bad tactics, guys. You have to take the good with the bad. But they were the originators of a lot of how Marines fight right now. Because the Thunder Warriors were wildly brutal and also weren't known for tactics. And the dark angels were. They originated a lot of this. Well, how do you fight and be the most effective with guys that are bigger, faster, stronger, and more intelligent?

Not even just more intelligent. You took in information faster than everybody else. I can understand the battlefield at an instant where you just see bombs going off. I see a bomb went off. That guy's over there. The supply depot is here. This guy's going to be shooting me. you're taking in a hundred different factors.

How do I maximize that? And the Dark Angel started using that. Hey, my guys are just smarter. They can take in more things. That means that we can use tactics that nobody else right now can use. And they're also fighting enemies that no one else is fighting.

They're getting that real practice on, as we said before, the rest of the other 19 legions, there's some sort of them fighting. Orcs, obviously. We're going to war the beast. But they're not fighting, what I would call

take all commerce wars whereas the wolves, the blood angels, the rest of them, they're fighting other, largely humans is where a lot of

they're fighting. Sometimes they're fighting, they're fighting orcs, obviously, some random things here and there, but what they're

really trying to do, though, is they're trying to conquer a planet. The dark angels are fighting to eliminate. And that's a different

type of tactic. But what's because of the way, I was just saying, what's cool is that the dark angels learn these tactics, they then get shared back to the rest legions who don't ever ask any questions of how anyone knows this because those are questions you don't ask. How would you practice that?

This seems really effective. You guys made this up? Drawing board. Yeah, totally drawing board. It's all war games. Don't ask. Don't ask no more questions. Some shit went down.

Don't worry about it. We're good. We'll be right back after a quick break. Another really cool thing about the First Legion is where they come from, from a gene seat stand. Well, they were all taro. Yeah. And this is important because they were, Terra is, this is important for some of the problems they were going to do later.

In order to make a space marine, as we've said before, but we'll do it again, you take organs that have a gene seed implanted inside of them. You insert those organs inside of the person. To be, come on, to be fair, you also hope for the best. And hope for the best, yeah. Because, like, there's a lot of people that die. Well, one of the key things, though, about this is you need. people whose genetic code is largely pure to put these things in there.

Terra has been at war at this point for thousands of years. Those wars use nuclear weapons. After the Dark Age of Technology, we blew up Earth a bunch. No, when I say blew up Earth, I mean, we blew up Earth. The seas boiled. Yeah. Terra isn't functional without other places. It's also without basically tech.

the planet is gone. It's just a rock. And so what happens is you've had nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, all these things. That doesn't make for great genetic codes. Like, spoiler alert. So one of the challenges the Dark Angels do have, and I bring this up because it's going to be really key later,

is that the Dark Angels have an impure genetic background, which creates some faults. that I'm foreshadowing to later, but I do want to bring it up now. One of the biggest things, though, is that they do get an impetus to find their primark. Yes. At this point in time, they're like, you know what it would make our genetics better? If we get the source, the purest source, which is our primark, which leads them to really want to find the primark, which they don't go against the emperor and make him do anything else, but they kind of get,

I don't know if they say they want to get a fire started underneath him. Well, I think a lot of it, and we'll cover us a bit later, is that the other prime marks were found first. I mean, they are the first. They're the first legion, but they're nowhere near the first prime mark found. No, he's way down the line. And they become, I don't know, they say become worried, because they didn't make the emperor do shit, because they were very loyal. But it was one of those, I think, they don't really go into it, but you get the said without saying kind of thing of. They want to go meet their dead.

Yeah. And I think the emperor. made it a thing where, okay, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna figure this shit out. We've been talking now a lot about some of the stuff that they did more than ether. And I think a really good story for us to dive into now is an example of what the dark angels did. And the first one that we want to kind of dig, that one dig into is the rangda. It's rang den. Rang down. It's the Rang den.

We got three fights. Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, we have three. there's a few story lines. I mean, you can't, the third was not a fight. The third, yeah, the third was not a fight. As we get into, about midway through the 30th millennia, the imperial fleets on the eastern fringe run into a, what I politely wrote notes as a Zenos problem.

Usually the Rangdon was only a Zenos problem. It was a problem. I mean, I guess it was a problem. So the Rangton are literally psychic Zenos who get more poised. They literally level up when they kill shit and get more powerful. Orks meet Eldar. Yeah. And they become individually, some of these are just primark level.

They're just, they legitimately, hey, man, I've been XP in this entire time. And now I'm a warp entity, which is before they know the warp entities exist. But they've got a bunch of juiced up dudes. and in the first war, because it's all the, uh, the xenoc, it's called the, the, the, the, rangued the xenicides, but the, the issue is that what you're into it does, is these are all purged imperial records. Right. So you don't even know exactly what they look like.

It's just that they have stories of them being, several of them being, quote, larger than primarks. Yeah. And more, well, what they actually said was more physically powerful than the primers. Exactly. And the Rangdon also, they were a slaver race. So they would conquer planets, human and Zenos. Well, they would psychically enslave them.

They were puppets. Yeah, and then they would use these with them. So this is the Eastern Fringe of the Empire, which is an era, it continues to be a problem with Zenos. Yeah. Eastern Fringe has been a shit show for a long time. Yeah, Eastern Fringe has did some issues over there, I think. There's been a couple little problems here and there. The Emperor actually initially is not, doesn't just commit the Dark Angels.

he just commits forces over there and they can't seem to break through. The first, we'll just say the first war, because there's three different engagement timelines. In the first, sorry, Imperium Loyals, I read a ton of stuff on this. No, really, because I'm sorry, but the Imperium gets its ass kicked. Oh, yeah, it was, it was, it was, I don't know what I call it the Zeno side. They were fine. Yeah, they got rocked. I mean, they took, be honest, the Dark Angels lost 50,000.

not people, Marines during this whole engagement. Well, there's also the crave. We'll get in that. But I'm saying over us a period of time, and not that long of a period of time, they lose an incredible amount of Marines. And the best part is,

I love when you look at the lore of the legions, because they're always like, we lost this many Marines. You're like, what does that translate into like regular imperial? guard bodies. You're like, oh, yeah, we lost like billions of them. Those guys are all dead. Those guys were getting smoke.

Like, we were throw... We stopped counting. We were throwing them in the woodchipper, hoping that the wood chipper would jam on the bodies they were throwing into it. Like, they were just losing untowulfed. The Rangdon were just crushing. Also, we're real big on

capturing anything from humans. They were just murdering. Yeah, they were just trying to... And so the first war of Rangdon just... Did not go. Yeah, it doesn't go out. And I want to kind of take a side note in the Rangdon that I put some notes here that I think are important. It's that up until this point of the Rangdon, even for the, I think the emperor, the interaction with Zenos was, in quotations, easy. They were all conquerable.

And it's because the orcs are disorganized. They're specifically disorganized. Also, the elder were keeping the arts disorganized. Yeah. But at this stage, the elder had just died. The orcs haven't come up yet. The elder are really from, they took a pretty big L. Yeah.

The elder lost 98% of their civilization. Yeah, the elder just took a 700,000 to zero loss in football. So, and that's at halftime. They're not doing great right now. The Drukari are just starting to peek out. And for those that you aren't aware, the tyrants aren't in the galaxy yet. No. The electrons are asleep.

There is nothing out there. So these rang down, they hit them. And it's like, okay, well, it's just some Zeno. go deal with it. We'll just figure it out. And the Rangdon are not what people think they are. And they ruin them. Yeah.

They are incredibly organized. Well, they're incredibly organized. They're technologically savvy. And they're also psychically powerful. And what ends up happening is not only did the Rangdon defeat the Dark Angels, them when they come in there, the Rangdon then pursue them back in.

Well, they don't just pursue them. They start taking sectors, not systems, sectors away, which is part of the galaxy, not like we didn't take a couple of planets away. They were taking whole areas. This marks really the first loss that the first legions had. That is true, actually.

They hadn't lost, had a real loss. And this was a huge. They didn't just take a loss like, hey, we got to retreat. They went, hey, man, we lost like most of our Marines. Which then leads to the second war of the regmen. What Brad mentioned earlier, we talked about this, how the dark angels really felt a longing for their primark. This war is why?

Because the ultramarines and the Luna wolves joined the Dark Angels in fighting the Rangdon. With their primers. Yeah, with Gilliman and Horace. Which is pretty inspiring. Also, again, the primarks are superhuman even to other Marines. Like, you're like, hey, man, here's a squadron of Marines. and the prime mark goes, I love my guys, but also none of those guys would do anything to me. And so now the Dark Angels are watching the Ultramarines and the Lunables perform their tactics,

and all honestly, better than they ever performed because of the primaries. But wildly better. Because also all, you have a genetic imperative in all the Marines to effectively love their prime arc, do better with their primark, and they're psychically connected to their primark. So they legitimately perform better, not just because they're trying to impress their prime mark, because their prime mark is literally magically creating, you know, juicing them up. He's leveling them up. It's actually like with orcs.

There's the same thing that happens with orcs. You put enough of them together. They actually start fighting better. And so the Dark Angels now are, they are watching this war. The enemy that defeated them is now being defeated by their quote-unquote brothers, because they are, by legions who they used to. be better than. Wildly better than.

And what are we missing? It's because we're missing a prime mark. And Lions got one of the coolest entry stories. Yeah. I mean, Dark Angels lore is amazing, guys. So let's dig into it. Let's pivot from that.

Now I think we've given you the history. Just to kind of sum it up again, the dark angels at this stage, before we get into this text piece, were the emperor's dirty force. He used them for just killing anything and everything. They are pushing their way

towards almost an evil level of force. At the time, remember, they're also, they don't want people to talk to them. So they are covered in skulls. And they adorn themselves with skulls and pieces of other Xenos bodies to have other people go

because they're trying to keep their secrets. Again, quotes on that, but that is what the dark angels at the time we're known for, is adorning themselves with fallen foes to make other legions. other people not talk to them so they didn't have a problem keeping their secrets. As we're going to go to this origin story, you'll notice that the dark angels, anyone who plays

the game currently, they're not the night lords. They're not the world eaters. So how do you, in quotations, fix a legion that is kind of evil in its process? You give them a paladin to lead them. And that is what the lion is. I don't know if he's paladin. He's lawful neutral. I use the word paladin intentionally to annoy Brad because Brad really...

Nerdding it up here. Yeah, well, it's also because Brad already has a paladin primark that he cares... So much. He cares massive. He's lawful good. The lion is lawful neutral. He's not lawful good. So rather than get yelled at anymore, we will move on.

So the primax, all primarks, we talked about this before. were jettisoned by the entities of chaos to everywhere. Random planet. The lion ended up in Caliban, which was, I mean, yes, it was just, I forgot about that point. It was just outside the high terror. Yeah. But it was basically... You could see the eye of terror from Caliban.

It was literally King Arthur style. It was run by feudal lords. And also, you have to give it a little bit. The lion does awesome, but the lion also has a really great... Upringing. Yeah. He's immediately adopted by another knight, Luther, and who raises him has his own.

And, well, weirdly enough, he's a prime arc. He starts wrecking all these warp beasts that are there because they go on hunts. Let's dive into this. So Caliban is a planet that can see the eye of terror. It is, it is. Yeah, it is literally, you can look up in the night sky and go, well, that's not right. That's probably not good. And as a result of its location, it's a, it's a forest world.

It's England. It just is England. It's a planet-sized England. It's literally, it's King Arthur. It's a Celtic. It's the whole, and of course, it's like Star Wars. The whole planet, for some reason, is the exact same topic. Yeah, they don't have any heat levels that there's no rotation.

It's just all forest. It's all forest. And in this forest, all over the place are these. All the beasts are juiced up. Yeah, super. Yeah, we're talking about it. They're basically fallout, ratted up. Like just beasts are crazy.

And he proves himself. He literally kills beast after beast, but also he's doing it in a lawfully abiding by every rule that they have. The Caliban knights had rules. The Knights of Caliban, Brett said it were well, the King Arthur. Their goal was if you became a knight on Caliban, your job was to protect the citizenry. And the way you protect the citizenries, you would go out from your fortresses and kill the warp beast, yeah, and hunt them down.

And the lion, because this is a primark, really damn good. Yeah, he was wildly the best. Yeah, really damn good at this. And he would just, you know, he would kill more than anyone else did. It was, and he had strategy. He also brought a different style to it. And he's doing this whole time with a guy named Luther, who is insanely important for the stories, the dark angel.

Foreshadowing stuff happens. Yeah. But he is effectively his adopted dad. But he also teaches him everything he knows about the nightly, the Caliban Nightly Code, which is basically the King Arthur Code. It is the King Arthur Code of Knights. They have them. They, I mean, they just gangster everything from the King Arthur Mythos. They have a round table.

You know what I mean? Everybody has a say. And he's the best at being the best. I mean, Lillian on Caliban. is the best at being the grim, I do the things that have to be done. And I also follow every rule to the letter, which is a big deal later on, because he follows them. But he's also brutal when he has to be brutal, but he has proper intentions. Hence the reason he's lawful neutral.

But he does bad shit, but he always does bad shit inside the letter of the law, always the letter of the law. Yeah. And also he does it in such a way that he's actually trying to be the greater good. He makes tough decisions all the time to like, hey, I have your best interests in mind. And sometimes the best interests of everyone is if you get scrouched. Now, I do have a lot of complaints about some of the writing that comes into this. But one of the ones I did have complained about is that when you read the lore, you read the story, especially the book, They talk about him and Luther kind of coming up together and doing these.

And they were a buddy team. And my issue with that is that one of them is a primark. And the other one is a dude. Some dude. Who would have otherwise been an imperial guardsman. They talk in the stories talk about them like going on hunts together and stuff. And I'm going to date myself here is this reminds me of the movie twins. in that the line is Arnold Schwarzenegger and Luther is Danny to me, though.

It is that, because that is, I'm not saying that tells us, but visually, that's what this would have looked like. True story, but Luther is his intellectual mentor. Right, but not in any way, shape, or form. Oh, physically, no. But also, he's not his intellectual equal either. Oh, no. We're talking about a perfect creature and his buddy. But is buddies like his philosophical guide?

Yeah, I'm still going with no Luther. No. Fine. I mean, you can't have Luther. You can't have the storyline unless you have a Luther. I get that, but I'm just going to state this for the record for anyone who hasn't figured this out. You should probably think about that for a minute.

That's entire story is based around it again. Here's a dude who is a regular human being being buddyed up with a prime mark. And viewing them each other as an equal. I do love the fact that they rise the ranks together. And you're like, I think one of these guys is carrying the load a little bit more. They rose to the ranks together. In what you and them? Just they would have walked into a room.

One of them is at least two feet taller than the other one. Because at this point, at this point, the lion is full grown. He's an adult. Yeah, he's full grown. He's two feet taller, probably a foot and a half to two feet wider. And just this giant man who's, you know, unarmed killing warp beat. and the other one is Luther. In my mind, he's just Idris album, but.

He's just there like, hey, oh, yeah, I was also there too. Like, yeah, you probably carried the day. Yeah, thanks, thanks, Luther. What did you do? I wrangled the horses shop. What gets, where this becomes important, though, is the lion and of course Luther have ridden all the ranks and they decide that it's time to actually fix Caliban permanently.

And we're going to fix it by killing every single. Every beast. And they basically make a great crusade. They do their own, they have their own crusade. Literally. And they scour the planet of beasts. They

ally all the knights together. All, all of the nightly orders get together under the one king, which is the lion, and they all rally behind him. And they, just kind of go, hey, let's just go east. And murder face every single beast on this entire planet.

And they do it in a pretty, by the way, the stories are pretty awesome. What a story? We're screwed. You're going to be done that. I know. But the stories are actually pretty awesome, to be honest. So, but like, they do just go, we're going to ruin everything. Which way?

That way. Yeah, we'll just go east. Well, what about the ones in the West? Oh, we're coming all the way. around. Yeah, we're going the whole way, guys. And you do it. For the first time since the sky exploded, the planet. So for the first time since you looked up into the nighttime sky and went, hey, man, that sucks a lot. It looks really scary up there. Don't worry about it. The planet is rid of, the, is rid of the, the humans on the planet, they can cut the forest down. They can leave their

fortresses. They can farm. They can do all this stuff. This planet now went from what was actually labeled within the Imperium as a death world before this all happened, because if you went there, you just would die to now being a garden world. That's how powerful what he just did was. They also partied like it was 1999. Yeah. And they went, they had a huge party, at which point the emperor shows up. Hey, hold on. Oh, we'll talk about Luther. Uh-huh. All right. So they conquer the planet. they being the lion, with a bunch of dudes.

With Luther. Luther and a bunch of other people. Luther was nearby. I'm just, I mean, like, you have a warp beast. How many warp beast does the lion kill?

How many is like, all of them? The Luther is like stabbing the one that's on the ground half dead. But anyway. Luther does get jealous because the lion is literally declared chief big wampa,

awesome, mega dude of all time. He's elevated to Supreme Grandmaster. I mean, he gets a big title. I'm assuming his hat's bigger than everybody else. And Luther, of course, gets upset that the person who's two feet taller than him, two feet wider and did almost all the killing seems to be getting more of the credit than he got. Oh, also the dude who thought of the whole thing, exhumed the whole thing, designed all the plans, organized it.

That person is getting more credit than Luther is. Also, united all of the nightly orders. Yes. But Luther was present in the meetings. So, you know, that's how this should go. So Luther's at this point getting jealous and he's upset that. And eight seconds later, the emperor shows up. Yeah, as always, the emperor shows up at this exact moment.

And the emperor's like, hey, I need the lion. And the lion immediately goes, yeah, you do need me. And he goes, hey, there's another guy that's actually my size. I probably am close. I'm closer to this guy than that. And the lion is brought into the Legion. I actually like what this next piece though. Because we talk about how good the lion is.

And this is one of those things I like about it. I love this story, but I hate the story because he effectively just takes children and goes, all right, I need the toughest freshmen. Yeah. What the lion does is he looks at this legion of murderers and says, And this is, because to me, this is very tactfully intelligent. The emperor comes in, brings the lion up and says, this is your Legion. Looks at the First Legion.

And it is a bunch of just. These guys have been through some shit. And they are, they are violent. They are this thing. And rather than just come in there and say, well, I'm in charge. Listen to me. He says, I'm going to earn it. Which, again, which is what I'm going to give you, which is the, yes, he did.

However, he also said, all right, freshman class. of the first company, who's the toughest freshman? And they're like, I guess Ted is. And they're like, I challenge Ted to combat. And you're like, I guess, but like, I feel like I'm going to get my ass kicked. And they did. But I give Lion credit here.

The first guy he fought was in Terminator armor. True. And the Lion was wearing a T-shirt. It's true. Lyon was literally wearing a, I've just been to Caliban. And all I got was this dumb T-shirt. And he ruined a guy in Terminator-Armorner. He just Chuck Norris kicked him in the head.

And I love this story because, and we're going to do this with space wolves. This story happens again. Levin Russis is actually a little bit even cooler. The Lions is more honorable. The Lehman Russis is just more like, who wants some of this? Yeah. I'm pretty wasted right now. Yeah, the Lehman Russ one's more like the scene of the very first X-Men when Wolverines

fighting in the cage. Yeah. He's just like, if you guys want to fight me, I'm in here. in here, just let me know. But like he challenges each one to combat and he's wearing Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt. And flip-flops and he's like, I got this. And he doesn't have to go the entire way down because he originally, his whole thing was he's going to fight the best guy in each company. And then eventually they're like, we got it, man.

You're awesome. And we are super excited to have you here. Right about the time you beat the Terminator, everybody else was like, I don't really know if I need to make my turn. What else do we want to do? Is he going to fight just a land raider next? I think he might win. I actually think he might head but the landerate. Oh, God.

Like, this dude's pretty badass. And he almost immediately gets the loyalty of the men because, remember, the dark angels are all about results. Exactly. And when he gets down with this, he shows them, I am the strongest. I will give you better results. And again, remember, They just suffered a horrible defeat, and they showed their brothers fighting with their primark and winning, and they just had their primark show up. And to them, this guy's wildly better than anybody else they've seen.

They saw the other primarks fighting. They just showed up and saw the guy that took on our best while he was wearing board shorts and flip flops, and he ruined them. We are now going to be. We're going to be incredible. Yeah, we were already wrecking without this. now we are basically unlocking all the secret power. We just did up down, up down, XYZ. We have unlocked all the cheat codes.

Our prime marks here, we are the first legion. We are the best. We're back to being the best. And a key piece about this, man, the level of foreshadowing we're throwing on this episode is heavy. As we discussed earlier, the dark angels were probably the most, in quotation, was an evil legion that the emperor had.

He was using them to do horrible things. As Brad said, they would have skulls on them. And not in the like, I'm goth sense in an actual, like, no, more like the predator, where I'm going to carry around tokens of all the things I've ruined. That's what they were. The problem is that you start going on that path far enough and you have a real issue because now you can actually, you can't become evil. So here comes the lion who is a better fighter than they are.

brings with him the rules of the knights of cal he puts a code and this for the most part whips the legion back the other side they go from being this kind of well they're still willing to do what needs to be done because also the lion is a guy that is also i'm willing to do what needs to be done but we should do it with rules exactly and he isn't like hey man you don't need to do terrible shit. He's like, we should do terrible shit with a structure of code. You're like, how is that code going to work out? In the end, real bendable.

Don't worry, we're going to get there later. But for now, he brings these guys, he brings the Legion back into what can now be brought. Effectively, you now could bring the Dark Angels the same party that you brought the other legions to. We're skipping over a little bit, though. The light, I actually have to do this because people will throw rocks at us if we the lion actually puts together a rigid command structure. He puts together a circle, eventually inner circle, but he brings together a circles of hierarchy, hierarchy of circles, who's in command, who's in what circle, what they need to know, what they don't need to know.

But he gives them a firm code if everybody gets a code, but then he also gives them because he comes from a feudal planet. So he literally turns the dark angels into a hierarchy system of these guys are in charge. These guys need to deal this. You need to just do this. And it becomes a, we're going to do some shit. People are going to need to know why. You need to just do what you need to do and believe in these people. And the dark angels grab onto that hardcore.

Because before it was just, we're doing jacked up shit because the emperor told us to. We're not really sure why. Now we've got this code into place. And we literally have the guy that is our genetic father with us. Well, let's go do whatever he says. Why not? And they jump in like, holy, like fully emerged. They get baptized on this and just go in. And they are now, this is our guy. We're doing whatever the hell he says. And at this point in time, to be perfectly honest, it's a side note, but I really think if the lion just decided we're going to punch the emperor right in the face, the entire Legion

would be like, all right. One thing also this does, that helps Legion out a lot now is they also now get a recruiting planet, which is something that we haven't really touched on this is our first Space Marine chapter. Well, they go from a non-devastated planet to where they start recruiting from Caliban. Now, and one of the people that they do recruit

and this, it's interesting. So throughout the legions, as we've discussed, we talked about the horse heresy, one of the biggest problems he seemed to run into is when someone is too old to become a space marine and they kind of do it sort of anyway. And they do this with Luther. And if you can't figure out where we're going with Luther, that's on you. But Luther actually gets through everything, though. He does, but Luther's not, he doesn't get the gene implants. He just, he just gets all the steroids to make himself bigger, stronger, faster. Also, the weird thing is is Caliban becomes

Caliban, but Caliban becomes like a kind of a shadow of its former self because they take all of the nights. Yeah. Like 100%. Yeah, 100 of them all are elevated. Those who are too old, like Luther, are given all the performance-enhancing drugs to make them... Nine feet tall. Yeah, space marine light, but all the ones who are young after us. But what this does is this now creates a core recruiting plan. Because as we said before, they lost over 50% of their force fighting... Wrangdon. Rangdon. Which I'm sure we're still saying wrong. Probably whatever. Now they have, they can replenish their forces and it's coming from the

world that they come from. Everything is now lined up for their success. And it's a big deal here because everything seems to be going their way, to be honest with you. And that's why we're going to stop this episode right here. Everything's going the dark angel's way. Everything is going their way. Wait, hold on a second. It might not continue. Hold on. I'm going to do the Dr. Evil Piggy. Things might get a little bit worse in the next episode. Yeah. But right now, shit's going great. Yeah, things are going great. The dark angels. But to, Just a recap, end of the episode.

I like doing little recaps on this. The Dark Angels were the First Legion. They were used to do all of the worst things the emperor had to do. Yeah, I think we're down playing it, though. Remember, when we're recapping, they didn't do awful shit. They did genocidal shit. Yeah. And they also did genocidal shit that no one needed to, you're doing stuff that no one,

you're not allowed to tell anybody else. It's so shitty, you're not allowed to say it to anybody. They are, so they're masters of secrecy. They're masters of killing. They're masters of murder. But they were starting to fall apart. They took their first big loss. They didn't.

It wasn't a big. It was a catastrophic loss. They took their first loss, which happened to be a catastrophic loss. They were 20 and O, they went into a fight, and they got knocked out where they woke up a month later. And they're like, did we win the fight? No. No.

And so now, though, they've got a prime arc to lead them who has earned a, all of their loyalty. They've got recruiting planet to refill their legion, and they are ready to kick ass and take things. Well, they've also got a code to live by, giving them a reason to do these bad things, which is a big deal for a lot of the dark angels because they now have a, hey, I'm doing these bad things, but it's because it's the greater, Tao, it's the greater good. But it is. It's the, we have a,

you're going to use Tao, not hot fuzz. I mean, you got to use hot fog. I'll use hot fog. But it's a big deal on that because these guys have a focus now. Because he got the loyalty so much of these guys because he told them, we're going to do things. And here's our code of why we're able to do these things. Because sometimes you have to do bad things as long as it follows the code.

And they live by that. They're like, okay. And you get them into line. They become not the guys with skulls on them. I want to end with that. The lion actually gets rid all that shit. Oh, yeah. Of course he does. He's just like, hey, man, you look insane.

Get rid all your crazy shit. Clean that up. On our next episode, we're going to go into some of the stuff we didn't mention about Caliban, some of the dark secrets of Caliban. It's Dagabat. Well, yeah. And then some of the other challenges they had that are sitting within their own Legion and how they manifest and take us all the way up to,

I would say, Warhammer 40K pre seven months ago. For those who don't realize, the lion, if I'm in the distance in the future, the lion only returned to Warhammer 40K in the year 2020. Yeah, literally. He's just freshly back. So in the next episode, we're going to cover, we're kind of finalize our lore coverage for the Dark Angels.

In the third episode, we're going to talk more about the actual faction, why they're fun to play, some of the cool elements about it, they kind of talk about why you should play Dark Angels and how the lore has manifested itself into the actual gameplay in the units. But the next one, we're going to finish off, in quotations, a lot of the lore of this. Once again, please join our Discord or our Facebook page,

both if you want. Neither if you don't. That's fine. Also, please like and subscribe to us. It does help us out quite a bit. But with that, I'm John Barsight. This is Bradchester. Scott. Have a great day.