The 40k Lorecast - Episode 25 - The Inquisition, good or bad?......... Yes? Maybe?

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

 On this episode we cover every imperial citizen's greatest fear: the inquisition. How each branch is structured and how they interact with each other (*spoiler alert not all that well*). We then dive into the lives of an inquisitor, their retinues, how they move through imperial space. We then talk about how an inquisitor achieves their job and the endless dangers from all sides. Lastly we spend time discussing whether the inquisition are the "good guys" or the "bad guys" in the imperium.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast. With me, John Barcati and Bradchester. Yes, God. Once again, as we've been learning lessons, you do your plugs in the beginning of your cast. So, are you going to tell me that, like, I should probably say, like and subscribe? Yeah, we should do it maybe in the beginning.

Also, that... Sometimes I don't do it at all. I'm going to give a shout out. We were just talking about the fact that I don't do that. K.R. Yeah. Who yells at me every time I do any cast? and I go, oh, I should probably promote myself.

Yeah, we're at a cast. I think this might be 24 or 25. And maybe it's a good time to mention that for those of you who play 40K competitively, Brad is a coach. As my sole income. As my sole income has been one for a long time. And we may, you should have mentioned at some point. For those, so Brad does have a coaching service.

You can contact him through the Discord. You should probably put that out there. Might be intriguing to help pay it out there. I am possibly the world's worst self-promoter. Terrible at this. People have to find me and beat the information out of me. We also have a website, the 40KLorecast.com. We have a Patreon page and a Discord page.

All of them, there are links in the show notes if you want to come in. The Discord's become a really good spot for people with questions about lore, complaints about GW writing. What I want to throw out there, though, is because all of our pages are in their infancy and they're slowly but surely growing. There's going to be more and more information. There's going to be more things on there as we continue to get bigger, basically. Exactly. Also, is hopefully you get a couple of you throw a couple ducats our way at the Patreon, because we'll eventually fix some of our stuff.

But most of the stuff requires money. Yeah, the whole idea. We did not think this. We hoped this would this thing would work. We didn't actually know it would work as well as it's been working. And so now our audio equipment's kind of embarrassing for what we're recording on. We went when we get bigger, big enough where it's going to matter and then immediately it mattered. We're not even half a year in.

And it's, yeah, it's a little bit. Thank you all for listening. obviously I could not be more thankful, but it's when your audio is bad and everyone knows your audio is bad, I get a lot of messages about my audio being bad, and so I'm working fast to try and fix it. I'd like you to point out that it's completely John's fault and not my fault at all the fact that as soon as I get excited, I eat the mic. Yes, I have moved myself closer to the microphone. I am also sitting a million miles away from my used to.

I couldn't move Brad further from the microphone. So as a result, I'm literally in timeout now. But anyway, on to the topic at hand. We've been talking a little bit about the rise of imperial cults, which led to a discussion of the creation of the Ordo Xenos. And as a result, we've just been effectively talking about the Inquisition without talk about the Inquisition. And we should talk about the Inquisition itself as an overarching group because,

and we can argue this, the Inquisition is the most powerful thing in the Imperium. Yes. Of bar none in the sense of autonomy. me. I would still say Space Marine Legion, powerful. Powerful is in like you can go and beat you up. Yeah. However, if you and I were going to fight and you could beat me up in a street fight and I just repo your house and that's true.

Burn down your business you work at and it's all legal, which is what the Inquisition does. Yeah, that's actually a really good example of what we're going to discuss tonight, which is the question of are the, is the, is. It's hard to argue the Inquisition being good or bad for the Imperium. I think they're good for the Imperium. They're terrible for the Imperium. We're going to argue this. No, no, no. So, no, no, no, I haven't written this subject yet.

Apparently, the new title is going to be Inquisition, good or bad. John McGrath, argue. So there's going to be some arguing here. But they are necessary, though. Yeah, they're necessary. There's going to be some arguing here, but we really wanted to dive into this. Like, where, how do we feel about the Inquisition? Do we think that it's a good thing for the Imperium, for the citizenry, etc?

And the answer is going to be. Well, it's tough because you look back at human history and you go, Inquisition, what was it? It was terrible. And then you're like, yeah, but what happens if, like, demons sometimes showed up and stole your baby? You're like, well, those guys are pretty good. Yeah. That it seems like somebody you might want around. What if the Inquisition who's there to save you is demonically possessed?

Yeah. And there's no way to check the authority. Yeah. Spoiler alert. We're getting to that later. But we'll start off with just a quick catch up for everybody. What is the Inquisition? And so there are effectively three, there's three main branches and then some sub branches,

which are hilarious. It was, let's just go from the, we'll go quick recap from the beginning. Emperor slash Malkador went, we need to stop out chaos. They made the inquisition, which was the Ordos Malius, which ended up being the also the Ordos Hereticus, which are two, two facets of one's the terrible version and one's the recent version. Yeah, exactly. So the Ordomalius is the anti-Denius. and anti-chaos, and they're backed by the Grey Knights. They're also the most secretive of the three.

Because it's weird, I'm still a struggle with this because when I read the books, it's hard to get, there was a period of time where it was pretty obvious the Imperial Citizens didn't know about chaos, but when I read a lot more of the more modern codexes, also play a lot of the more the games and read some of the books, it seems like there is a bit more knowledge, more common knowledge about it.

So it's moved around a little bit, but Grey Knights, people don't really know exist, and then the Ordo Herre, the Ordomalius seem to keep more of a cloak of shadow. You know they are. They're the KGB. They're the CIA. They're the, and the thing is that then you get into the second of that, which is Ordo Hereticus.

Which everyone knows exists. Everybody knows they exist, but they don't know why they just, they just know that there's a good chance that if somebody says you did something bad, a guy will show up and murder you and everybody you know. And may bring the sister of science with him, which can. do horrible things to you. They can put you into a penitent engine, which... Which seems bad.

Yeah, I'm going to go with pretty bad. That sister's cast is going to be weird when we go through. Yeah. That's just weird. They have a lot of weird things happen. But like the Lotus Hereticus are the ones that are supposed to infiltrate and find out possessed or heretic. They're supposed to find heretics.

The problem is that they find heresy wherever they want. Also, if you're a high-ranking guy, you can just say, Yeah. This guy's heretic. and you're like, I'm literally Ted. And they're like, cool, Ted. Well, I now have all your stuff because this guy said you're a heretic and you go down. Now, the ones that I said, in the very last cast, was Ordo Zenos.

And while they're not good, they're still better than the others. And I will still argue that. I disagree. I think it's Ardos Malleus that are the best of the three. And that's going to be a thing. I mean, what we do agree on is Ordos Hereticus sucks so much. Oh, there's no. Just a tornado.

And this is not a Nocta sisters players. It's not your army's cool as hell. It's just Ordo Hereticus is just awful. It's just awful. In all the books, in every codex, they're always bad. Humans exist, though. The problem is that Ordo, there's no other Ordo's that just is used as a tool. They're also the ones that bring the black ships.

And so they're the ones who round up psychers who just didn't get the stamp early enough and then go sacrifice into the emperor. Yeah, it's just, they do that. It's bad. They're used as power plays all the time by my least favorite people in 40K, the Lords of Terra, consistently taking things over. Again, you don't need to worry about your political rivals as long as you can just save that they're heretics and bury them.

Now, we also have to say that there's about 20 other arms of the Inquisition. And some of these are hilarious. So you've got the Ordos Militarium, which is just a bunch of guys that are checking up on the military. There's a bunch of ones like this. But there's two, and these are my favorites. There's one that is literally in charge of finding out everything about the origins of the Inquisition and everything that went into it. And then there's another arm that is literally in charge of making sure no one finds out about the origins.

All of the imperial records are scrubbed about the creation of especially the Ordomalius, the Grey Nights. Exactly. And so these are. And these are official, by the way, two official. And we're going to get to a second where this becomes a big issue because the power and inquisitor wields from an independent standpoint. But yeah, the Inquisition almost feels like it's intentionally built to overlap itself negatively because they also want to root out any, because the one thing every branch of the Inquisition

is in charge of, no matter what, is rooting out corruption inside the Inquisition. That is, there one, like, all of us are part. part of this were a great big team of backstabbing to Brutei over and over again. I am going to give the ultimate. This is how old I am. And I'm going to bring up paranoia an unbelievably old game from early 90s. This might be 80s. Probably early 90s.

Oh, God. I forgot it existed. You're welcome. That wasn't like Sega CD, was it? That was a board game and a video game. God, some of these, yeah. I'm saying it's like actually, I'm actually looking at a place. Station 2 right now.

While we're doing this cast, I'm looking at my PlayStation 2 because Final Fantasy 7 remake came out, and I got annoyed that it wasn't. I haven't been paying it that much attention. So I went to go play it, and then someone had to inform me that it's only chapter 2 of 3. You're going to be so mad when you find out that they've actually changed the timeline storyline. That was also my younger brother informed me of this.

And so I went, yeah, I'm sure you're going to play Final Fantasy 7 again. Emerald Weapon, here I come. Yeah, I know exactly how this thing ends. I can do some material. grinding. Let's knock this out. Those chocoboos. Yeah.

Chokea, oh, God, I just do a gold chokaboo. What do you have to do? Spend a lot of time. So let's dive into the power of them. We'll start about where their power comes from. Yeah, let's go with the number one thing. So they have an inquisitors,

all inquisitors, when you get to a certain level, are given an inquisitorial rosette. And I'm probably saying that wrong because there's three Ss and two T's somewhere in there. But it is, somehow uncopyable, and it is your writ of power. And when I say writ of power, I mean, literally this is a note from your dad, who's the emperor. Exactly.

And it straight up says, I can take whatever I want and use it for whatever I want, which means that these guys can be unbelievably useful and also unbelievably terrible and corrupt. And they do it pretty much, I would say the same, they're probably more corrupt than they are useful. But what it does is it allows them to do things that the ultimate bureaucracy in the DMV when you go, when you're trying to get something done, the Imperium is terrible at it. You need people with things like the Inquisitorium Rosette, where they can just go, hey, I need this and we're going to get it done. Does that have wild abuse of power? problems? Yep.

It might have some. Yeah. Like crazy. They are effectively infallible because the inquisitorial Rosette is, let's call it what it is. It's the word of God because the emperor is the God. It is you have a piece of, it's like a thing on your shoulder that, or actually are going to be on a chain that says. You literally have a symbol that's effectively a I am all powerful with one. From the Imperium, your God said I can do whatever I want. The issue with these things is that it's a physical thing. It can't be copied, and it seems like there's no stories of someone like stealing one.

I don't know why. Yeah, I don't know how that works. But if you do turn corrupt or you do bad things, it doesn't disappear. So you get this power once it's granted to you, you have it until you're killed. And there is a lot of inquisitors that have been corrupted. Yeah. And or, to be honest, to be fair, what's he would be. worse because at least when you become chaos that corrupted, there was at least magic powers

working against you. The shittier people are the inquisitors that are just straight bought. Yeah. And that happens also. All the time. Yeah. So let's go through some of the things that they can do with this. Because it does line up with some of a rogue trader stuff we covered.

So for example, they can just move around. Like there are no issues with ports of entry. They want to go to a planet. They go to a planet. And when they arrive at the planet, you have to make accommodations for them, too. immediately, and they can also take over anything they want. They can just say, I'm sleeping at the palace. This is just happening.

Whatever they decide is their base of operations while they're there, that just goes down. Also, they can commandeer as many forces. And the bigger thing is not the forces, because the forces are like, yes, of course they can get that. Right. They can commandeer as many of your resources. If you're making Grand Cherokees, they can go, you're not doing that anymore. You're making missiles. And that's what we're doing.

This is more important. Let's talk about a bit more like how this functions for the citizenry. These happen for a reason. The Inquisitor's purpose is to avoid the bureaucracy on urgent matters. So we've got a problem where I know there's some sort of demonic or Xenose incursion or heretical incursion happening here. And I don't have time to call the Las Canaan factory that's 10 systems over to get last canons here. Instead, you're going to, you guys are going to stop making Grand Cherokees and you're making. can be a last cat. I want to go in this one more time because we were laughing. We touched on it.

But the problem, the reason that this exists and it's awful, but the reason it has to exist, I hate the Inquisition, but the Inquisition is in a World War horrible aliens and demons exist. You just need these guys to exist, even though their presence is awful. But the problem is that our society is so big because of millions of worlds that you can't. Because if you went through normal channels and you went, I need to get this factory making Las Canons instead of transports, it would take several lifetimes for this to get back. And that's not a ha-ha, that's just how it works.

Yeah, that's how it's set up. It's designed. Because then to defend the Imperium here, that's how efficient manufacturing takes place. You don't move around a lot. You pick into their specialty to the point where even the people that are working your factory are so specialized. that you do it well.

Well, that is a big thing because they actually put cybernetic enhancements on them to make a specific thing. Exactly. And we'll talk about hive worlds and an upcoming cast. And, yeah, they're horrible. They suck. But they can also commandeer, part of the commandeering of troops, they can move troops, which is the same thing. So they can sit there and say, we'll use auto hereticus because it's all of our least favorite, but it's probably the most active of the group militarily, where we've got a situation where we've got a,

probably a hive world or something like that where there is something going on. A corrupt governor, a corrupt part of the world. We need to stamp this out now and it's happening now. It's happening now. I'm grabbing your forces. I'm leaving today. Yeah, these astramalitarians get in the ship. We're going and they go there and they stamp it out.

This is something that would take months. And by the time, and don't forget, these guys are also hunting down people who don't want to be hunted down. We talked about last episode with the Ordozinos, which is sometimes a lot of these, I think, The chaos are the same way. The longer you let something go, the larger the problem is. It just is.

It just grows. It just, yeah. Most of these are just a cancer that grows out. It's just a big deal. One of the notes I even made here is that a lot of like the conflicts in the galaxy that we read about in the codexes, we read about in the novels, they were actually in quotes started by the Inquisition. Not necessarily the inquisition were shitty, but they were the ones who found it. They sat there and said, hey, this is going on here. I detected a Gene Steeler cult, you know, group on Planet 4523 and system blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now they, so they attack and it turns out it's not a couple of them, it's the whole planet's Gene Steeler cult. And now you've got a war. These are the things that the Inquisition does. This is why they're so important. One of the most powerful tricks up the Inquisition sleeve is the exterminatists. What's the order exterminatists, which is, I got to get my cheat again. Sometimes this, 0.01% of the time, this is the thing that you have to do. You have a gene stealer cult.

Pyrinid, orc invasions. Orcav is something that, like, you can't get rid of. They say we have to effectively destroy the planet. We're going to cleanse the planet. They don't even just like boom, boom, boom, blow up the planet. We're talking they set the atmosphere on fire. It's the von three. Estabon three.

Yep. So the problem is this went from the holy God last resort. We have so many other things we can do. And there's tons of stories of Inquisitors just going, yeah, let's just do it. And there's a bunch of cough, cough, Ordos Hereticus, you suck so much. 85% of all Ordos exterminatists or Ordos Hereticus going, these guys heard about chaos. Let's just glass the planet.

Yeah, let's just remove the planet. But it's not all of them. Yeah, there's like six guys. We don't feel like figuring out which ones, which. And if we just bomb the whole planet, you know what we get? All six of them. You know why?

It also sucks because we could have had an awesome novel about an inquisitor doing some detective-style work, getting into gunfights, and said we got some chud in a ship ordering the planet to be blown up. He sucks. in every way. Yeah, it feels like

that's more of a white dwarf story. It would be the Ordo Exterminatus, and Dan Abnitz are going to be the action. Yeah, the action. Let's track this down. Other ones like Planet Bad, Burn Planet. The Extromanus has also been used as a threat.

And this is another thing that bothers me. This is because I hate the corruption part of it is because the Lords of Terra and their underlings have used ordos exterminatus as the, I'll just blow up your planet because it's definitely full of heretics. And again, this is their,

direct rivals, the guy that's most likely to be voted in the next time. They're like, that's definitely a her headache planet. Just remove that planet. And it does, to talk about what things we're focusing on here is for the citizenry, this is when we talk about the citizenry's in reaction, the citizenry's interaction, that was harder to say that it should have been, with the Inquisition. This is the big one here, is the citizenry understands, in my opinion, the value of the Inquisition.

They're terrified of the Inquisition, and this is why, because they're aware the English could just decide to blow their planet up, and they don't evacuate you. No. It's just, they just leave. And then- The Intergalactic Highway is scheduled to go right through here, man. See, now there's at least a good book reference. And if you don't get that reference, read.

Anyway, that's where a lot of this comes into play. Is this exterminatis is something everyone's afraid of, which will do both, motivate people to work with the Inquisition, but also motivate them to never, ever contact because this is also how you get the spread of things sometimes. You are so afraid to contact them because sometimes instead of coming in with a scalpel, they come in with a nuclear bomb. And you're like, well, which one am I going to get? You know, like, want to roll the dice? Depends on the inquisitor. Exactly. It depends on the inquisitor. And the thing is, that is a pretty big tool. And the thing is also they have the power not only to just eliminate a planet, but a lot of

times they try to eliminate any. They're like the mob. They don't want to let any loose ends. There are times a planet that you used to trade with doesn't exist anymore. And according to Imperial Records, you never traded with it in the first place. They will literally blank you out of existing. You know, and people are told you're no longer allowed to talk about Mars. Yeah. Mars doesn't exists anymore. But I remember it. No, you don't. It was never there. This is a key part of the Inquisition. So when we talk about their ability to do this, let's talk about how they're structured. And I will say, as we go through this, if you haven't read the Eisenhorn novels, you should. They do a good job of, they don't really talk about this, but of letting you experience it.

One of the challenges Brett now were discussing as we went into the Ordo Xenos, Ordo Hereticus, all these things, when the Inquisition is these are non-codex things. So the writings on this is more anecdotal. It's more, there's references in a codex. There's, you read the novels. They come up a lot, obviously. The Inquisition, to me, are one of the more, I think them and Rogue Trader are massive in the 40K universe. They reference them.

Yeah, but never getting a full, like, breakthrough of it. In the things is that there's also wild, wild differences in the Inquisitors themselves. be right back after a quick break. In my professional life, one thing I know well is how challenging managing a global team can be. Just the act of creating one has been an extreme challenge over the years because one thing you learn quickly is a difficulty of hiring global talent and how unclear those costs can be. It looks simple at first, but then the fees start to stack up with compliance worries, contractors versus employees, and a host of other regulations. Pebble brings clarity with upfront all-in hiring costs and enables you to hire the world.

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but some are traveling solo, literally by themselves. They go place to place. they show their writ of power, take what they need, leave again. They're like blown Ronin samurai running around. Exactly. And then there's groups, Eisenhorn, which I think is fairly common, where you have a band of people. Yep.

That seems to be the norm. When you read through it, the norm is inquisitors are loan operators, but they've got a retinue. I think we'll probably spend some time on that a little bit here about, about they have a revenue with them. And it seems like certain jobs are really bad. Eisenhard went through like 47 astrapass, I think. Yeah, just in general, being a psycher in the 40K universe is terrible.

But there's other, we have to go to the extreme, though, because some of the Lord Inquisitors just have wild, crazy arm. They just have almost legion status of power of military. And they cruise around, and a lot of these just never disband those militaries because they go from place to place and handle bigger problems. And that's an important note about, Inquisitors is that the level of independence that they have can actually become a problem pretty quick because no one knows where they are.

They're not, they don't check in. They don't report anybody. So they're just kind of moving through the galaxy. And to the point where the Imperium doesn't even know if some of the inquirters are alive or dead. It's based on like, when was the last time you heard from Eric? And they assume, oh, Eric might be dead. It's also we've had Inquisitors that got corrupted by chaos.

And all of a sudden, you're like, oh, we didn't hear about this guy for a long time. And he's just accumulated massive power. Yeah, we heard about him a lot in the 11th crusade of Abadden. Yeah. Not in a great way. And so they're able to, this independence where they work through is, it's, again, it's critical for their job title. But for the citizenry, this is another big issue because this is the old movie trope where

or the mobsters, the criminals, dress up like cops to arrest someone so they can kill them. This is the problem with Inquisitors. When Inquisitors shows up, you don't know if they can be asking you to do some really horrible things. And there's no way to check this authority. There is a... And it's worse because you might have another Inquisitor that goes, well, you were working for a force of chaos. You're like, this dude literally was wearing the exact same year you are. And you're like, yeah, but he was bad.

and I'm a good guy. You're like, I feel like this is going to go terribly for me. I will admit, this structure is important because usually what the Inquisition is doing is they're hunting down kind of small things. It's a small corruption. It's an individual. They're looking for like the head of the snake, not all the way up to Folgram, but like. You might be working your way up, but it's a bad idea.

Yeah, I would not go anywhere near that snake. He's got lots of swords and Gilliman will explain why. He's having some flashbacks. But that's what they're trying to. track down. These, you can't track them down if you're part of a big police, a big force that's doing it. So they have to be independent and able to sneak in and out. So it makes a lot of sense to structure them as well. But the thing is not all of them are doing that. That's the whole thing. Of course. That's why it's so wildly different because we have, you're like, what is an

inquisitor? And then I could give you 10 different answers and they're all correct. Yep. One thing that does kind of get around this is the conclaves. So a conclave is when you're this level of independent, and you need to make some tough decisions, they actually will form these temporary conclaves, which I get a big kick out of, because a conclave is basically a bunch of inquisitors getting together to just have a conversation about, hey, here's what I'm investigating. The problem is that there's no rules you have to listen to it. And half the time they just do their own thing after.

Yeah, have a conclave, discuss it and go, man. The thing is that most of the time, the only reason a conclave exists is it's something that you are going to get your ass kick. if you try to handle it yourself, so you're forced to get somebody else involved. And the conclaves are both hilarious and tragic at the exact same time because they are. It is, you have these stories of multiple inquisitors

getting together with the sisters, the Grey Knights, the Imperial Navy, whatever it is to discuss, here's what we're going to do. And everyone says, that's a terrible idea. And the person just goes and does it anyway. And by the way, they're not wrong for doing it that way because they're still an inquisitor. They do whatever the hell they want.

My favorite parts are where they literally do the old school, say, literally, count. They do the old school, this is my jurisdiction because this is chaos. But no, it's actually Zenos. It's part of both. What should be mine, that. It should be this. Oh, yeah. There's lots of stories of them fighting over this.

So who has jurisdiction? Because what also happens is, one thing that we probably should have touched on is that an Inquisitor, they don't get promotions. They don't get anything like that. They just, but they get to get. clout. And so the more stuff that, the more cases that you solve, the more heresy you expose, the more your name gets known within the Inquisition. And that's what they go for us. What Brad was talking about, this is my jurisdiction, not your jurisdiction, it's because this case is about to get cracked. And I want to be the one that kills or captures the ultimate enemy.

Right. So there tends to be some kind of adorable fights here over the world's dumbest thing. but you're in the imperium of bureaucracy, this will come up a lot. And again, these guys are awful for a hole. There's some cool guys, but even the cool ones do a lot of bad things. But the problem is, again, while if you're in regular society, we're right now we look at old good position, like, oh, my God, this is awful. But again, if demons actually did occasionally pop out, you're like, those guys are awful, but sometimes someone needs to fight off the bloodthirster that showed up.

And that was terrible. Fair point. It's also helpful, too, to do these conclaves because, as we said, you can actually have multiple inquisitors tracking down the same thing at the same time and not realize they're together. Or inquisitors are not, they're not immortal, but they'll live a long time, but not the longest time. Chaos has some pretty good lifespans to it.

So you could also be on the fourth or fifth Inquisitor who's tracking down the same chaos thing. It's nice to get a conclave together and say, oh, yeah, I remember Inquisitor Sean 300 years ago was tracking down this guy. Well, are you closer to it? Here's some of his notes. There's a lot of that ends up happening as conclaves.

Because chaos does a good job of hiding itself. Let's be honest here. And they do a good job of snuffing out people that were trying to get up on them. Exactly. Quisitorial Red News. Let's talk about this. Some of them have, and we go back, we mentioned this in the last chaos. Let's set this better.

Brad and I both play a lot of D&D. Indeed. Let's set this correctly. Inquisitor Red News are probably the most interesting part of the- Oh, 100% to the two of us because we play D&D. It's a party of adventures. It's a party of adventures and it's cool as shit. We're going to go into this one because there's no way we weren't covering it.

And I think for me, to me, I actually understand the lore better when I look at it through this light. When I look at it through the light of a DNA. It's hard to look over because it's so big. There's so many things that are happening. But like, for every Marine, there's a billion citizens. Yeah. Just that's how it is. And the thing is that somebody has to be investigating all these guys are like, for me, they're like 1920s, private eyes.

Exactly. working on it, or they're an old school D&D Adventure Group, or they're both, to be honest. Kind of both, yeah. Because actually, you just said something in there that thing is actually important. There are a few million worlds. I mean, it moves from one million to a few million depending on what you're reading. You figure each world has billions of people on it.

There's probably less than 10,000 inquisitors. That's the space we're dealing with here. So they have all this independence. They're going around, and they're in these little adventuring. parties because they are fully self-sufficient. The other thing, too, is in order to be this independent, they have to be fully self-sufficient. And they've got kind of the traditional part of this, which is the logistics, because they've got houses, they've got archives, they've got all the other that to keep. And there's people who just keep those around for them. And that's cute.

Let's go to the fun part, which is actually their adventurer party. It's crazy because they have an adventuring party, but part of the adventuring party is almost, most of the person that's handing out the quests. Yeah. Because they have people that are just in charge of data and correlating all of the things that have happened before. Like when you get those conclays, they need somebody that's, and a lot of times it's multiple somebodies that are in charge of figuring all this out.

Where am I going? Where is the next point? I mean, let's, literally before you that's cast, I, uh-oh, using my word. Yeah, I did. We were discussing Baldur's Gate 3. And I'm just getting into it for the first time because I couldn't put it off any longer. But when you build a party, you know, from scratch, what do you need? I need a fighter.

I need someone who can open locks. I need a healer. And I need a fireball. And I need fireball. You need fireball. Playing without fireball is just boring. Seems silly. It's like, why would we not?

It's the same as this. We've got the Inquisitor, but the Inquisitor is going to do so much. The Inquisitor needs someone who can collect all the data. The Inquisitor needs someone who can keep. them alive. The Inquisitor needs someone who can just get them through a firefight. These are things you need. And some of them are multi-class. Sometimes you get some overlap. But that's what this, that's what this group is. You need, and the things that a lot of times you have these wildly specialized people, because they'll be experts in this. Or to be honest with you,

they're even, I can't believe anybody didn't say that. Because I say, to be honest, probably more than I say the other ones. You say them all. That's true. I should probably work on my vernacular. It's fine. We're both old enough. We're not changing our language anytime soon. Let's just accept the fact that...

I should have more of it. I read. It's really well read. Yeah, but it's just... You pick some phrases. You're old enough now. You know, like, I'm going with this. It's the same reason people your age all wear new balance.

It's because they... It's because they're just comfy shoes. So, the thing is that you have people that just need to be able to get... You have your home base. You have your home base. It's a lot of times you... It could be a spaceship, but still, it's a base. Yeah.

Right. You have your base, and on your base are all the people that are, will go into the D&D slash video gaming references, but you need people that stay at camp and figure things out for you. And then you need your muscle and you need your specialist, need your magic users. You need people that can do that. And again, go to the Eisenhower books. He has a great party with him. Yeah, I know he's got one of the best parties with them.

Even the other parties he can encounter is, though, also you'll see a lot. We'll have an amazing fighter with them. They also have people who are just, you also see people who are experts in imperial knowledge, imperial history, chaos knowledge, which, ooh, that guy's a tough one to have in your party. You got to be careful. That wasn't a nice match. That's your knife edge person of like, keep an eye. But because you have to be able to investigate and you can't, you're talking about multiple worlds

throughout all these different systems, systems that could be months, maybe even years of travel apart from each other. You need to land and just go. So someone who has to understand. You need to know all the local traditions. Yeah. Or even just dialects to be like, this person is not from here, or this person is from there, those types of things.

And so these adventuring parties, while beholden to the inquisitor, they're what allow the Inquisitor to really do the majority of their work. And I'm a huge fan of them. So it's not good. It is a big deal on that. It's exciting. And this is why Cough Cove Cavan do this. But Inquisitors have unwritten, just written power.

They can do whatever they want. But that is followed wildly different world to world. Everybody gives you what you want. Mostly it's how they go about doing that. How much red tape is this? I need this. Well, I can definitely get you that, but it's going to take weeks as opposed to here's the thing you need right now.

Here you have access to all my libraries, or we could just have the three guys that already know the answer to your question, talk to you. And in the books and the stories, these are wildly different. You get a huge difference in your political, I guess you can call it political sport we have on the thing. Yeah, that's a key part of this, is bringing in people who can get you through the local nobles, the local whoever it is that's in charge, even a local warlord, because you don't have weeks. Because the person you're chasing is on planet.

And the second they find out you're on planet. they're going off planet. So you need to be able to get down there, get the records, track them down before any of that happens. That's a big thing to talk about, though, in a galaxy-wide game storyline is because right now I'm chasing John, and he just leaves.

It's annoying for me to go and find John in Venezuela, but that's not like going, hey, he could be, yes. Was that a reference to where in the world is Carmen San Diego? Kind of. Now that I thought about it, yes, indeed it is. And this is, I think what's important here is when we talk about the political support, understand that an imperial governor who's likely who you're going to deal with runs a planet

could be a system. The two things an imperial governor is most afraid of is a rival imperial governor and the Inquisition. Because if I'm just, as we've said in prior cats, if I'm just, if I'm an imperial governor and my planet is routinely on time on all of its deliveries to the Imperium, I get to do whatever I want forever. Yep. An inquisitor showing up

ruins everything. It can be the end of everything I care about. And we haven't touched one yet, but sometimes those guys kill inquisitors. For good reason, by the way. Good selfish reason, but her good selfish reason. You're like, good reason you're like, because he really inconvenienced me.

Yes. But it can ruin everything that you have, though, because one, obviously, exterminatus is the ultimate. Yep. But if you just takes all your stuff. And a lot of them are just corrupt. So they're sitting there, an inquisitor lands on the planet and says to them,

hey, I need to look at all your records. And they know he looks at my records. I don't know. Because basically, which Ordo are you? Is this, who just showed up? Yeah. Is it Orto Malius? Yeah.

He's not a demon. Ordo Xenos chaginacus. Ordo hereticus who are totally here for me. Right. And you've been basically cooking the books forever. Or your biggest trading partner is Dark Ellar. Yeah. You don't know who is it.

Which one of you is here? It could end me. So you need someone who can get you through that. quickly and figure out like, yeah, I know you're actually selling off people to the Droucari. I'm not here for that. Yeah. Okay, cool. Have a nice day, I guess.

Still terrified? It looks like your biggest export is people. Is people. That seems odd. Okay, okay, okay, okay. But that's where a lot of these guys come into play. And it's a really critical part of their lives. But again, also for the citizenry, it's the same reaction.

The citizenry is going to come in and they're going to meet an inquisitor. It's not just the noble who might be corrupt. Who knows who you're talking to yet? So these guys get scary. You have Brad's talking about trading with Jukari, but you also have positive trading. Maybe you've landed, it's a fringe world, and they are routinely trading with the towel. And it's good for them. And you get there, and you're not chasing that down.

You're chasing down some chaos, who actually has already world jumped, but was here for a little bit. You want the data on that. As a citizen, I'm going, I don't want to tell you anything because I don't need exterminatus coming. Right. So how do we negotiate that? How do we do this? This comes into that question of, is the Inquisition good or bad? It gets really tricky because you may be doing nothing bad.

But the wrong Inquisitor might say, yeah, I strongly disagree. Yeah. Or he continues his search and he also just makes a note that that guy left, everything's okay, right? And then you go, oh, is that a fleet up top in the low orbit? You're like, yeah, that Inquisitor put an email in that. A little text in his way out. I don't know what the shorthand for exterminatus would be. Put the date on it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just like smiley face, nuclear explosion, frowny face, you know, and send that it went off. That's the emojis of the Inquisition. This is one of my favorites parts that we want to talk about. So, yeah, let's dive into, as we're discussing this, though, what checks are there on their authority? Hold on. Carry the one, zero.

Exactly. This is where it gets really fun. They can do anything. Because as we said before, they speak with the word of God. Yep. And the only person, people that can do anything about it, okay, I'll go with who can actually do something about it, and then who can actually do something about it. There's two groups can do something about it.

One is other inquisition, and two is the space marines because... When they decide that they're tired of it. You can say that you've got a little shiny metal that says you can do whatever, and they go, yeah, man, I'm somewhere between seven and nine feet tall, depending on what I'm wearing. I'm pretty sure there have been inquisitors who have asked the Dark Angels very seriously about Caliban. Hey, I haven't been to Caliban in a while. I'm going to head there, and their head just doesn't exist anymore. Hey, look, you can't breathe outside in space.

Good luck out there. Oh, yeah, it's the old, hey, just this way. It's Calabans through this door over here. It just opens. The air lock just opens. just sprinting in spray paint. Yeah. Caliban. Just jump inside.

But that's a big thing because the Marines don't really suffer fools. No. And the Marines, as much as you can say you have authority. There are a lot of stories about that. Again, we talked about it a little bit with the wolves on that. They, in the end, you can get too big for your britches, but then the Marines eventually show up and go,

yeah, I'm real tired of this. Yeah, this were not. do it. So we'll kind of skip over the space marine, punch you in the face. You can't listen to you. I'm not listening to you thing. And focus more on where a lot of the checks authority come from, which is the actual internal inquisition. That's who has to do it. And no one is policing the inquisition except for the inquisition, which becomes, again, pretty weird and corrupt. Because other inquisitors, there's some inquisitors where that's what they do is they're trying to find the corruption inside the inquisition.

Yeah, and I think it's important thing. The Inquisition is largely gray area. That's the thing. So we'll use, screw it. We'll just, we'll call it the Eisenhorn book, right? Eisenhorn is routinely accused of heresy. A lot. Even has witch hunters set after him.

It's because he's constantly doing things that are breaking the letter of the law all the time. Yeah. Just all the time. And so the right slash wrong inquisitor gets wind of this and just decides, yeah, this Eisenhorn, this Inquisitor is a heretic, and they order Hereticus after him. Yep. And the thing is that, and how he gets away with it, a lot, is he's wildly successful what he does, but he did technically, and a lot of these people are, wow, hardliners. And I think this goes into it from a citizenry standpoint. We've touched us a few times,

and we should probably dive more heavily into it. If I'm a citizenry, and let's say, for example, I'm working with a craft world. And I'm working with a craft world, not just to trade for food, but because there's a chaos incursion nearby. And the craft world and I are working to kill off this incursion. If Ordomalius comes in, they're going to be super excited.

And they're going to, they actually will help. I can help them out. We can all help each other to kill off this incursion. But after that Ordomalius leaves, Ordo Xenos on a separate investigation, may have found out that they may have been, tracking that Inquisitor who was working with the craft world, tracking to my planet. And now the next thing, the first inquisitor I met gave me a big high five and a metal.

The second inquisitor murdered everyone I know. Yep. And the citizenry has no idea who's who. Yeah. They just know that another guy showed up with, again, a shiny metal. Shiny metal of Inquisition. And this one was significantly less cool than the last one. And also, you never know what they think.

it could be, hey, you guys knew that there was a chaos incursion. Thanks for helping. Also, we don't want there to be any chance that heretics are here. Right. So we should just kill the planet. And even more fun, there may have an Inquisitor who's on the side of the chaos that you just wiped out and is now just coming there to collect a bunch of you to give the Slinash to make up for the fact that he just lost a bunch of him.

What we're trying to say is, be it in the Imperium sucks. It is, overall, the odds of interacting with an inquisitor is terrible. Beyond a quick conversation, wherever you are, it's probably going to be a different place. If you have the money to leave, if you see an inquisitor, just go to a different plan. There's probably, you're just better off. It's, for this reason, very few people have actually ever met an inquisitor. It's because when they come, you always see, you see this in, like, movies a lot where it's like someone comes to town and no one was to talk to them. And it's because they're like, yeah, there's wherever trouble follows you, wherever you go.

They're the boogey, man. They are. And so what happens is, as a result, though, the, and also we touched a second ago that there's beyond trillions. You've got millions of plants with billions of people on it and thousands of Inquisitors. And it's a big thing. There's such a big difference in that. If you see a Marine, that's, oh, man, that's the great. We saw the angels.

Yeah. And also it's a Marine, seven foot tall monstrosity of power. Yeah, you come, but those are the beacons of power for the Imperium. You see an Inquisitor, you're like, oh, something terrible is going to happen. And also, the Inquisitor is the same size of all your buddies. So it's like, you see an inquirator, oh, that's Sarah. That's Sarah. Sarah and your friend, Sarah, and the female Inquisitor just showed up are the same size, shape, all those things.

They don't really stand out. Except for Sarah's cousin, who's the Inquisitor, now just murdered everybody. Yeah, that's the problem. And they come through. So what ends up happening is that throughout the Imperium, you get tall tales constantly about the Inquisition. What is it? And so people are really afraid of them because the most common tale is the Inquisition

showed up on a planet and that planet ceased to exist. You also naturally get the piece of the belief that does the Inquisition stamp out chaos or Xenos or do they bring them? Because whenever, because we were having no problems before. Nothing but trouble. Yeah. No problem before. They showed up lots of problems.

It's also, I love that you brought that up because that is in a lot of the stories in the books. Inquisitors, especially, Oros Malius inquisitors or even Hereticus comes in. And people don't know that there was chaos on their world. Exactly. They're like, of course, it was you came in the chaos. You're like, no, it's always been here. You're like, no, it wasn't. It's Gandalf in the first, the Lord of the Rings.

Because after he got back with Bilbo from the first one, yeah, I'm doing this. If you don't know it, that's a total you problem. And the Hobbits had labeled him a troublemaker. Because the last time he'd come through, there was trouble. So therefore, troublemaker. And that's what the inquisition is, but in a less funny sense and more of it, everyone dies to a demon. It's funny.

You're like, this would be great except for everybody dies. Yeah, because Ron never got to the Shire, but... Thoron goes to the Shire. That's the show I want to see. Yeah, it's not even one episode. It's a YouTube short. Just a little... Hobbit's flying everywhere. But anyway, but let's actually spend the time on what the job of an

inquisitor is, because I like to put, I'm going to put us in that role. Like, what, what am I doing as an inquisitor? And I think the first and foremost piece is inquisitors believe in what they're doing more than almost anyone in the Imperium. Yes. And a lot of the Inquisitors have unshakable belief. I would go with the ones. that are the biggest believers are the malice. Ordos Malius, because you have looked into, like, actual evil. You've seen, yeah. You may not have met a bloodthorster, but you've met probably close to.

Yeah, you've seen. A couple of them have it, most of them. Like, actual magical evil, like, evil incarnate, like, the essence of it. I would actually, I would argue that the Ordo Xenos in 41st, who had been. into planets that Tyrannids have been through, probably have a similar viewpoint of, oh, no. But the thing is like, those are the people

that will do the worst things. That's why I said the Ordozinos, while not good, and none of them are, are at least doing the thing you can concretely see. If you're a citizen, they're fighting alien invasion, alien this, it's hard to go, hey, I'm Ordo Hereticus,

I'm Ordo Malius and Listerly and go, I'm fighting against the idea of evil from the chaos. You're like, what does that even mean? I watched a wrong book or, you know, movie, whatever. It is a lot of easy to be like, remember that you car you raid that happened a while ago? I'm trying to spread that out. That's not going to happen anymore.

Oh, I like you. High five. Yeah, I killed Ted. You're like, why did Ted have to die? You're like, Ted could have spread an idea of this. And you're like, I don't even know what that means, man. All I know is you killed Ted. And I like Ted.

He owed me money. But the Inquisitors really are, because of this, they're that grizzled movie detective where everyone tells him it was a suicide and they're saying, no, it was a murder. That is, that's what their job is. And yeah, the issue is, was the chaos incursion easily put down? Or did the chaos incursion actually just come in and leave? Like Abadens Crusades. The thing is, like, you think about the Abaddon's,

first crusade where he comes out of the warp. He had no actual intention of conquering the galaxy, but he's just ravaging it. The space marines in the imperial and go to fight back and abandonmenture retreats back under the eye of terror. And they're like, oh, see, we got him. It's all done. It would be the Inquisition,

it would be the ones who would say, no, something, what else did they do? What's missing? Where did he go? Yeah, what got stolen? Something, this was too easy. That's the job of the Inquisition. Yeah.

And let's call that what it is. That's bad news. That means everyone else is trying to celebrate the great victory, and you're the one saying, I don't think we won. I think there's more going on here. Because all of the things that the, as we said, the inquisition, it's trick to this, the inquisitors are focused on the stuff in the shadows. So they're constant versus like the space marines where it's like, yep, there they are,

and now they're not here anymore. This makes it a lot cooler, I think, from what they're doing. but also makes it a lot harder for the citizenry because they're saying, no, no, the threat's over. The threat's gone. We beat the threat. Yes, I would also like to have the great parade

for our great victory as opposed to the guy that goes, hey, I need to tear apart your life to find out if something else happened. You're like, you suck. I want to go back to the parade, man. Having an awesome parade. I guess then, who here's an old movie reference, the Jaws reference, where he's measuring the bite,

the tiger, shark, this isn't, this isn't wide enough. That's what the Inquisition does. But the thing is, they're right. They're right. Sometimes. That's very true. There's a lot of collateral damage in the inquisitorial investigations.

That's why I made the note here where the problem is the inquisitors rarely know the level of what they're looking for. That's what makes it exciting. Yeah. You know what? I'm going to go into the movie detective reference, though. Inquisitors are constantly, have no idea whether John's a corrupt, governor not conduct like gas.

He just sucks. He's just a dick. Yeah. He was actually selling people to the dark color, whatever. Yeah. But then there's also the times when John's actually one of Abadon's key leaders, and he's been corrupting 42 other systems on his travels as he's pretending to sell apples. Yeah.

And he's actually the key. He's Kaiser Jose. There you go. I'm 1400 years old. Yeah. But thanks. And imbued with warp power. It's that kind of a thing. And like, meanwhile, you're walking into my audience chamber to tell me that you're on this planet to look for some corruption.

Yeah. And it's so far beyond. Yeah. Because you're like, I think people might be stealing apples. You're like, yeah, probably. Probably. That's exactly what it is. Let me help you.

Oh my God. Look over there. Bang. Yeah. And I'm going to have to kill you because I've been doing. doing bad things for the last 1,400 years. There's a hell brute, like one floor down. Yeah, I have no idea what you're getting into.

And I think that's one of the most exciting things in 40K lore. I do love, and I love Marines. I got into the game because of the horse heresy. But when you're looking at continued things that I can relate to as Brad, the regular dude. Yeah. The very tall, regular dude, that has fallen things that I say too many times. Don't worry. When we do a league of O-10, that'll be the least.

I'll probably title it. My people. Yeah, Brad's taller than them. But the thing is that you can relate to these people because they're not super powerful. They're just guys. Yeah, exactly. They're pretty juiced up. Eisenards aren't a badass.

But Eisenhardt's bad. Some have augmentation. But the thing is, they're not any more juiced up or augmented than other imperial civil civil citizen can be. That's the thing. But the things they keep getting involved in these. It's why I like the story so much because you have no idea what's going to happen. They're looking into this.

Is this a tiny thing? Or am I looking into the mob? Am I looking to the chaos? What are you even getting into? You're starting to pull the threads and, oh, shit, this is why I have this little symbol that tells me that I can grab whatever I need because sometimes you thought this was like a tiny thing. And it becomes this gigantic, crazy thing. Storyline wise things. This is amazing.

I want to watch this show already. It's a great show because what we just described is literally every good video game we've ever played. Yeah. Is it this this piece of, I'm going to go with it, Final Fantasy 7. It starts off with just a guy on a little mission, and then Seferov seems like he might be a problem, and later on you are fighting. Every, the world destruction event. Exactly. Actually, I was like Final Fantasy 9, but that's me.

But it's the same concept. That one, too. Nine's good. But the point being is that this is the whole cool thing about the Inquisers. they don't know what they're doing. They could be something, like, Brett said, as simple as like,

some guy is stealing apples and look corrupt, but you were just stealing apples all the way up to Abadden's 14th crusade. Yeah. It's about to begin, and you just found it. Like, oh.

So they, with this, though, the issue with the citizenry in this is that in order to properly investigate, they got to keep themselves a little bit quiet, and they got to move a bit more through the shadows. And this is why they have the retiners that also, because you can't just walk up and ask, you need people that can walk up and ask. Yeah. And so for the citizenry, this is where it becomes an issue because these guys may not always present themselves as inquisitors.

In fact, a lot of times they won't present themselves as inquisitors. There's just some off- Some of the greatest stories are the fact that nobody knows this guy's an inquisitor until he grabs something. and you've had, we'll go into the corruption in a second, but you got a lot of these guys that have been, he's just a rogue traitor. And then they just cruise around. And then when he has to throw down, he's, oh, yeah, I'm also this.

And I need all your stuff. Yeah. I'm actually not a rogue trader. I'm an inquisitor, Inquisitor, Lord. And you and all of your spaceships are coming with me over that way. Yeah. When today, yes.

Yeah. Now, this is a bit of, big deal. I'm going to go into two things on this as we've got, knows for it, because you need to be a little bit underhanded. You need to be cloak and dagger. You need to have people working for you that are maybe tainted by chaos because you need to know the workings of chaos, maybe tainted by Zenos because they know the workings of Zenos or sometimes on some of the Inquisitor ships, you actually have Zenos that work for them on their ship. But the thing is that,

when you get down the rabbit hole a little bit too far, when all you have working for you are criminals, quote, or quote, criminals, or corrupted, and you keep trying to win your battles by using Zeno's technology, heretic technology. Well, sometimes things don't go that well over a lifetime of doing this. Yeah, I think the note I made here is sometimes the heretic hunter becomes the heretic. And this is probably one of the biggest problems with the inquisition is all the stuff we've been building.

And we talk about it again from a citizenry standpoint. The citizenry's biggest fear is not a loyal inquisitor. It's a heretic inquisitor. Again, that's the biggest danger. Go to those Eisenhardt books. There's a couple of others. There's a rabbit series. But there's a lot of others.

and the thing is that the guys that are the biggest assholes, the Puritan inquisitors, they do have points. They've got a great point because they understand. You're like a guy with unlimited power that gets corrupted to chaos still has unlimited power. For example, one thing we should have mentioned is that a good number of inquisitors are psychers. Yeah.

A lot more than you would expect are also psychers. They also will routinely have psychers in their retinous. psychers have direct access to the warp, which means chaos. Also, the better part is a lot of these psychers are considered minor psychers, which means that they have lower levels of power, but they have lower levels of defense. Exactly. And you're constantly engaging with chaos,

and the chaos powers eventually go, this guy has feeble ability to stop me from just going in his mind. And if he keeps picking up my artifacts, oh, and if you load up your crew with criminals that you usually could control and people that are already chaos corrupted because they've been looking through that stuff, and then you become corrupted and your crew goes, yeah, I actually like him better at this way. I want to do bad shit anyways. This is because Inquisitors, as we discussed this, we're going to keep probably having to make these detective references, but they're good references. The idea is inquisitors do use torture. They do use.

They're terrible. Yeah, they do want to. Even Inquisitor with good intentions will eventually do this. And you run the same thing with it. If you're trying, we'll use, who says it better? If you're an inquisitor, let's say you're Ordo Zenos and you're trying to track down a very like remote or hard to find Zeno. And you have psychic powers. No, you can tell you where that guy is right now.

Zeech. Right. Today. Do you go that. route. Same with if you're Ordo Malius and you're trying to track down a demon incursion. You know, who'll tell you where they are? Might be Kraft World. Might also be Dr. Khari. Walpy orks.

It's a big thing on that. You have to go, are you going to get corrupted? But you could save millions of people. Exactly. I can tell you right now. This is, and there's actually a very good moment in this in the Eisenhorn's second novel, which I really, I loved. But I just go read the book. I'm not going to read it to you. I would. Brad's, Brad's fireside chats will be the next one. But what we're talking about here is an element of what the line between corruption and non-corruption is a 50-mile-wide gray. Well, officially with the fact that what's considered the good guys, the Empire, like chaplains and inquisorial chaplain, stuff like that, these guys are terrible. Exactly.

They do like horrible things all the time. And they're also one of the things, one of my favorite lines, it's been in many things. better to kill thousands or millions than let one heretic. Yep, then let one heretic live. And so with that, don't forget, when you do all this murder and all this killing and all these things, chaos will use corn because you just want to understand. Corn cares not where the, why the blood spills, just the blood spills. Now, an inquisitor can be doing actions in the effort to overturn chaos. But if he's doing the actions of chaos, it's probably not Nergal, but whatever.

But doing the actions of chaos, that God gets fed by that. And also might give that Inquisitor boons. Chaos gods are not that strategic. Like I just said it really well. As I'm doing things that are making Slanesh happy by torturing someone, by pulling their fingernails off or whatever, Slanesh, if I have psychic powers, may just accidentally give me more power as I do that. So I'm actually becoming corrupted and not real. And all of the chaos powers are, even cornsons, are insidious in how they corrupt.

There's stories where you just go, I want more power, here's more power. But like a lot of times they get you on the, you're just, weirdly enough, I'm slightly better at, we'll go with Slash. Yeah. I seem like better at my interrogations now. I'm also really better at convincing some of these criminals and everything else. Weird. They all seem to be really bending to my will. I'm leveling up with my ability.

I must just be getting way better at it. Yeah, exactly. Oops. And all this again, just a quick note here. The emperor, by the way, knows more than chaos does, but he's just not talking. So we're stuck here. And so you end up with a lot of inquisitors making these decisions of is the enemy of my enemy, my friend. That is, to me, at least, feels like the overarching theme in inquisitorial corruption.

And inquisitorial corruption is the ultimate danger for the citizenry. Because it's not, this comes into two forms. One, a corrupt inquisitor has unlimited power, so you can't stop them from doing anything. It could be bad things going to happen to you. But the problem for the citizenry is it always ends up terrible. Because if you do what the heretical inquisitor tells you to do, you end up doing terrible shit. and then also at the end, another inquisters is probably going to show up.

And you're like, man, I didn't want to do all these horrible things. And the other inquisitor goes, you did. So you should also die horribly. And you're like, you guys suck so much. Imagine you're a librarian at a top secret facility. And an inquisitor comes in and shows you their inquisitorial badge and says, I need to see all the top secret stuff. You can't say no.

So you let them in. And they come in there and they use their whatever it is, and they read all the top secrets off and they leave. And a month later, another inquisitor shows up and says, hey, was so-and-so just here? Yeah, I let him in. Why? Well, he had a badge.

Oh, well, what did he access? All this stuff. Great. We have to blow your planet up now because that guy actually was corrupt. Bye! And that's the end of it. You have no win here, none whatsoever. Also, there's just cross-fews.

fire, where you also might just be on a ship or on a planet that has a corrupt inquisitor on it. And the rest of the inquisitors know, no, they're there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, collateral damage is pretty big. Yeah, space marines are here.

Space Marines, besides my beloved salamanders. It's actually more like that situation. The sisters have showed up. And there's just a lot of Meltta. And they're just like, hey, if we shoot this general direction, we'll kill the guy. Yeah. You're like, yeah, but there's a lot of other people that are like, well, they shouldn't be there. You're like, but you know what, never mind.

So this becomes one of, when we discuss, are they good or bad for the citizenry at their design? Yeah, their function is nightmarish. You really cannot. There's just no win here because the other thing, too, is at the end of the day, inquisers pretty hard to kill. So when you have a corrupt inquisitor, remember, corrupt or non-corrupt, they live their lives investigating things that want to kill them. Yeah, they're super cagey.

Yeah. There are also a lot of them, cough, cough, Eisenhorn, aren't individually powerful. I was taking out assassins. Yeah. In the books, he's taken out imperial assassins. He's a badass fighter. So that's. And these guys, but they're also, they.

plan for the worst at all. They also have 43 exit plans and they have unlimited resources to fix whatever happened to them because, hey, you try to ambush me. So what did I do? I just, again, I'll blow up the world that you were trying to ambush me on while you're still standing on it. Also, I can access any amount of information. So if you told anybody that you're on your way to get me, I know that you're on your

way and I called somebody else up to intercept you. And this is important to remember. An inquisitor is a job for life. You don't retire. There's no retired inquisitors. Inquisitors get old enough where you no longer are fast enough. You didn't, you got a little too complacent because you haven't been jumped in a while. And you almost always die terribly.

It's a gazelle. You can run and you run and you run and eventually the lions are quicker. That's just how it goes. You're like, so this is going to go bad, right? Yeah. You're going to get torn. You don't, there's no like special funeral pie or you just die. I mean, that is actually the best death for an inquisitor because, oh, yeah, what happened?

I was too slow and a greater demon took me home as a plaything or a homoculus got a hold of me. Or I was accused of heresy, whether I am or I'm not, and I was put into a penitent engine for the rest of my life. Or you're putting one of those entombed things that just tortures you forever. Just forever to get information out of you. this makes again corrupt inquisitors real bugaboo because they're not going down without a fight and they will and they'll do things don't forget because that power they'll do things like send the imperial navy to go attack the other imperial navy yep and both imperial navies don't know you have two imperial navies both being directed to shoot each other by two different inquisitors

yep none of them can say no yep and more yep it's just fun so So with that, let's dive into the main meet here, or just conclude the main meet here. Is the Inquisition good or bad? Yes. It's all gray area. Yeah, exactly. It's all gray area. You know, actually, that's not.

I'm going to go with my, I'm going to start this. Please. The Inquisition's ridiculously bad, but necessary. I would agree with that. I think that the, if we're ranking them, it's definitely, I think, Brian, I both agree, Otto Hereticus. By a mile. Worst.

I'm still standing. and then by Ordo Malius, I think, is the better. There's so much more room to miss on that one. There is, but I just think that the Ordo Xenos, it's probably because I mostly play Zenos armies. So there's a little bit of like Magnus did nothing wrong here on my side. I'll give you that. They do treat all of them the same.

Yeah. Whereas I think the Ordo Malius, I also play Chaos armies and they are all bad. There is no. Nurgles a little less bad than corn, question mark. Probably not. I'd rather just get hit by an act. then just rot away.

I guess that's true, but there's an embrace. Griggles, grandfatherly embrace. But the thing is they do terrible. They're 85% awful and 15% still awful, but necessary. And one of the challenges also when we talk about the inquisition from a citizenry standpoint, the Ordo Hereticus is part of that. And there is nothing the citizenry want less than Ordo Hereticus to show up and say, But the thing, they're still, like I said, they're awful, awful, like five offals.

They aren't necessary, though, John, because demons exist in this game. That's true. In this world, demons are a thing. You know what I mean? Like, you can just think about being bad enough, and it'll manifest. That's true. I'm trying to think. Tirends might show up.

Gene Steeler Colts exist where you have to go, hey, man, I think that the guy sweeping has an extra arm that he keeps under his cloak, that could probably be terrible. Yeah, I'm going to, by the way, I'm going to shit on that so hard we do J.D. Zeller cult, what a weird thing. I got to throw an extra arm. Okay.

Anyway, my issue is that when I will use the Eisenhorn books primarily, but also the Ravenner books, there's no interaction in those books where he leaves and it's positive for the place that he left. No, everything's a trash fire. That's the 80s, like,

it walks away from, explosion that does not look back. Every single place he goes, everyone ends up dead or it's destroyed. It's always. A million times worse. It's so much worse. Also, every single, I have to look through the books again. Yeah.

I'm trying to think if anybody that helps him ever comes out better at all. There's a couple people that just don't die. But I think everybody else is still shitty. Man, and I literally can think of people in our discord who are going to crap me for not knowing these names. But his pilot in the first book, he was. Not his retinue, but his redneau, I'm talking about... I'm even with the retinue, though.

Even in the retinue, they were all dying a lot. Which also, he just throws astropath in a wood chipper. He loses so many of them. What's the... His astropaths are Star Trek red shirts. Yeah. That's what they are. Those guys are just heads popping every five seconds.

Oh, yeah. To the point where actually... I'm surprised they kept giving them names. He goes and gets, like, resources and different things from multiple people. He has connections and stuff. Yeah. But every connection he has, I'm trying to think. I haven't read the books in a while.

These are one of the... to be honest. with when they first came out. I've read the eyes in our books twice. Yeah. Because I just loved him. But I'm thinking, I'm trying to think back because he interacts with a ton of people,

but something bad always had they lose. They have less shit almost every time. Every time he interacts with someone, that person ends up getting killed. Or they just, or seven to ten times. Or the place, they lose resources.

They no longer have a business. They don't have their own contacts. Or the world is shit after he leaves. Exactly. And that's a fair. And that's when we talk about, like from a citizenry standpoint, I think Brad's right.

Like the citizenry need the inquisition, and they do a lot of good for the citizenry as a system. But on the planet that they're doing the quote unquote good on, no, you're all dead. It's going to say they're awful. They're just awful, but they're necessary. They do the shit that everybody would say, is this good? No, it's terrible. You are bad. However, somebody has to get this done.

I think I would sum it up as saying, I really want this Inquisition to show up two to three systems over. That's probably good for me. Did you take care of this problem? Yeah. Like a neighborhood or two over? Like the next solar system over, if they're working there really heavily, that's probably good for me and we're cool.

I just don't want to even, I don't even, if there's multiple planets in my system, I don't want them on any of them. They're on one of them, the furthest one from me. That's kind of where you want them doing their good. They are not going to help if they're on your. planet or at least not going to help you. They're going to help the Imperium. So that feels like a fair assessment. You know what I am going to hand us on? I would love everybody to go into our Discord onto the page and like and subscribe, but also, especially in the Discord, we are always

looking for the next thing we can do because, let me shoot this out there. We have infinite topics to talk about. Oh, yeah. And we'd love to see what you would like to hear about next. and we would love to go with some of the passion projects that you have. There's a lot of people that are huge on specific factions, specific chapters of Marines. You could request how. Yeah. And the thing is we're going to do, we did Avedon, we're going to do some more characters. We would love to hear what you would have to say, what are your favorite characters that we can talk?

We can go ahead and spoil it out. So the next cast we're going to do, we're going to be diving into the planets. And we're not sure if it's one or two casts yet because it's not all the way written. but stuff like what is life like on an agri world, death world bad, death world, real bad. Like the things we're going to do, I really want to talk about the hive worlds. We talk about that. With the high worlds are going to be a big one. The majority of the citizenry live in them.

That's what they are. This is why you have Negramunda and gangs of things are bad in the Imperium. There's a reason why people turn to chaos and things of that nature. Oh, yeah. And that's why this sets up pretty well-wage. Anything that would be, and we'll talk about this. And I actually think it's exciting. There's a lot of lore that goes into any of that you guys that play Necremonda.

There's a whole subsective lore that goes into that. 40K. One thing that we're going to do a lot more of is focusing on this era between M32 and M41 because it's not played in the game. It's stuff that it's all referenced in the game. Some of the characters, Brad and I have discussed, we're going to be diving to Aramon in the near future because Aramon's awesome. Also, trilogy of books, fantastic.

Exactly. It's the thing we're looking for most is, hey, I play 40K or I read 40K. And I hear this reference a lot and I don't really necessarily know what it is. Again, join our Discord, like and subscribe to the podcast. Come check out the website. This is John Barzotti and Bradchester. See you next week.