The 40k Lorecast - Episode 39 - Tyranids pt 3 - Imperial history of the Tyranid invasions.

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

On this cast we conclude our coverage of the Tyranid lore deep dive with a focus on the imperial history of the Tyranids. We open with the first official battle with Tyranids at Tyran against Hive Fleet Behemoth. We then move onto Macragg and Iyanden and their battles against Kraken. We then move onto the true nightmare to the galaxy with Hive Fleet Leviathan. We conclude with the devastation of Baal and where we are from a "modern" 40k standpoint with the Tyranid invasion.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 Barzati and Bradchester. This guy. Today, we're going to conclude our coverage of the tyranids with a deep dive. Yeah, deep-ish dive. Mediocre dive. So we'll start really with kind of like where it officially began a tyranton invasion

and where it's progressed up to actually all the way up to Leviathan. I really like this, to be honest with you. They did a pretty good job because I like the fact, and we're going to, we've talked about a little bit before, but I really enjoy the fact that Tarynx are written from the point of view of the Imperian. Yeah. So there's always the mystery. And also. Well, not always is the problem.

Some of the earlier codexes they did make the mistake. Yes. But as a whole, I'll give them, I'll give them some leeway here. Oh, yeah. Because, I mean, even what they're named from, we're going to talk about that in a minute, is, again, not even the first time. It's not even the 10th time. And that's what every tyranny did.

Every tyranny. The tyrantids haven't introduced themselves with, hi, I'm Zoe. You know, it's just been. Here's also the, the ladder of what we have. Yeah, yeah. Hierarchy. Yeah, I'm called Zoentrop because my father was with malanthrope, but I'm a smaller version. Like, no, it's.

He was the Duke of Zohenthrope. But before we jump in, once again, as always, please like and subscribe to the podcast and leave up a review. This really does help us with our metrics. And what happens is the more people who listen, who subscribe and then leave a positive review, the higher up in the algorithm were placed within Spotify specifically. So when we're able to get exposed to us. And it's a big deal for us.

I mean, I know it sounds like a small thing, but it really makes it different because it exposes us to a lot more people by the likes and reviews. And also I should point out, I did realize we're in episode 39. On Spotify, it's actually the follow button, not the like button. I realized that earlier this week. Go team. My name's John, and I pay attention to things. Anyway.

My name's Brad, and you are in charge. Exactly. And you default to me and pay attention to things. So, yeah, that's one got a little bit missed anyway. Also, please join the Discord if you can. If you don't want to, it's fine. But it's gotten really big. I think we're over 400 members now.

We've got a lot of different, whatever they're called. We've got a lot of different channels that are really cool. Yeah. Because we've got everything from lore discussions to fan fiction discussions to model showcases. Model, even some rules discussion. Yeah. We do have a perennial 40K coach with us who actually knows the rules really well. And there are a lot of people in the community who do play.

So for those of you who are maybe just discovering 40K lore for the first time and are saying, hey, kind of want to play this game. How is it played? Good news for you. It's super not complicated as a game. Really, you can pick it up in no time. Weirdly enough, that's what I do for a living. Because it is wildly complicated.

And so the good news is that we do have Brad Chester here. Brad is available for coaching. you can either try to, Brad, what's the email? They can email you like? Old man, Brad 40K at gmail.com. And since none of you caught that, just go to the 40K Lourcast. Dot com. If you go to Brad's page, there's a link directly there.

You click it, it'll actually pop it in the email for you. So there's also that one. I'm always clear and concise. There's no times that anybody has now said that we need 40K Lourcats shirts. Yeah, it happens. It happens. Additionally, there is a link in the show notes for a, we do have a Patreon. if you guys want to help us out with getting some more equipment,

I finally figured I had that there's something called a limiter and a compressor in editing software. So we do sound better than we used to, but it would be nice to get a better soundboard and some of those things. So if people just want to help us out, I'd appreciate it. Well, it's going to go right into that stuff because that's where it goes. This is the labor of love for Brad and I. Anyway, back to the Tyrannids, the topic at hand. So as we said before, the Tyrannids have been in the galaxy for a long time, just not really in force. You know, space hulks coming in, the bioship here or there that probably just landed on it.

Infiltration units basically have been here for a long time. Yeah, but both intentional and accidental. Correct. But there was a key moment where the Tyrinid fleet seems to have actually made an effort into the galaxy. We'll talk more about what this effort was shortly, but we want to kind of jump right into that. And yeah. I heard there's a planet that had something to do with the naming. And here's the funny.

I actually don't know how to pronounce this. Is it, is it T-R-R-N or Tyran? Oh, good question. I'll look that up. Yeah, T-Y-R-A-N. I'm saying that as I see that, as I put the note up on the screen in front of us, I'm like, shit, I don't know to pronounce that. I'm going to say Tiran.

Yeah. So we can say Tiran-I-N-I-N-S. Yeah, but it's a book. They also could be Tyranids. I don't know. That's true that. Yeah, I'm not British. I'm not.

I live there as a kid, but it doesn't count. I watched Postman Pat. That's about what. or the sense. It was a good show. Postman Pat was good. Like, honestly, been Pankton-Pair. They were good. Like, yeah, this is... I live there in the early 80s. So, so the first full evidence we get of a tyrannid invasion actually comes on the planet Tyrant. And this is an amazing story. This is, you know, they dud on occasion. Don't get me wrong. But when they, when they hit, they hit hard.

They hit it out of the park. Yeah, this is always swinging for the fences because they either strike out or they hit home runs a lot. By the way, uh, about 60% of our audience is not American. So let's use sports eligible. We can just cricket, but I don't know what cricket is. Just we should hold back. I realize, I mean, like, looking at our metrics, I'm like, we probably should make less American sports references.

Yeah. Because it's just lost on people. Also, the fact is, is I still think that cricket is a plot to make me feel dumb about sports, even though I know everything about every American sport. And it predates all the sports. Yeah. Cricket's actually pretty cool. It's, the only thing I like about cricket is because,

because it's so long, the games last a week. Everyone just drinks in the stand. That sounds like a good game. It's like the ultimate game of- I need to know. Yeah, crickets, cricket's kind of an interesting. Just boring is all fucking. I'm sorry it is.

If you guys like it, I know we have Australian listeners. It's fine. You guys also have rugby and footy, so you're winning. Footy's the greatest game ever made. Anyway, as we were just saying, all the tyrannid naming mechanics come from the Imperium, which also means that the orcs drew car, Eldar, Votan, and Tao probably have different things.

Their own names. For tiered units, but we don't have to care. We need to make a podcast specifically on what orcs have named everyone else. It's all pointy or round or boom. It's just level of very pointy, kind of pointy, you know, squishy. I would actually get more a kick out of what the Tao would name them. But I've shit on them enough. Not yet.

Don't worry. Never enough. There's more coming. So, you know, as we said in the last casts, when the tyrannids appear somewhere, there are precursors. You've got the earthquakes. You also go. The biggest one you have is it just goes dark. All of a sudden, things cease to exist.

Shadows and a warped. Yeah. And so what no one really knew is the eastern fringe of the galaxy. We were seeing just multiple worlds just go dark for no reason. And this is happening around. M-30, M-41. So we're at the point now where Abadden's in his 13th Crusader.

Well, the big thing is that while Ternans have been around for forever in the game, they are supposedly new to the galaxy in the story. Well, that's because, yeah, it's a good point we should point out, is that in 1989

or so, when the game began, the game began in M-40. So we can talk about all the, all the the happenings of Horace heresy have never occurred in what I would call the Codex era of the game. Right. It's all pre-reference. It's ancient history, actually.

So interestingly enough, like the tyranids actually are newer to the galaxy than the tower, but the tyranids are one of the first races in the game because the game starts at M40-ish. Right. So it's an important thing. So going to that point, the galaxy is already on fire. when the Eastern French, and this is, when we say Eastern French, we meet the very edge

of the galaxy on the right side. Just saying it. I wasn't even going to mention it because I knew you're going to the lack of magnetic north in a galaxy. Good job, guys. Anyway, but they're coming in over there and it's just kind of this,

well, that's really far away and kind of who gives a crap is the viewpoint. But the adeptus of the Mistratum say, all right, let's just send some people out there. Let's backtrack for just a second on this because I do, I know we're doing Ternids, but we have to, a lot of these things don't make sense unless you again look at it from how inefficient the bureaucracy of the Imperium is. Yeah. Because they have, when we say fleet, it's not like a little strike fleet of ships.

No, it's a living planets basically moving through space. They don't even recognize this as a thing. until much later, because 47 million guys have to stamp something before this happens. And a lot of these don't make sense unless you realize that, because otherwise you're like, what are you talking about? They're killing world after world after world. Why did no one do anything? You're like, they didn't even know it was a thing.

That's how an efficient of the bureaucracy. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. The odds, sorry, the adeptives, I've been estrathed, didn't, the adeptus administration most likely, don't really call this out in the codexes, but most likely, only took interest in the Eastern Fringe when we reached like the 100th world that had randomly gone dark. And I was like, oh, we should probably do something now.

But the first 20 was a, I don't care. As soon as they started breaking some supply chains. And they went, well, this is going to mess. This will make me do even more people. I should probably look at it. I'll send someone over there. So they send some survey ships out there. What the surface ships find is really strange.

They find planets that were marked as like agri worlds or, you know, Lush. Yeah, lush worlds are, there's nothing there, like a moon. They have an atmosphere. And if you know it's Mercury, Venus, but they both have the atmosphere, actually. I think it's Mercury is a planet. But there's no, there's no life.

Or not sure Mars actually, probably the, I know I'm right when I say Mars, so we'll go with Mars. It's that thing of like, there's nothing here. There's no life. There's no anything. Okay, well, and then it's like, well, I guess someone must have labeled it wrong. But then this happens over and over and over again. Like, oceans are missing.

Like, we're talking about water worlds that you get to and are just giant craters. Like, this is real. What ends up happening is a survey ship is coming back and all of a sudden encounters a just swarm of life. Let's be fair. They bring it on like, hey, the survey ship spotted some stuff. This is a small ship that wasn't expecting any of this. We have to do it justice. There's no way that these guys weren't.

Holy shit, holy shit, oh my God, oh my God, go anywhere but there. You basically most likely jumped out of warp, come in, and you land kind of like that. It's actually that scene in Star Wars after Alderon was blown up. Like, why are we in an asteroid belt? Oh my God. Except instead of asteroids, it's spores. You've never seen this species before. It's everywhere.

And this planet that's coming back to is the planet Tyrant, Tiran, whatever it's going to be. So they tell, they report back in because this is not in the planet. They're coming back into the system. So they kind of hit this. They fly through it and begin radioing down to the planet. Because Shadow and the Warp exists, they're not happy to use astropads of this distance. They can actually use radios. They're now radioing to a planet saying, hey, we have an invasion in orbit.

What are you going to do? And the planet, of course, turns on. Tyran, you know, this planet did have, it was actually was a military. I was going to say, it's listed, let's talk about things that weren't what they were. Fair. This is listed as a research facility, and it is not, unless they were researching guns. Well, they're researching what happens when you shoot things with horrible times. It's important research.

There was a lot of guns on this planet. It's a research facility. You're like, yeah. And this is why we end up, this becomes the first recorded battle with the Tyrannids, is because it's the first planet that Tyrannids invaded that could fight back. The rest of them just... Well, it's the first battle and not slaughter. And so the planet, of course, knows what's happening,

and they begin just opening up. So the good thing, the nice thing about that I think, the one piece of imperial bureaucracy that does function is when you go to small scale, it's very functional. So they're able to, this planet's able to, this plant, the whole planet. Because they have a rigid hierarchy. Exactly. And we'll do that when in the upcoming plo, it's shamelessly.

self-promotion in our next episode. Oh, you're going to have a guard, guys. You're going to have some fun with guard. But they have a rigid hierarchy, which allows shit to be done. Also, screw you. What? Well, I mean, oh, that's why. The next note, literally, I mean, I'm just reading it.

Well, though it lacked a space marine presence, good thing with all the poison in the air, it was heavily fortified. It was heavily fortified. I mean, luckily, there was a lot of poison coming down. So those space marines have been there. They always been wiped out like that. But, yeah, so hiring is a serious military operation. Not only is the planet four to five,

they also had a space. It's had orbital defenses. Well, they also, there were planets. They had, well, it's got cannons. It's got orbital. It's basically got giant cannons. But there also was a fleet in space. So they had imperial ships.

They also have, look at Hoff. They had the big cannons that are shooting, iron cannons that are shooting into space. this is, again, a research. It's so wildly many air quotes for this. Yeah, well, again, they were researching what happens when I shoot this candidate something over there. So they were really ready for this, but they also were not really ready for this.

Yeah, and so the way the battle, I love the way this battle progresses, because, of course, imperial forces just go, go ham on the tyrians. They fire everything into them. And the tyrians are just blowing apart in orbit. And remember, the Ternan, we talked about this a little bit, the annotation. Tiernans have not encountered any real resistance up until this point. So they have no reason to have adapted to deal with orbital defenses. And so they're just ripping these ships out of orbit.

And it gets close to the planet. It's coming in. So it's going well for the Imperium. They're blasting the ships that are in orbit. And they try to make planet fall. They're destroying. They're really moving. and they're setting themselves up to attack.

That being said, what the Imperium doesn't realize is the shadow of the warp has shut off any and all communication. They are sending, they start to realize it in a little bit, but initially they just think, okay, we're going to engage this force. We've called for help. Help is on its way. We're going to keep it. You just have to hold out.

Yeah, we're going to hold out. We're killing this. But then they see that they're having just so much, almost ease of killing the tyrantids that they decide to commit the Navy that's in the, in space to, all right, what we're going to do is we're going to split them. We're going to blow up the main ships and then we'll just mop up the rest. And they don't realize that they're fighting the JV of the Tarynx. Yeah. And it turns out the Hive Fleet was adapting. The Hive Fleet adapts quickly to this. And it was a ruse. They go in and they hit the center and discover it was complete pincer. The hive mine is the old ones probably,

but also effectively working as a supercomputer. It learns and adapts in the center. In the United States, instantly in real time. Yeah. As, as this imperial, as most of this Imperial Navy comes into the High Fleet Norbit, the High Fleet quadruples in size and swallows them. And that's it. Tyrannids now own the sky. And this is fast, fast, by the way.

This was a wild. An hour, a couple hours. I mean, we're not talking. This wasn't an epic imperial fight to the end. They just got wrecked. This is a first round knockout. Yeah. So now the Tyridids own.

the skies and begin the true invasion. Which is filling the sky with spores. Yep. I mean, to the point where the sky is now obscured. They can't see. And there's nothing left and they're coming down. At this stage, though, one of the cool thing is the invasion that then begins is this is before we've seen any of the tyrann adaptations. As we said before, zoanthropes came from eating Eldar.

Well, they haven't fought Eldar yet. You know, biophores are from orcs. this is the early stages of tyrannids. So it's effectively gaunts, so hormagons, termagons, gargoyles, the initial third edition release of J. Lictors, Karnifxes, and some hive tyrants. Very, you know, not the 10th edition version that we're all used. Bloodbuss are used to, 8th edition or 7th edition, whatever.

The battle is really cool. You actually did have Katachan jungle fighters there who were like, you know, who are fighting off the tyrannids. You've got like ramparts just blasting stuff apart. But effectively what ends up happening is the tyranted horde is the tyrantid horde. There's a reason that it's called the endless swar. Yeah, there are mountains of dead termagons and hormagons that thousands to millions more run over the mountain, down the mountain. It's a big thing, too, because they're also not taking, we're attacking at dawn.

They have, we're attacking 24-7 all day, every day. everywhere. And one of the parts of stories that I really like about this is at a certain point, the Imperial Forces knew this is over. There's no scenario that we're going to survive this. And one of the admecs, you know, because

we actually have done a thing on admec so far, Admec are really smart. Like, you have to get the admet credit. Admec, especially admec, like, like, um, the characters. They're really, extremely intelligent and extremely practical. So he realizes that if the tyrannians are going to

consume everything on the planet. There will be no record of this. So what he does is he loads a data slate with videos of the recording, all the data they have of the battle, and then fires it into basically the core of the planet so far down that the tear-inid swarms consumption of the planet won't get to it. And that's that. They're all dead. With a with a Homer Beacon, of course. Yeah, he's the home of a beacon. And now they're all dead. That's it. So fast forward about a year. and Inquisitor, why can't I think of his name off the top of my head? Billy. No, Cripman. Inquisitor Cripman arrives in the plant.

Cripman's, we have to give him a name because Cripman's one of the more important parts. I mean, he's actually made most important. True, but I do like saying Inquisitor Billy. They could easily have just done Inquisitor Eric. Just saying it wasn't a matter. They're British. I mean, go with it, you know. But this data slate, Cripman finds this data sleep and freaks the F out. To his credit, he has the proper reaction, which is of, oh, shit.

Yeah, because he's, remember, Cretman now arrives at this planet, which was a research, air quotes, military base. That's gone, gone. And there's nothing left. Yeah. Nothing left. Not a, not a soul, no, no, not no skeletons, nothing. Everything has been consumed. Although it's not really clear if the military, like, I don't know how the tyrants would eat like a giant steel structure.

And they never talk about that. Yeah, you know, I'd just say that of mind. All organic mass harvest goes. Exactly, but it's all gone. Crittman finds this data slate and is just horrified and freaks the president freaks that out and runs back to the Imperium screaming all the way. Which is the proper. Oh, exactly. And luckily, he is a high-level inquisitor.

So all the bureaucracy doesn't exist. Right. He cuts through all the bullshit because, again, the Ternids have been just cakewalking through this part of the galaxy. four, we're not 100% sure with the timeline on this, but they've recorded until now, and they still wrecked it. Yeah. And when they went there.

Tyran, I mean, the battle of Tyran likely lasted less than $40. Right. But the thing is, is like they didn't even have any of that before because no one knew anything. They were cut off. They're just smoking agro worlds. They're showing up at high worlds that didn't have, they had the garrison.

Yeah, they had some R bites and some guardsmen. And it was like, well, we're going to eat all of you. They're like weird, man. The giant Godzilla monsters killed Judge Dredd. Yeah, I was like, oh, yeah, it's a judge dread versus a carnifex. Yeah, it didn't work out. It worked out so badly they didn't bother writing a story about it. Exactly.

So, yeah, at this stage, Cripman is running back. And the good news is that because he, because of his rank and everything else, the Imperium is now aware of the threat and begins preparing for it, which leads us up to the first tyrannic. war, which is a big deal on this because the Tyrannins had no way to know. Yeah. But they chose the wrong path to roll through. Yeah.

So we kind of lucky, unlucky. I mean, it was really lucky for the rest of the galaxy. So Crittman is now aware of what a Tiernan invasion looks like. It is, it's mostly the shadow of the warp. They haven't, at this stage, they haven't figured out the whole earthquake thing that we talked about the last cast, but he now knows Shadow the Warp. So Cripman begins searching, not even archives. He's just looking for any imperial world that has gone dark and looking for a pattern

where there's multiple, and he sees it. And there's a bunch of these worlds. We refer to the Trian invasion as tendrils because it is. It's like the tentacle of an octopus reaching into something. It's very linear. Right. The thing is that they also, they don't move the entire fleet. but they do at the same time because the fleet never splinters off.

Yeah. It just extends out. It extends out. And it's like I use the term tentacle because what is like the tip of tentacle is narrow. But as that tentacle moves, it gets a lot wider and heavier. So now there's more and more tier and is that kind of come through. And he looks around and he sees a pattern. And he starts and he sees this tendril moving into the eastern.

And immediately, this Crypton's really good, by the way. It's an amazing inquisitor decides, Well, where can we, how do we stop this? Where do we have enough imperial forces to make this to actually push back? And luckily, there was kind of a key planet that it was going right towards. Yeah, they're moving towards McCrague, which was they... We were to discuss what McCrague is, so why don't you all tell, because I know how much you love this army. Why don't you tell everyone what McCrack is?

They get shit on, but the ultrarians are badass. They're incredibly badass, yeah. I mean, they're the ultimate, they're the best TPS reporters of all. time. But also, there's some bad dudes. Oh, yeah. And there's a reason that McCrag is the home world of the Ultramarines. And the Ultramarines aren't exactly a chapter that goes, we should circle around and see what happens. No, they will dig in and make you write a report about why they dug in, but they're not going anywhere. So the Tyrannids have now effectively targeted the home world of here.

A little side note here, because we haven't pointed out. Gillen's dead at this stage. Two story. Yeah. I mean, it's Marnius Calgar is ready to rock. And also a bunch of people that got super famous because of this war. Yeah. And Marnius Calgar is he's not Gilliman, but he's not that far below Gilman.

Yeah, he's a bad dude. He's, his leadership, his toughness. Calgar fricking. He's a brilliant strategist. Yeah. Yeah. Calgar rocks. They prepare.

And they have. they're already making plans upon plans before they even get there because they've reviewed all the information that they got from him. Well, and Cripman shows up and tells Calgar, I have proof they're coming here. And Calgar doesn't do any of the movie trope of like maybe yada, yada, yeah, yeah. Calgar goes, all right, we're all in.

And Calgar sends out the call Imperial Navy's on its way. Reinforcements, boom, boom, boom. He's effectively trying to turn. McRaeck into a fortress world. We'll talk about what he actually also said. Calgar says, I'm not repelling this invasion. I'm going to stamp it out of existence. He's just like, this is going down.

Calgar was awesome. And what Calgar does is, I mean, this is referred to as one of those epic battles fought really by any Space Marine chapter in the 41st millennia. They also, as heroic as it is, this is still why the Salomonas is the only good guys. Sorry, Ultramarangas.

but Calgar just goes, I can't fortify every planet in the system. Some of you guys are going to have to not exist anymore. Yeah, this is the first time where he really, not the first time. He's pretty pragmatic about what he does. So what Calgar realizes is that the only way to stop an invasion of this size is to kind of do, is to force it to Pyrrhic victories. So he takes entire worlds, loads up with weapons, knowing that they're going to kill by the tyranny,

but their entire purpose was to just take a pound of flesh. from a tyrant fleet to kind of make it to weaken it in key areas. Well, he's also kind of loading them with not straight bombs and explosives, but straight bombs and explosives. Because he knew that from the videos, he didn't want to leave a bunch of biomass. So he was kind of going, hey, if they get too close, crack the planet. Yeah, blow it up. Crack the planet. And we're done.

But what Calgar also does is really critical is he starts bringing a massive fleet into orbit. So there's a giant and, you know, this is the bigger thing. It's hard. And the thing about Tyrannids, it's a we don't really know what Tyrannids know. Like, do the Tyrannids, like, did Calgary even have to hide the fleet or the Tyrion is not known? I don't, it's hard because they're so single of purpose when Tyrann is in vain.

You also don't know how much knowledge they have from the warp. They use the warp, but they don't go through the warp. Are they intercepting communications? They're blocking them off. Like, what do they know? Exactly. Again, you have an overriding, unbelievable. powerful, unbelievably intelligent mind that's,

so you don't know what their actual capabilities are. So, and the dates here do matter. So it's 754 of M41. So just, you know. This is recent history. Extreme recent history. The Hyde Fleet reaches McCrack. And the ultramarines just opened fire and kill basically a billion tyrantids.

Their initial shot is banana pants. Yeah, just they're all gone. And, I mean, but that being said, like, the, the stories from this era are that no one had ever conceived of if they swarmed this large. I mean, their opening salvo would have eliminated, like, any other fleet. Yeah. Like, like, they killed enough tyranids that if it had been tau, the end of their civilization. That's how many they killed in, like, the first 45 minutes. It's insane.

but every time that they killed one, three more popped up. Well, this is a good story because you put a note on it, but I think it requires more. This story is bullish. Literally Titans, not Knights, Titans. Again, Titans are so large that they have their own marketplace ecosystems inside of them. Yes. They're gigantic. Pacific Rim has nothing on Titans.

A Pacific Rim is a knight. Titans are the moon. walking around the earth. And that moon is made up of guns. Right. And they made, the Ternids went, we don't have the proper shit yet. What we're going to do?

I don't know. Brad and John, if we had a billion of you, do you guys think you could just drag this moon down? We're like, I guess we'll give it a shot. And they did. Yeah.

The Titans, gaunts, probably millions of gaunts, climbed onto the Titans and just bit, at bit its legs. They started like, ripping out cables. Until they fell to the ground.

Yep. And then consumed it. So we're not that far under this battle when the ultramarines kind of hit the back foot here, where it's like McCrigg, McGreg is going to fall. That's it. And one of the biggest things about this is, is, I don't think they were, well, they're always, the Marines are always overconfident, but they were less overconfident than they usually have. The tyrant has brought poison.

They would have been, that's, that's, scry. They were okay, but then the Tirenids dropped some tainted oyster samples. And they ate them and were like, well, now I got to put it. I mean, it's slightly smoggy out here. We're probably going to die. Well, there was a lot of night fighting, too. But their initial, God, we haven't even touched on that. But one of the things is, is they showed up with so many guns and their initial salvo.

And push was so big. And they killed so many things that you're thinking, well... Yeah, we got this. Yeah, this is... We got this. This might be a tough battle, but this is...

We're winning. You know what I mean? Yes, it's going to be an epic battle, but also we kind of won. And then they realized, oh, shit, we need to do something.

And so what ends up happening, I don't love this part of writing here. So the GW... It's what they do every time. I know. All of a sudden, the space marines are down to one last outpost.

It's a planet. I mean, unless McRaeg is like, I don't know, an asteroid, which we know it's not. It's a giant world. It's a planet. Like, you don't have one. There's no outposts that big enough. Also, nuke that place. Yeah.

It's like, anyways, there's one outpost left, whatever. Anyway. But this last outpost is what's holding on. And actually, Calgar is there. And he gets mortally wounded by, Doesn't even stop fighting, though. Yeah, the apothecaries are working on him. He's legitimately fighting while people are just stim-packing him up.

Yeah. It actually is kind of bad. I mean, he's wrecking things. That's true. And so, fine. Let's do the story. Well, pause on it. Let's set the stage, though.

Marius Calgar fights with two comically gigantic power fists. Yeah. Well, let's do this. You know, screw it. And if you haven't seen it, if you haven't seen a power fist, think hellboy. But Hellboy's paw, his one fist is wildly too small. Yeah. He's got two of us.

He's got two of those. It is a weird thing. But anyway, all right. So first off, they did name it Cold Steel Ridge. For those of you following at home, were like, wait, you mean Haxar Ridge? Yep. Yep. That's exactly what I mean.

But anyway. All right. So Calgard and his troops are just, they're tearing apart. They're the invading fleet. So at this base, they're just waiting. Well, another thing that's pretty badass. You're selling this short. He's finding an episode.

battle, they're firing orbital bombardments just next to him. It is danger close. He's like, yeah, just fire airstrikes where. Yeah, he's calling down. He's calling out orbital bombardments on himself, like, but just move it to aim the left a degree. Yeah. And that's where he said, like, we'll be good. There is, you know, gigantic bombs going off right next to you. The visual here is cool because you've got the tyrannids coming over this ridge trying to come in and they're having to not only get through the fire. So the space Marines are shooting out. The ships in orbit are firing orbital canons down.

And these are, I mean, tyrants are fast. So some of the gaunts are able to cross and get in there. And now that the space brains are fighting with like chain swords and power fists against, you know, the gaunts and the genocles that are getting in there. This is a, this is pure nightmare war. Well, also, however, you do have to give the, can one guy turn? the tides. Yes and no, the reason he turned the tide is the morret. You were making all your leadership checks. Oh, yeah. The morale here at Calgar is standing on top of a mountain of bodies

just going, what? I didn't keep going. I didn't hear no bell. But at this point, the hive mind deploys its first like kind of specialized organization. And this is bad. And it's called the Swarm Lord. And so for those of you who play 40K normalized, yeah, the Swarm Lord is a unique character to Tyrannids. Now, that being said, a Swarm Lord is both a unique character and not a unique character.

And a type of unit now. Yeah, because the Hive Mine can recreate, can recreate anything it wants to create. So, yeah. Well, the thing is, is he starts directing the flow of every, all the attacks.

And now, because as we said before, in the last cast, a Hive Tyrant has the luxury of getting the feedback of every single unit, processing it, and changing those units

all telepathically. Calgar has to radio his orders. So out of nowhere, the tide is turning. Now the Tyrannids begin actually... They start using super crazy tactics, though, because they started playing possum. They had a whole... And I'm talking carpets of gaunts

that were pretending they were dead. They had the first time that they really saw. They saw it a little bit, but they didn't realize that tyranins would just go dormant because they burrowed in and just sat there and waited for the go time, and then they sprung up from the ground. And so now, this turns the tide. I mean, the Ultramids, let me say turn the tide.

They were holding out one fortress on an entire planet. And like, but that fortress was doing really well. Anyway, that fortress now has stopped doing well. And now the Ultramarines get overwhelmed. The Swarm Lord then, just like Calgar, Swarmored's, lead from the front, he comes straight up. And the swarm lord realizes that Calgar is the secret to the ultramar. And he beelines for him.

And goes right at him. And, I mean, to his credit, I mean, Calgar does go toe to toe with the swarm lord. He gets run through. Yeah, the swarm lord just. I'm not in a, no, I'm saying he actually gets run through. And that being said, Even because now Calgar is a primaris model. But if we take the original Calgar model,

and you put it next to a Swarmwood, that's actually an accurate size difference. So the Swarmud wrecks him. And of course, the Swarmwood can't kill him because Calgar's honor guard jump on the Swarmor. You know what? I'm going to save us from the hatred of Ultraman fans. His honor guard.

You mean the Vittricks Guard? Come on? The Vittrix Guard, fine. Because those dudes are. Bad ass. The Vittricks guards all see this happen. Just like in Horace heresy, when Lehman Ross is about to get killed after stabbing Horace, and all of the space holes just jump on Horace and say, you're not stabbing him.

I don't care if I die, you're not getting yet. They just piled you. Yeah. And that's what the Vittrix Guard do to the Swarm Lord. So they're able to grab Calgar and shove him in the Thunderhawk and get him back into orbit. That being said, they're still losing pretty badly. Like badly, badly, badly. And GW writing.

Anyway, what they decide to do is take, is one ship who's fighting in orbit, realizes that they're going to get, that they're going to die, and turns their ship right into the heart of the Tarranted fleet. It was pretty badass. This is, the explosion is badass, but it just, they did detonate the warp. But they did detonate the warp core. And again, to the adaptations. And again, not even just adaptations.

of the bodies and what they've produced, but adaptations of tactics. Yeah. They just, this wasn't on the menu of possibilities. Yeah, Tarran to just see a ship coming towards them and don't realize.

So I don't think they name the guy who does this, but maybe they do and I've just forgotten it. But the ultramarine ship drives into the heart of the Tiranid fleet, detonates the warp drive, which basically causes an inverse of the warp to appear and sucks the entire, They're almost the entire tyranny.

Well, it kills all the synapse. Yeah. Well, first, it sucks the whole fleet into the war. Right. We don't know where. They're just in the warps somewhere. And then, yeah, now all the synapse is gone. There is no connection.

And this turns the tide again. Now, McCrigg. There's still billions of creatures, but they are meandering around. Yeah, but the Swarm Lord, the connection of the Swarmourner is gone. Now they're just, they're more animalistic. And the space marines, a space marine. can take a gaunt in a fight, no problem. Like, you know, now, now you can send to the five terminators.

Especially if a few thousand of them at a time are just wandering around. Yeah, now you can send terminators with heavy flamers in, and yeah, we're good. So they do. So McCrigg is quote unquote saved. It's not just the planet, the systems, because McCrag and Ultramar, the system itself, is a lot of planets. It's a big, this is where they were. talking about recreating the Imperium of Man starting here because there were so many people,

because this is a center of commerce, agriculture, and they have huge worlds with huge populations, they've gotten wrecked. The death toll is catastrophic, going back to Star Phantom Menace. The death toll is catastrophic. But it was just crazy. Never mentioned the Phantom Manus ever again. I think that won the Oscar. anyway. I didn't say for what? Costumes.

I think it actually did win like a tech one. It wasn't acting. That was almost wide all over the money. No, it was not. Oh, God. Yeah. Script or acting, it was not. We'll be right back after a quick break. What's actually really fascinating about this moment, though, is that they're celebrating,

that the space brings the Imperium is celebrating because they have destroyed the Xenot threat. And by the zeno threat, I don't mean a tendril of a high fleet because they don't know that that's a thing. They think they just killed the tyranny. Because in, let's talk about, let's roll it back just a second. At this time, the Imperium of Man does not understand how big the high fleets are. All right. Let's point out, they still don't. Well, true. Well, we still don't. I mean, that's Yes, I got you. But I'm saying the individual fleets. Okay, fair enough.

Like, we still have no way. We still, the individual named fleets. At this time, they have no idea how big it is. This was a, while it was a huge, gigantic battle, you can call it war. But they didn't know at the time it wasn't a war. It was a battle in a much larger. This was an incursion fleet at the most. And so, yeah, mankind is no idea.

And we still don't. I mean, at the, you know, we're right getting up towards the, 42nd millennia now. We've no idea how many tyrant is there are. We have no idea what is we covered in the last episode, what their motivation is, where they're coming from, anything. What we now know is there's a lot of them. And at this point, they did not know that. So the Imperium's about to learn the hard way about this. So the thing is, is that they weren't wrong, but they weren't right at the same time. Because they did say this is a civilization, to call it, a species that's going planet by planet and bringing everything with them.

But they don't realize that this was tendrils of them bringing everything with them. And one thing that we're not going to get into too much here, but we should mention it, is that we also now know that, it kind of an homage to like the Hercules and the Hydra, if you kill off a hive fleet, unless you eliminate every single part of it, This fleet actually will split into two new high fleets that then will take different paths and will, if they get fed, will grow into new hive fleets. And they will also adapt differently. Yep. You know what, I'm going into this. I know we're going to talk about it a little bit later anyways, but I'm just going to rock it.

All of the high fleets in the game are pale comparisons to what happens in the lore. because in the lore, the high fleets get very specialized by what they're fighting. Oh, yeah. Chronos. Chrono. Chrono. They're all tyrannies. The way they do everything is completely different.

And they adapt to it. They effectively made blanks, even though they're psychics. And then they made whole fleets of gigantic creatures to be breaches and anti-tank. And they have other fleets that are just supposed to. be the fastest infiltrate, basically. Yeah, I'm being honest, as we were doing the show notes, I was really pining for eighth edition tyrannids, where they actually were, like, each fleet was a little bit more, yes.

Yeah, that was, I think the, maybe six. I'm trying to think back. It's just, it had had that. That's the thing, you know, I'll get on my soapbox again. I really enjoy when every faction detachment, which is detachment is a new term. A new term. Yeah, we're different.

Right. They were just so different, and they were different in the way that they played because the stories are so different about them. You have whole fleets of just lictors and things of that nature, infiltrate just doing their thing, and you've got whole fleets of geogeth. Behemoth was just known as the, sorry, Yormar, you know what I mean? Yeah. And things of that nature, and Kronos was accidentally fighting demons, and they had to figure out a way to do it because they didn't get biomass from them, because when you defeated them, they were gone.

So they had to have new ways and they were adapting, and these fleets are so wildly different from each other. And that's one thing that doesn't anymore represent any more representing the game. And I am a little sad about that. That's true. And you're right. So with all these fleets, we also assume they're all connected back to a single hive mine,

but as we've said before, it could be multiple hive minds. We really don't know. Which actually makes a difference, to be honest with you. Yeah. It makes more sense to have multiple hive minds because of the fact that the fleets act wildly different, and they also are going different places. Yeah, they're going different places, again, though, but the fact that never fight is just, that's what I go off.

Because even orcs will fight orcs. True. That's the thing. But, I see, I say, even orcs will fight orcs. The entire purpose of orcs is the fight. Of course, they fight each other. Who am I kidding? But the thing is, when you're looking at the high, you know, screw this, we're going on our,

John and Brad's fan fiction on this. No, but it makes more sense to me that there's more than one hive mind. more like a council or a conglomeration to make a hive mine. Are you making that up because you believe that or because you played Starcraft so many times? That's how it functions. Both? I'm with you on this, but I do, you do struggle if you guys, I mean, I'd laugh as I was writing the notes for tyranny. A lot of this stuff, it starts from memory and then I start doing the research.

I wrote stuff that I realized later I was doing the research. Oh, no, that was Starcraft. I had to delete it and pull in something. But it just makes more. sentence because of the way that they act and adapt and do things. But you have to, it's mostly, I think that the hive mind

might be just a synergistic multiple minds forming one because they do act differently. So from there, let's dive into kind of where this all falls to crap. And yeah, so about 250 years, which is a long time. So 250 years

post McCrick. We are now, where a bad in the 13th crusade has now begun. It's full swing. The Tao uprising is full swing. Drew Kari are fully going on. I know Brad made it. I'm trying to be nicer about Tao. They're also, by the way, in the Eastern Fringe, we'll get to the story with them.

Not that much longer. But I don't know where the Eastern fringe just explodes. But differently, the first time it was going quiet. Now it's worker rebellions. The Imperium doesn't know how to respond. of this because they've had cultist rebellions and stuff. They haven't, they're not ready for jeans stealing rebellions. So they don't know the difference in how to do something about these.

Well, yeah, and this story is actually really cool because it dives really into that problem. So you get this massive, like you're getting the worker protests, terrorism, all this stuff is occurring out in the Eastern French. And of course, the Imperium that is an astronomer like, hey, what the hell is going on? And the local authorities come back with, well, they're pushing back. It's because of the Imperium. It's because, well, there's too many soldiers here. It's making our citizens uncomfortable.

So they're revolting. You need to take the soldiers out of here. To which, you know, they say, don't worry, we'll police ourselves. We're not saying get rid of the Arbytes, our people. The people already corrupted by the jeans deal. Yeah, exactly. They'll send it over. So the, but here's what's funny.

the Inquisition then sends people out there, and they're like, we don't trust you. So they start searching for, to Brad's point, cultists, where is the cult? Where are the cult? And as we said when we talked about Jesus or cult, these guys can pass the test of imperial citizen real well. You get there, and they love the Imperium. And also, they're not, they're not chaos tainted. They're not picking up on this. Yes.

Yeah, you put, you put, like, the sanctioned psychers to search for. Right, but they're searching for the wrong thing. Yeah, nothing there. We're fine. And also, KAS cultists typically tend to be large groups led by people in high profile. Yep. Governors, you know, jeans dealers do not do that. They want the foreman of third shift.

Exactly. And so the main area of this is a planet called ICAR 4. And ICAR 4 many years, of course, it's genius. We're talking probably 100 plus years before. Exactly. They do generations. Yeah, a group called the Brotherhood appears. This is one of my favorite stories of all the genealogy corruption.

I think it really tells how the genealory corruptions work. The Brotherhood comes out of nowhere, and they're to start talking about how much they love the emperor, and they're worshipping the day the emperor will come back to mankind in mortal form. And of course... Wrong emperor. Yeah, but the Ecclesiarchy are like, run over there, like, we're going to stamp out these heretics,

but these guys are building these beautiful, incredible chapels. And it is images of the emperor. There is no, as president, there's no chaos corruption anywhere. It's just these guys really love the emperor. And of course, the Ecclesiarchy is like, well, I guess they can hang out. So you guys are welcome to stay.

Go ahead and keep on building. And the adept of the astronomer saying, well, everything the brotherhood's in charge of exceeds quota for production. Oh, yeah. When Gene Steelers, before Gene Steeler's, we've talked about this before, before Gene Steeler corrupted worlds, Volt is probably when they're at their most productive.

They're the best planet for the Imperial. Oh, putting up giant, exceeds expectations on all reviews. Oh, yeah. But then eventually the Brotherhood turns violent. Whoa, whoa, whoa. It turns violent means like, oh, that guy was Queensberry Rules. I want to fight you. No, the planet erupts.

Like, now. Anyone not a member of the Brotherhood is killed by Brotherhood members. also, they go back a little bit, because it's not a, John, make yourself do this Tuesday night, and he calls back and says, Brad, you tell Billy that he needs to do this. No, they're psychically connected. Yeah, everyone acts at once. It's a, when it's go time, it's go time, period. And what happened, I do like the story again, because remember, at this, up till this moment,

the Imperium is not aware of genius dealers. Oh, they don't even know they exist. They may have had... No, they know they're... You mean that stuff that we were shooting on Space Hulks? But there's no content of Gene Sler-Cult does not exist until this moment. Because during the revolt, there's an inquisitor whose name I don't remember. It may actually have been written written down.

I do want to roll back a little bit because as usual, this is the Imperium's own fault. They did have Gene Stilers before because Gene Stalers would kill ranking members of armed forces, but they were written as demonic possessions at the time. Oh, I didn't know that. That's the origin. The origin. It wasn't always, but that's what they thought it was. But back to the Brotherhood and Rebellion,

an inquisitor is there on planet watching these hordes of men attack and kill each other, and he sees something. And what he sees is a pure string gene stealer, directing them around. And he, and this video, he has video of this of, hey, there's an alien directing humans in this invasion.

And clearly humans. We have a much bigger problem than we thought. So he calls in. Luckily, the ultramarines are not far away. Which I don't know what the ultramarines do, but apparently they have like the bat signal for the galaxy. Yeah. There is nearby.

And oh, yeah, I forgot about this story. Anyway, so Calgar is notified. it's Tyrannids and he just goes, nah, he sends everyone there. This story is so dumb and so cool at the same time. Well, no, this story is so cool and then it just, we're going to bring back the whole piece of Terminators in lore. I know, but it's just, yes. They go full anime, though.

It's a little anime. It's a little. It's 100% anime. Fair enough. 20 dudes and Calgar show up on the planet, which, by the way, is a planet of billions. Well, they show up on the giant temple they built for the emperor, which in really clever writing, is actually a facade that sits above a subterranean complex.

Because as we said before, most of the genes that are cult members can't be seen by mankind because they'll pick them up as Zenos instantly. So you've got probably billions of them below the core, but for the story, it's not that many. And 20 dudes showed up on the planet. and started chewing bubble gum. It's 20 dudes in Terminator armor. And Mardius Calgar. And Mardius Calgar.

And Mardius Calgar teleport down. They wreck the entire temple, mostly with a one, one terminator. With a heavy flavor. One. With unending fuel, we'll continue. It's, it's, honestly. He kills like 20,000 people himself. Yeah.

They end up. That is, by the way, read that story. that's not, I'm probably incorrect, but it's not that incorrect. Yeah, you're not that far off. And so ends, they, of course. Because he was murdering down the, yeah, he's into the temple. It's fine. He fights in the temple, kills everyone in the temple,

finds, like, the secret passageway, goes to the secret passageway, and just keeps murdering their way down until the Patriarch shows up, and they kill the Patriarch. Yep. Which then does, because of signaps, it's all the G-Stoy cult members are now. The back about this, the Patriarch, has a psychic connection to everyone in the jeans dealer cult. Yeah.

And also, and it's a, he basically overrides your. He's complete control. Right. But it's, but it's, he fixes your, your jeans. He actually changes you. Again, gene stealers, they change your genetic makeup so that you are, whether you want to be or not, 100% loyal. Yeah.

Do whatever he says. And so with him gone, now what you do have is a planet full of just rebels. who don't even know where they are at this moment. And the Imperium mops, cleans up all the news. And so I like to tell you, because if you think it from a timing standpoint, they come in, they do the fight, they kill the Patriarch. Now they're just cleaning up and they're going, okay, well, whatever that was. The 20 Terminators also go boss mode, because they effectively go,

they video game in and go level by level killing, yes. Yeah, again, 20 Terminators. Yeah, 20. But that's what I said. I go, 20K might be a low number on that. Yeah. Because they went, that's where the main force was. They went straight down.

Well, I, one little spoiler, spoiler alert, they didn't kill all of them. Well, no. They killed everybody in that temple. Everyone was the temple. And everyone below the temple, but there was some other stuff going on, which was to do one second. You have to treat it like at the end of aliens, the only way to be sure. And a new kid from orbit. After celebrating the victory, a couple years later,

it's all worthless. The astrapads all of a sudden start dying or freaking out because the shadow of the warp begins to come up around. But one of my favorite units, Tyrannic War veterans know better. Yes. So remember, the ultramarines are already here. What's crazy, though, is that whereas five-fleet behemoth, which was the first fleet, hit, you know, the Ultramar system.

and, you know, got through a few planets here and there. Cracken is a thousand light year wide. They also, Cracken doesn't tendril as much as the other ones. Crackens coming into the galaxy at a size no one's ever seen. Luckily, and I say luckily, because GW likes to write this thing, it just decides to target two things. Again, bad news. Yeah, just two things.

Also, you could have grown so much larger if you would have just not gone after these targets. And you could argue that the first target they go is ICORC for, which is because the Genesler cult were there, they were being drawn to it. As we said earlier, the Ultramarians wiped out the Genius to their cult, but not really. Yeah, they killed the genes to their cult, but they forgot to kill the Gene Steelers. Well, the Ternans, as well as the StarCraft Horn, has the ability to burn. Yeah. And so they don't realize this, but as this hive fleet cracking comes into orbit around I-Corps 4, tens of thousands of genes there's just come out of the planet. Well, it's a big deal because they start learning that you, all of these planets can be a trap all the time. Yeah. And that's a big deal. We're going to go into this a little bit more. But moving forward, this is one of the biggest things that if you're on a planet and you think nothing's going on, it could be, because, Tiernins are able to stay, one of the, they, it doesn't come into the game, obviously,

but one of the biggest things about Tyrannins is they can just lay dormant for who knows amount of time. Yeah, I mean, it's maybe not Necron level sleep, but it's not that far. I mean, they really are. Maybe it's seen as the space marines have, where they can cocoon themselves. Unless they get poison, of course. Unless they get poison. Well, the tyrantids wouldn't get poison.

They've got organs that prevent bats. Screw you. God damn it. It makes me more enrage the more we talk about it. Because it's just objectively hilarious. As the Hyde Fleet moves into orbit, the genius

stories pop out out of the ground. Luckily, because of McCraig, Calgar knows at this stage what works and what doesn't work against Tyrannids, and he has fortified his positions with what does work. Spoiler, what works?

fire and volume and all the bullets. Don't need, don't need big shit yet. Yeah, just rip. And it works for a period of time. Again, Calgar, epic hero, also wildly too pragmatic. Yeah.

I mean, he's, let's name it. Calgar's lawful neutral at best. Yeah. I mean, he's very lawful. You're right. 100% lawful. And he is. He's not lawful good.

Al-Lah, I'm telling you. Calgar, again, to help stop the crisis, it worked earlier. In the first Tehranic War, it's going to work in the second Tehranic War. Calgar begins just sacrificing planets as they're moving towards I-Corps to try and pull this fleet down. He's scorched earthy shit. But once they get to I-Corps, Calgar is ready to party. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is, again, he's epic hero, pragmatic, not a bad dude, but a very good.

But a very, I'm willing, I'm willing to sacrifice you for the greater good. So as a Tyrannid fleet is fighting its way through, landing on I-Corps and fighting the space marines are just hammering the planet. And this time, the difference was, I think part of this is that I-Corps is not part of Ultramar. So Calgar doesn't really care about blowing up the thousand-year-old temple or whatever it is because, and it's not my planet. And I need the tyrant, it's dead. So he's waging a much more like Russians World War II style of scorched earth against the tyrantids that just, and it is just in this, in the, in the reading of this, he does set off. If you have a reactor of any short whatsoever, it's probably rigged to blow. I'm just, it's just saying.

It's, it's, the writing here, it's, the storytelling here is going to be a little bit tough and about to flip, fix it in a second. But they win. the second tyrannic war is actually a success. The Calgar does at ICAR 4 by effectively turn the planet into a husk, defeat High Fleet Cracken. Also, kind of like, let's back that up because victory and the people that were from ICAR 4 were like, hey man, this place is a parking lot. I don't think there was any people who were from ICOR 4. That's true. There probably was one guy that's just super bummed.

Well, he pointed out his mouth shut. He looked around. It was like there's a bunch of ultramarines walking around going. No, I like it more like this, guys. This is actually a better set of it. They high-fived and we went, victory for us. Yeah, exactly. No, we're good here.

But you might ask yourself, well, how does a thousand light-year-wide fleet just die to ultramarines? You should probably not talk about that because it makes no sense. Well, yeah, it's starting to get worse now. We'll be right back after a quick break. there actually was a second part of the fleet. Effectively, High Fleet Cracken decided after being a thousand light years wide to just make two very pinpoint maneuvers on two specific worlds and attack with full force. So, I'm going to give this a little prop because the attack makes no sense at the same time as the other.

However, Eldar have to be just delicious. Yeah, so let's try to keep this under 45 minutes, Brad. Fine. Because we're about to talk about Eldha. Craft World Iand, which is one of my favorites. I know. I know what we're stepping into here. All right.

So, a real quick thing. We haven't done Eldar yet. So let's do a quick disclaimer on what a craft world is. It is a flying planet. I mean, is the easiest way to describe it. But flying planet would undersell it. It is a flying battle planet. Yes.

And it is equipped with, of course, everything that you'd have from a planet. It's kind of full ecosystem, basically. And we say a craft world. A craft world is not a world that the Eldar have labeled as their own. A craft world is mobile. Yeah. I mean, not that mobile. I mean, they're not.

I mean, it's still traveling in FTL. It is. But it's not like, you know, I'm just saying. Yeah, it's not doing evasive maneuvers. Yeah. If you want to invade a craft world, you can just go, I'm going to go in this general direction. They don't exactly pivot fast. So it is a, I mean, it's where they live, but it's also fully ready to go.

It is a mobile world slash fortress. The Eldar were actually building these. These things predate the birth of Slanesh, but they were meant to be a way for they could. Their arcs. Yeah, it's an arc to go in. So they were meant to be able to fight. because the Eldar were making this at a time where the galaxy was not a safe place. Craftworlds are not undefensible.

They are incredibly. Also, Eldar also was not very nice to people. That's also true. If you're going to flee your home systems, you know we're probably going to meet people that we've done. We've been pretty shitting. Exactly. So the cool thing, though, does help the Eldor out here is that the tyrannid threat doesn't necessarily know that much about Eldar and the Eldor have the black libraries.

They actually do know a decent amount about Tyrannids at this stage. I think they know more than anybody knows at this point in time because they also, again, have Farsars who are precogs, who look into the future and there's a lot of them. And they get their to coalesce their data together and go, what is the best way we can do to handle this? They knew this was going to happen. Kind of. Dumbed Melentine?

Yes. Well, they didn't know specifics. That's the whole thing. I'm just saying. They knew some, but they, they. All of it is in the lore, and we'll cover us later, Eldar precog is it interesting. Yeah, well, they know everything sometimes,

and they know nothing. Yeah, that's the thing. But the other key thing is that whether we were talking about ICOR had a full G-Sler, Colton infestation, there are no gene-stler-culton infestations on Eldar. It's impossible. They're too psychically-powered.

It's also laughable. Exactly, they're two-suckily-powered. You're like, hey, this guy's, like, definitely, splinter pistol of the face. Yeah. And that was next. So the Ternan fleet emerges near the crap world and the Eldar fleet just goes to town. Eldar are light years faster with massive guns and are just picking this fleet apart.

However, the Ternans go, hey, these guys can work that, you know, screw it. I don't care. I'm still using all of our sports analogies. Yep. Eldar's working the jab like no one's business. Everyone knows boxing. You're fine. And they say, and Tarynans go, cool.

nice jab. How about I just bring everybody from the stance into gangpile you, which is their tactic. They just bring everyone. And that's what ends up happening is as this battle is commencing

the tyrannies, sorry, as this battle is commencing, the Eldar realized that they're racking up like a three, 400 to one kill ratio, but they're outnumbered

10,000 to one. Oh, so it just doesn't matter. Over time, they, realize this is where their precogs are pretty good. They realize quite quickly that they are going to lose this because they're just going to run out of people.

Also, it's a big deal because shadows on the warp is a way bigger deal for the Eldar because it's not cutting off communications. It's cutting off one of their main sources of damage. Yeah, this one actually also caused there was a problem here where it right in, when I was reading the codex, it was making the comment that the shadow and the warp disrupts. the ability of the Eldar to use the webways. And it doesn't explain how. And I'm going to be honest, I can't figure that one out completely.

It's a lot of things are supposedly just tied into. This is a big deal because they go, it's kind of like when you talk about, screw it, have you ever played any of the Star Wars games? When they talk about a Jedi losing his connection to the force becomes super shitty because he's so used to using it for everything. You know, if I grab a cup, I'm not going to walk over and get the cup. I'm just going to have the cup will fly over to me. Yeah.

Can you do that? I'm a psycher. You know what I mean? They do it with everything. They enter, I think they enter the web way by pinging this, pinging psychics to psychic power because they don't know any other way because I've, why would I ever do anything else? And maybe this is, we do have a lot of listeners cast who love Eldar. Tell me how that works. I spent like an hour trying to find it and then gave up moving on my day.

It's just when you basically have a, I'll go into it, though, because when you have a race that magic is part of everyday life, it's not these epic, you know, human psychers are, ah, we're, you're lighting bolts, you're doing all this stuff. Eldar is small things all the time every day. Your whole life is psyche powers. The guy that makes muffins is a psycher in Eldar. That's true. So what ends up happening, though, is that the Eldar realized they're going to lose.

But the Eldar also are not vicious. And their viewpoint is, all right, well, we're going to fight till the very last of us is here. And that's it. We're not even call for help. We're just not going to roll over because we're Eldar. They're also making wraith constructs like no one's business. Oh, they're throwing everything. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Wraith knights, wraith blades, wraith lords. We'll cover a yend in an entire case. Everybody that just died, is coming back with a pretty big vengeance now. Oh, you killed everybody I know? Cool. Give me a moment. I'm going to change into my new outfit.

And I'm going to tell you all about how I feel about that happening. This is called a force axe. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You killed everybody I know that I've known for a thousand years. I'm going to have something to say about that. Give me a second. As I ended know are on their back foot.

and the Tyrannid fleet's going to kill them. Prince Ariel puts on his monocle and rocks in, baby. Let's do it. All right. So, again, Captain Jack Sparles in. None of you can see the facial expression. I'm literally rubbing my temples. I'm joyous right now.

Brad's so happy. This story is a good one, but it's just they do it every freaking time. So there was... Prince Euro rides in with Corsairs, baby. Yeah, Prince Yeroyal. Uriel, which will cover another time, has been banished by Ayanden for making a pretty stupid move fighting some demons. Several times, by the way. Yeah, numerous times.

It wasn't like he made one mistake. He kind of did it a bunch. Ayen, so Uriel is just wandering the galaxy alone trying to redeem himself for his mistakes. And he amasses a huge... Well, that's where this whole story is stupid. So he's this, he is an outcast of Kraft World Ayendan. I mean, they did an entire anime on this. Yeah, he senses Iyandin is under its greatest threat since the birth of Sla-Nesh.

And he brings his fleet with him to go save them. Which is a bonkers big fleet. The fleet's larger than Ayendan's fleet. Yes. The guy who was an outcast had more ships and people than the craft world. He was outcast. Pirate fleet, John. Why are you not picking up on this?

Pirate fleet made up a... Corse. I get that, but Eldar don't replicate. It's like he literally left with more people than... Okay. He showed up with more people that were on. How do you banish someone who represents 70% of you? That's basically what this was.

That's Brad, by the way, is ear-to-ear grinning right now. None of you can see. He's so happy because he loves this story. And I just think it's hilarious. I'm about to drop some monocle love on you. He's so excited about Prince Uriel. by the way, is the only bad, from a rule standpoint,

is maybe the only shitty character. In the entire Eldon model line, he's the only one that sucks. But he used to be bad. When? What addition? Fifth? Fourth.

There it is. Yeah. You're used to. No, no, no. Actually, that's a lie. I think it might have been third. Yeah, you're used to creates a blackberry. Hold on.

I brought an insane clown posse with Prince Uriel to the 2001 Baltimore GT. Yeah. So, boom. He almost predates cell phones. All right. Anyway, that's when he was all. But effectively, Uriel does come back. He puts them beating on the tear.

He just wrecks them. Just completely just. The entire hive fleet in the orbit around Ayan and just ceases to exist. And Uriel is a badass. Uriel is, we talked about how genius a strategist Calgar is. Uriel is probably the greatest

space fighter, I don't the term you'd have for this. But as far as, He's a captain. He's an odd-arm. He's the best author. There is, yeah. No one fights in combat in space better than Prince Uriel.

In the galaxy. And again, they haven't had time to adapt this. Maybe the Tao. I'm kidding, obviously. They haven't had time to attempt this. Because Uriel is doing something that they haven't encountered yet. Yeah. Which is, he just keeps making passing, like, he just keeps making sweep attacks.

Yeah, it's really not that impressive. So he just goes, what if we just fly really, really fast and shoot all our guns at them and stay out of the rain? And then turn around and do it again. Yeah, it is. Actually, you know what your list it was? As we're saying, he did space invaders. That's what this was. He just right, I'm just going to keep going left to right, shooting all of the tyrants and get to like level 55 of space invader.

And then wait. But he does trash the tyrannins. He does. He kills off all the tyrannids. And this part does bother me because. If you, the beginning, now, to be fair, to UW, the story of the invasion by the Cracken invasion, it's not like it started in the third edition and then concluded in fourth edition. So all of this has written in its entirety in the past tense.

But effectively, if you read it, if I'm reading it in the codex, because as we've said here, I mostly read codexes, it starts off with the largest tyrannid invasion in history. It is unstoppably large. it is an impossible monumental task. And thanks to two battles, Cracken doesn't exist anymore. I can do this to people easily. Return of the Jedi.

They kill the emperor. You're like, don't we outnumber the rebels about 100 to 1 in ships? Yeah, but they killed the emperor. The emperor is dead. It's over, guys. They blew up the second death star.

We can kill them right now. They're right there. We outnumber them. Like, sorry, guys. It's the rules. We lost. That's the game. That's effectively what just happened here.

Like, we won these two battles, but we could just kill them, right? Like, no, guys, it's in the bylaws. We can't win if we lose these two. That being said, so now the second tyrannic war has concluded, and the galaxy is nowhere near at peace at this moment. We still have everything else going on. Fast forward about seven years, and it really goes nuts. the Kraken fleets start coming in from everywhere.

We also get the rejuvenation, as you talked to you said before. Yeah. We get a couple dead fleets that came back to life because you left them alone. And newsflash, if you go to an agro world, farmers with pitchforks don't do super well against Ternet invasions, even if they're small. So what's interesting from a writing standpoint, so we're about to get into some of the best stories the tyrant invasion. So after the defeat of Cracken at McCraig and Iynden, we get the emergence of High Fleet Leviathan. Now, we have other fleets at this point from Yormongers and Yormonger,

Kronos, they're all in the galaxy too. He were still on a Leviathan for the game. Yeah. And now we've said that's well because Leviathan's mildly large. This is only five years post the defeat of Cracken, which which just didn't get defeated though, because it's still has the mass. It's still there. It's just the biggest threat. The problem is the two largest tendrils were. They kicked it back, but it's still a giant fleet.

It is, and it isn't. To me, the problem is, the fleet actually is now splintered is the problems. The Cracken fleet now is splintering into other fleets. Sure. It's still a threat. Don't get me wrong. It's still a thousand like wide. It's a big fleet.

But it's not, it's just not pressing towards. We won. You're like, there's still a bunch of dudes outside with guns. There's still quadrillions of them. Shut up. Yeah. We won. I said, I declared we won.

Now we're going to dive into a Kripman. So as we said before, Kripman is the inquisitor for Tyrnits, basically. Kripman's entire purpose in this world is to kill Tarynx. That's what he likes to do. He notices that the southern part of the galaxy is now going dark. I'm waiting for John to lose his mind about South again, but continue. It's also a 3D space.

Bottom, lower. It's technically bottom, lower, severe, south, west. It's fine. I mean, it's just so dumb. It's also this piece of, like, how big are the freaking tear it is? We're talking about a hundred, is it a million light years between, like, like. That's what I said. They won two battles.

What the F? They splintered two tendrils. Nothing's done. Well, what I'm saying is more, like, we're getting to this point now. All right, let's do this, and I'll dive into it a second. So, Cretman sees just, like, oh, no, there's another tiered invasion. So what he does is, and I like this. He only burns out astropaths.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You act like he had Ted and Johnny came up. No, he's firing these guys out of cannons, basically. He's effectively, like, lashing astrophats closer to each other so he can make one hardcore message to pierce through that's a, The Shadow and the Wharf, which, by the way, he does do. He puts them in a carnival canon like clowns. But I just like the story because he's literally forcing these.

I mean, literally, I did Brad there. He's taking these astrapass and forcing them to shoot their brain through the warp. Oh, they make contact through the Shadow Wharf to the Astropaz and other side who are just screaming, help, help, burns both a mountain, but he learns quickly, oh, we have a problem over there. Yeah, those guys are super dead. And he does this a bunch, by the way. Oh, yeah, he has.

Cripman, like all good Inquisitors, gives zero Fs about astrophats. Yeah. I mean, he's just knocking these guys with bats. Like, he's doing whack-a-mole with astrapass. The issue that Cripon does discover, though, is that this is a tiered invasion that is now larger than any tiered invasion up to the state,

and two to three times closer to Terra than any invasion had ever been. To be foul? It's also learned from all the others. It's a big deal. Yeah. And so he then organizes defenses and says, we have to do something. This fleet will end. Leviathan is one of the, at the time, at this time, is the perfectly adapted fleet because it's not a specialized fleet.

It's not a chronos. It's not a behemots, not a yormonger. It's the, I've taken... It's massive. It's massive, but it also has taken all of the information from every other fight that's happened. Yeah. And they have every organism that the other fleets have created, effectively ready to go online in this fleet. What Kripman does is he realizes that the way it's coming into the galaxy,

is like the term they use is a maw. It's just, it's a jaw. There's a jaw that's further to less. Jeff and draw us further than right. Brad's got a point. I'm not using East and West anymore. I'm using left and right because it's equally accurate. And realizes that as this mall closes,

it'll just be a chunk of the galaxy. So he goes, we're going to go take out half this mall. And this story's cool as hell. He takes Astromilitarim, obviously, Imperial Navy, Ultramarines, Death Watch. Which is the right thing to take is they have anti-Zenos mojo. And they all go and just, and they do, they wreck a giant.

a chunk of this Leviathan invasion. They actually go on a huge winning spree. They wreck engagement after engagement. They get jimbing. I mean, we're talking 100 to nothing. Yeah. And they just wrecked their in. This effectively saves the galaxy because he takes this one chunk of the mall out.

So now it can't just collapse and eat a whole bottom section. It was a big thing because he was also trying to save the logistics of the imperial. You would have lost that section of the galaxy. and the ability to give ships, fleet, food, fuel, everything. Remember, the Imperium is a giant machine, but it's also a wildly specialized machine. It just says, I'm going to make this planet make wheels.

So if you lose all the wheels, you can still make tanks, but they don't go real far. Crittman, though, can only do this. The galaxy has too much war. The Imperium can't commit enough forces to do what he did on the left side of the Ma. But to all the ones. We still have a full chaos invasion. We still have Necrons.

We still have Drukari. Well, they're harassed. Technically, we still have Tao. What? What Kripman then has to do is he has to decide, well, how else can I fight this invasion? And he does something that's going to get him in a lot of trouble. he realizes that if you just starve the tyrantids, they can't grow. He did what Marnius Calgar had kind of done, and he takes it to an inquisition level.

Yes, he does exactly. Calgar was taking people away, blowing things up, blowing planets up at the end. How about if I just kill everyone? Yeah, except Cripman decides. Yeah, Cripman decides to do this at a scale no one's ever seen. He effectively takes every world with any semblance of life for... He kills trillions of people. Yeah, for like light years apart in front of a tyrant invasion, just kills.

And well, he just blows those planets up. He just orders exterminatus and all of them. Now, technically, what he ordered was the evacuation and destruction of the planet. Yeah, except for the fact that several of these planets, he went, you guys should leave and then blew them up. Yeah, his evacuation plan was. It's like everyone should, everyone should leave when. Oh, you didn't do it yet?

Well, anyway, we're here now. Boom time. Also, you only said that to the bridge, sir. Oh, they didn't hear it? Whatever. Exactly. This is recorded as Critman actually kills due to this order. More Imperials than...

Anyone else? Except for the Horace heresy. That was the last time this many imperial citizens died. We'll be right back after a quick blitz. So yeah, Crittman gets in a little bit of shit for this. And by a little bit of shit, he gets like stripped of title and all this stuff.

However, again, I like Cripman a lot. Critman, while... Like, Crippin a lot. He's cool, man.

I mean, I mean, not a cool dude. Yeah, fine. Well, his stories are good. Anyway, what Cripman does,

his last little act, though, is as he's about the basically being... Because, like, they stripped him of his title, but they didn't kill him. He wasn't arrested.

He was in charge. He was just no longer a Lord Inquisitor. I mean, he, in the stories, though, he still has his sigil of rank. Well, but it's a, yeah, you're right, it's a weird thing where he had a single of rank. He can just show up and go. Yeah, but at the same time, he technically, but he can't call Exterminatus anymore. So what they're really doing? They were like, all right, we're not going to let you just white planets anymore.

I know, but he also kind of, continue on. There's a weird thing because he still kind of has all this stuff, and unless you double-checked. him, he can kind of just keep doing whatever the hell he wants to do. Kripman, though, does, I find. If we're going to be honest, why do I like Kripman? Because this last little thing he does, I think is awesome. Kripman realizes that could, aside from just blowing up every planet in front of the Dyrnids, what if I just put an impossible force in front of them that didn't cost a single

imperial life? Ork, ork, or, or something a good idea. And what he does is he just, he finds a hybrid. Hive ship. How he does this, no one's really sure, but he finds one. And he drags it near an orc colony. The York's attack. The Hive ship wakes up. The hive ship sends out a distress call, and he begins a perpetual motion machine of death. And the orcs go, cool, we'll fight you. And then the tier did make orc fighting, are abominations, basically. Well, because that's why this battle gets amazing because effectively this Tyrannid hive ship sends out a call saying, hey, because

orcs, while they are soulless and not really useful for demons, they are organic matter. So they are consumable by the tyranids. And as an orc fights, more orcs appear. So you've got now almost an infinite source of organic matter is coming into a galaxy. The tyranids just turn and go right there. And now you're not. you've got this. And unfortunately, when you do that, orcs go, oh, cool. More of the orcs.

And so you've got this kind of, this really great battle happening where we've got orcs or, I mean, orcs basically teleport in. We don't know how, because we definitely how it works appear, but the bigger the battle, the more orcs.

All you're going to do is call a walk. Yeah, we are now, this actually isn't even an official walk yet, which is what's interesting about it. That is true. I mean, it's, we know, it's a baby log.

Yeah, it's a walk. It's not an official log yet. The orcs are just hammering into this area and the tyranids are following in because for the tyranids, this might be the most valuable asset they've encountered so far because the amount of biomass that's going to be available from killing all these orcs. I will say there's a little bit of a danger here. And Crittman does know it. If the tyranids are victorious, they will have so much.

They'll have two things. One, so much biomass that we actually... Oh, they'll just make new fleets. Yeah. And also, they're going to make new tyranids out of the orc DNA. And you don't want that. Yeah. And I want to take a side note here.

Some of that biomass is technically tyrannid. It'll be squig. So I like the idea of the tyrantids consuming orangutanin scu and squig off to bring it back to being a tyrannid. It's like, guys, Bronco riding. Yeah. I can ride that. Before we get into what is probably the greatest story of the tyrannid invasion, cough, cough. suck at blood angels.

There is one more I want to talk about, which is the doom of Malinty. Holy shit. This is such a great model with a great effect. Great effect. This entire story, by the way, is like three paragraphs in the history of the lore.

But it's awesome. So remember earlier when Iyanden was under, was under assault from the tyrannids and they fought back and won. Yeah, that didn't happen every time. I mean, if a guy's name is, the doom of

Enter name. They probably, the word after doom of probably didn't do well. If you play 40K, you're probably aware of the different craft worlds and you've never heard of the craft world malentai. That's because that craft world doesn't exist anymore. This craft world

was under assault by, it wasn't even a very large. It's a splenify. It was a name of the Spinafee. It wasn't even a big one. The Tehran, the Eldar fought back, did a good job. Actually blew up the hive. I was saying, they're actually, actually wrecked them.

Yeah. But the hive ship dropped some spores onto the planet. One of the end. The challenge Eldar have is they kind of, sometimes they're almost too bureaucratic. And they began attacking and killing the things that they view were most dangerous to them. Not necessarily understanding all the different dangers. One such. Also, as always, pretty overconfident.

Yeah, they didn't recognize that there was a single zoon throat that wasn't even attacking anything, which is kind of moving across the landscape. Eating that. Well, it was, it was, it was just, but it wasn't doing the same stuff as like the genius tilleries and the carn effects. They're focusing on them. Right. But it was literally walking around feeding off psychic energy, which is, yes, everywhere on a

craft row. Yeah. And somehow, despite all the farseers, they couldn't figure what was about to happen here, so they didn't see that far into this sear. The doom of Malentai Zoanthrope reached. Something you don't really want it to reach, which is the Infinity Circuit, which is where all of the Tyrannid souls are stored. Eldar souls, thank you. This is where all of the Eldar souls are stored.

We have no idea what happened when it got there other than it got there and that craft world doesn't exist anymore. That's the end of the story. I'm saying the doom of Malentai probably had to spend a decent amount of time leveling up and choosing its new skills and feats. Yeah. It, that's, the entire story is this zoanthrope reached the infinity circuit and ended the craft. Yeah, the craft world was found, I think, like a hundred years later. It's a husk. Just a husk and floating with some records of this happening, but nothing post it reaching the infinity circuit.

There is another story that we should cover that I'm going to do very, very quickly. Yes, there was a moment where the Tao encountered the tyrann. We're going to talk about that. No, we're doing it real quick because I'm going to cover it. I was going to write it in here. I actually don't want to shit on the towel that hard. We're going to cover that in the towel cast. And the reason why is because what the towel did in trying to contact and be cool to the tyranids.

They're trying to negotiate. But it makes sense when you understand the entirety of the towel lore. If you don't do the whole towel lore, it just makes them sound like complete morons. Was it a stupid move? Yes. but if you want to send towel or it actually made some sense. Oh, yeah, because it does follow their rules of contact. Yeah, the rules of contact.

They're seeing it. They didn't understand how dangerous they were. So I don't, that's why people are going to be like, oh, is John going to shit on the towel for 30 minutes in this cast? And like, no. Another cast. Yeah, we'll save it for a towel cast where I can probably do some more stuff. But it just, it's honestly, that would be, that's, that's punching down. So that's why I'm not going to buy, I don't punch down.

If you're not going to do that, can we talk about. the second biggest brawl in 40K outside of the horse heresy? Are we talking about a certain devastation of ball? Yeah, it's actually one of the best endings of any story that they've done. But it's also a big... Oh, this is cool as shit. This starts out as a battle and then becomes a Donnybrook and then becomes a, oh shit, who the hell is even here?

Yeah. Also, who's even fighting who? Yeah, and also who's not here is actually. Yeah, kind of, yeah. It's nuts. So Leviathan tendrils are coming into the, into the galaxy. You know, as we said, we've got,

some of them are fighting orcs now. Some of them got killed off by Kripman, but there still are large tendrils. And one of them just sets a B-line for the home world of the Blood Angels ball. Which is pretty awesome, by the way, because Dante lights up the flames of Gondor. Oh, yeah.

And everyone shows up. And this is recorded as the largest, tendril that they've ever seen in imperial history and it's going right towards ball. Yeah. And obviously sanguaneous is dead. No spoiler right there. We've covered it a bunch of times. The head of the Blood Angels now is Commander Dante.

And Bedante says, I need every successor chapter back and they all every single one of the answers. He puts out the call. I'm saying it's pretty awesome because some of these are like far every single drops

everything they're doing and runs up. Some of these guys are not entirely welcome in the Imperium. Correct. Flesh terrors are, you know, like. There's a bunch of sketch guys. There's somebody, like, we'll cover these guys in the cast. But Blood Angels has some successor chappers that they're so close to chaos that they. I mean, let's name a couple of them.

Flesh terrors, absolvers, blood drinkers. Yeah, these guys are not exactly like, oh, the blood drinkers are here. Cool. Let's get a dinner party. Are we just dead now? Like, we're dead, aren't we? Yeah, we're all dead, right? But they call all of them in.

We're talking, this is the largest planetary defense since Terra was defended against Horace. Besides, we won't talk about the space walls. But besides Space Wolfs, we haven't seen a Legion together. Yeah, but the Space Wolf's so tricky because this is actually getting more impressive than the Spacewools because the Space Wholes didn't do the second founding. Well, we'll go into that way. Yeah, okay, fine, but officially, is what I'm saying. Whereas the Blood Angels did.

And so the Blood Angels calling you, the Blood Angels coming in and saying, almost in pure violation of Gilliman. 100%. Oh, hey. They reassembled the Legion. Remember, we splintered? No. Also, the fact that they made so many different successor chapters and then reassembled

means we're bigger than the original Legion was. This is, I mean, your setup. And this is not even including all of the guardsmen, trillions more of guardsmen. entire fleets of the Imperial Navy. Let's pause it again. We've talked about it. We've touched on it, but it's been a long time in episodes-wise.

Please, yeah. Space Marines don't just show up with 10 other space marines. Space Marines show up with space marines and the 2 million guardsmen, tanks, fleets, support staff. They're showing up with a bunch of guys. It's not, you know, Dante and his bro. you're showing up with millions of billions of guardsmen. And not only that, they even armed the populace. So they turned ball into maybe the most defended planet in the galaxy.

Yeah. I mean, actually, I would argue, and this is a funny foreshadow into here, it's better defended than Cadia. At the time, because there's more. Yeah, it's better defended than Cadia, which is really important. Well, it's a big deal because you have about the same amount of guardsmen. And then you add a metric ton of Marines. Also, Marines not knowing for being chill guys. Yeah, yeah.

We have some of the most, we'll go a second most aggressive Marines, but it could be first most aggressive depending on whether you've painted your Marine Legion red or bluish. I'm not going to get in the middle of a Blood Angel space wall fight here between fans. So this, also they know about the tyrannids at this point. So we're aware of what's coming, all the details. And Dante is just ready to go. Now, the sad part about this is Dante, despite all this, you know, what do you call it, reinforcement, also recognized this could be the end of the blood angels.

So one of the last things he does before the shadow of the warp overtakes them, and the high fleet arrives is he takes all the genes seat from the planet and ships it off world back towards Terra. I think it was the Terra. Yeah, but he also took a bunch of their awesome shit. Well, yeah, and their artifacts, everything. He basically was saying, we may all die here, but I'm going to make it so that we can rise again. Should we not succeed? Yeah.

Again, these stories, I am actually, I have no reason not to like Blood Angels. I've never been a huge fan of Blood Angels, but I love their lore. I just, I think they're cool. He just says that... And they're badass. And the thing is, he says, I'm going to fight until the very end, but also, even I have no idea

how we're going to win this. This is hopeless odds. It's just, like, there's... Vegas won't take a bet on this fight. Yeah, and I'll be honest, it doesn't go well. I mean, they come in, don't get... There's a reason why it's called

the devastation ball. It doesn't go well. I mean, they were outnumbered hundreds or thousands to won by this tyranny fleet. And when I say, thousand. I'm not saying a thousand homogons to one space marine Terminator armor, which we've covered in the lore.

Terminator armor is fine. We're talking probably a hundred Carnifexes. It's a big deal on this because, again, I want to go into the fact that Leviathan has all of the knowledge of all the other fleets and incursions. They are ready to fight the Imperium

with perfectly adapted organisms to fight against Marines, to fight against tanks. They have everything they need to fight against everything the Imperiums ever put forward to them. Yeah, and it goes, don't be wrong, the Blaineers put up on hell of a fight. I mean, wave after wave are beaten back.

Millions of Tyrannids are lying dead almost instantly. But there's just too many. The High Feet Leviathan actually redeploys the Swarm Lord, which is, again, the Swarm Lord, man, that model is not that good in the tabletop. No, but in the lore, he is. He's a tactical genius. Yeah, in the lower, he's Gilleman. I mean, he's actually better than Gilleman, actually.

He's maybe one of the best tactics. He, well, the biggest thing about it is like he because he has a dick. Whatever. Maybe he hits people with it. But one of the biggest things about it is his, when he's there, he, because the minds are so complex, he's actually using every organism around him as one of his appendages, basically. You're fighting a guy that's also using. using his 47,000 other arms is effectively how he fights.

And eventually this, just like we were talking with Allendon, they are getting, they just cannot maintain a kill ratio that doesn't mathematically end with the blood angels all dying. Because there's just too many. Well, the problem is, is one of the best things about the Terrans, you go, oh, they just keep using more people. Yes, but why that's such a. great tactic is once you touch all the guns. And in the game, I mean, think about it. In the game

of 40K, once you start touching everybody's guns, the only thing you can fight in is the stuff that's right next to you, which means that once I grab all the heavy weapons, the guns, the tanks, the whatever, you no longer can fire at the next waves, which is what you, which is what you were doing to keep away from. Once I stop you from stopping all the new waves, you can only fight. punching guys next to you. A flesh terror holding a chain sword kills a lot of tyrannists. Right. But the problem is that the demolishers aren't shooting anymore.

The predators are, the predators are shooting right in front of them instead of a quarter mile down. They can shoot in the combat. We're not in the ninth edition predator. Yeah. What I'm saying. It's a big thing on that is you're no longer dealing with the stuff that's out coming to you. You're only dealing with the stuff that's immediately touching you. Now, as this is all going on, this is mean we didn't mention, and this is, it is on purpose.

The invasion of Ball begins and occurs in 999 of M41. Why does that matter? Well, we're also, this is 999 of M41 is the last year of Baden's 13th Crusade. Probably a coincidence. Yeah. So as Ball is turning and trying to get wrecked by the Tyrannids is the exact same. same moment that the will of eternity begins falling from the sky on Kadia. Yeah, he's dropping the people's elbow on him right this second.

And Kedia explodes and all the necks on all the pylons are broken. And the eye of terror goes from an eye of terror to the rift. Which cuts the galaxy in half. And that rift goes pretty close to ball. Why am I mentioning this? because we're going back a few episodes to our old buddy. A few?

Yeah. I honestly, I don't know when this was. Cabanda. To Cabanda. Cabanda, for those who forgot, is the bloodthurster who defeated Sanguineas. And then got his ass right. By Sanguidious.

Sorry, he wanted a split decision victory versus Sanguinus. And then Sanguinus took him over. First round knocked out. Yeah. And he took him over the walls. of Tara and broke his back while talking shit to everyone. Yes.

And threw him down. So, Cabanda got a bit of a grudge. Yeah, he's not super excited about the blood angels. And so, but he vowed after the last time saying, I did the crap out of him. I forgot that this is the reason he's here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He vowed. Nobody kills blood angels, but me. I am going to kill the blood angels. I am going to destroy this Legion. And so as the Tyrannid fleet is invading and wrecking ball, He is stuck in the warp watching his, whatever you want to call it, his purpose in the world disappear because the Blay Angels are getting wrecked by this fleet. And then a door opens right in front of him, basically, and he goes, no. Yeah.

Boom. This is my, because remember, Kabanda at this moment, now I can get in there. But he is a, he's maybe one of the top bloodthursers of all of corn. Corn is not the god of wantless slaughter. He is the god of combat. So Cabanda decides, yes, I could go, I could go jump ahead of the tyranids and kill off the rest of the blay angels. Nope. But that's not what I vowed.

I am going to take the belay angels at their full strength and destroy them. So what happens? Well, a giant warp storm erupts above ball. And billions or more. Yeah, of bloodletters, blood crushers, and blood thursher, attack the tyrannids. Yeah, this is, this is a full W-W-E kind of stuff going on. I cannot tell you how much I love this story about the idea of, like, you're on a planet

and you're fighting the tyrannids, and you're on your back foot, your buddies are dying, and you look up and a warp storm above you opens. Remember, this is one of my favorite things about corn is they don't, physics don't bother them. They blow the brass, the horns. Yeah, the blast horns. And as you look up, think of you're a blood angel, you're fighting a tyrannid, and you look up and bloodthirsters start falling from the sky. So this really can't get any worse. They were on the moon.

Yeah. It can't get any worse. And then the bloodthusters just kill all of the tyrannids that you were fighting and then leave and then disappear. So you're just sitting there. And there's a lot of movie references you can make here. But you're sitting there standing around holding your chain sores, probably still dripping with tyrannid blood. I mean, the bloodthirsty just killed the tyrannia.

This does happen. You are selling it short again. You know, the boys in blue did show up again. Well, yeah, I know that. I mean, they show up afterwards. No, that's after. What I'm saying is some, you know, there's a flesh tears sitting there. And he just, while fighting a tyrannid, a bloodthirster appears, kills a tyrannid.

Basically gives you the fingers. and just runs somewhere else. And he just sit there holding the chain sword like, all right, well, let's get ready to fight the bloodthirsters. You have to. And then they all leave. You have to think to yourself, did I die and I'm just dreaming this? It just happened.

And then, of course, to Brad's point where my part of this that every blood angel player hates is that this all ends, all the demons disappear, but there still are some tyrannids left. and as the Blood Angels get ready to go kill off the rest of the Blood Angels, the Ultramarines show up and say, Hey, guys, don't worry, we got this. Ultramarines kill steel like a motherfucker. Oh, yeah. You've ever played any MMRPG,

the Ultra Rain showed up when the boss is at 1% and killed it and took the lute. All the loot and all the experience. We did it. High five. There's high five in the Blas Angel. I don't want to high five you back. Go away.

We're not bumping it. No, go away. Now, what I do like, though, is that one of the story I forgot to mention I love is, after all of them, the demons disappear, there are pyramids of tyrannid skulls. Kabanda. That Kabanda left with his, basically, he basically signed the planet. Yes. With Tyrannish skills.

Yeah. He did like a concert thing where it's lighting up being, exactly going, yeah. Cabanda. Yeah. He wrote Kabanda. Code Cabanda in Tyrannid skulls on ball, which is just so bad ass. But he doesn't just write it.

He writes, it's a pyramid size. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's pyramids. Yeah. Of skulls. It's fantastic. It's a great story. And since then, the Bladows have now been rebuilding their legions so they can,

so Cabanda can come back. Jumping quickly just to kind of catch everyone up to where we are now in modern 40K. So the latest book. High Fleet Leviathan seems to have recouped, and it's coming back with a... It was so big that I don't think it ever was anywhere. Yeah. And also, the thing is, is that this is the Imperium's fault, but not their fault. The Imperium's just so big that if you leave a high fleet with anybody, I'm sorry,

but so many worlds are effectively undefended, even if they are, and you can just, biomass, you can just make a new fleet. Well, and there seems to be a new fleet that's been coming in from the top and left, which is very close to Terra. And as this one's been ripping through, now a rather key and important person in the Imperium has taken notice. And is Trajan Valoris, who's the head of the custodian guard. Yeah, he's not super excited about this. Yeah, and when the head of the custodian guard decides we're going to do something, all that bureaucracy thing in that we were going to be... Yeah, those guys get shit done.

It's over quickly when Trajan says, we're doing... this, there's no one like, well, you didn't fill out the full, oh, my good. I mean, he also has a double lord status. That's why he's a double lord of terror. So that does help. But this is still a situation. He has now built, and we're going to cover this more when we do custodes. He's actually now built his own version of Death Watch that consists of custodes, sisters of

battle, sisters of silence, space marines, knights, and all, and other forces of the Imperium, whose entire purpose is kill all the tyrannids that are near Terra. Yep. Gilliman, who now is alive again, don't worry, we're going to cover that later, who's now alive again, has also now taken the primaris and is hurtling primaris Marines into this thing. Right now, in the current book, this will change, this will change. In the current book, Friah Nexus is no next. Yeah, Tyrannids are the greatest threat to the galaxy.

and Gileman is for the next two weeks. Well, we don't know, though. The problem is Prionix does, there's no book with Prion X. True. It's a mission. It's a mission thing. My guess is it'll be 11th edition,

we'll make something else up, or which will be a Baden's 14th crusade, some new Silent King thing will not be the Tao. But the Tarnets are wildly the problem. Yeah. And the thing is, is that I get my cheat together, because I don't want to just throw it out there.

But my opinion is, the Imperium has to stamp out full scorched earth version of killing the nids. Nids are never going to be gone because you can't find all of them. Well, Nids are orcs. It's the same thing as orcs. You'll never wipe them out completely, but you need to stop them before they get momentum.

That's kind of where. Or it's just out. Yeah. Because if they get too much biomass, Leviathan's too big, all of these are just, and we've seen it in the, in the fleets coming back from the dead, basically.

Yeah. It is such a huge deal. They've done, I don't think they fought anybody worse than Tierniz. Tiernids always are fighting when they want to fight. Yeah, the problem of the Tyrannets is they're just so like automaton in the way that they fight. They're just coming for you. There's no strategy to them. Sure, but we've never, we don't go to them.

We're starting to. Well, here's the irony. Now that you said something there and it made me realize the irony, the irony of all this is this, the Imperium is built to, do zino side. Their purpose is every and all xenos must be killed from the galaxy. The only way to stop tyranids is to kill every last one of them. But there are more tyrannids than the Imperium has bullets. Yeah.

And the thing is, is that they, again, we always were starting to, between Trajan and Gilliman, they're starting to take the fight to them. But we haven't went to the tyrannets. Yeah. We've always got ready for the tyrannists. for the tune is to come to us, we stance up. And we try to counter attack. And we, yeah.

My hope, it's a weird thing. My hope is that this is hardcore fanboy stuff here. But I'm hoping that we kind of see a change in the lore where all the bureaucracy of the Imperium starts to go away because we're seeing this now, where Trajan is cutting, it's cutting the red tape. And maybe we start seeing some successes. And the Imperium's able to actually just de-red tape themselves and start to actually invade and kill.

I'm going to end this cast on a making John anger. You know who is really going to cut through the red tape? Gelleman. Leman Russ. No. The Great Wolf. No. I know why you're saying it and it's exciting,

but I'm just going with it'll be Gelleman. You know why? Who wrote the red tape? True. It's like, Lehman Russ is there like, there's too much red tape, but Lehman would get stuck in the red tape. That's what he would do.

Gilliman's like, I own a factory that makes red tape. Yeah, Gilman just goes, I'm just going to delete the red tape. Lehman, why are you punching the red tape? Because remember Lehman Russ is Zoolander. Tactical genius. The files are in the computer. Like, Lehman Russ would actually believe the red tape is a real thing

and would try and find the planet that makes red tape and attack that planet. Now, that would be a fight that I'd like to read about. That would be a least... The space wolves invade the planet that makes red tape. Yeah, and the people are making the red tape. Like, it's for parades. Why are you mad?

Boom. Yeah. Anyway, we hope you guys have enjoyed this coverage. This was actually a very fun one to research and write about. So our love of tyrannids, well, he's mine. Brad likes them. I actually do like the tyrannids. However, next week we're going to take a turn,

and we're going to focus on the Imperial Guard. I don't think you guys know how fun the Imperial Guard can be from a lore perspective. They're awesome. I've never been, you like them as in the game. In the game, I'm like, meh about playing them. But as far as- I like playing them, it's just, it's really easy to run an artillery line.

And so if you just want to go to an event and drink and not have to do very much, you just put a bunch of artillery up and say, yeah, I'm shooting that thing that I can't see. But like when you look at the, there's probably more lore than anyone out. I mean, maybe space brains. I'm back and forth.

There's so much lore. Okay, listen, there's more, it's events where your sources are. There's more codex. lore on space marine. There's more black library lore on Imperial Guard. Oh, for sure. That's so, it becomes those things. Like the Gaunt's ghost books are significantly

I mean, Horace Heresy's dream, but Horace Heresy is not really space marine lore. Horace heresy is just history lore. I mean, you've got the Death Corporate Creek. Yeah. And to be fair, as we're going to cover next week, the next few weeks, they mildly outnumber the space marines.

So we might want to have a bit more lore on them. They're also easier to identify with the person who's kind of like us versus the mutant that is full of organs that don't work. Fucking poison. And night fighting, which I noticed they brought back in the new books and the cards. Anyway, all right.

But until next week, this has been John Barcati and Bradchester. This guy. Thank you for listening.