The 40k Lorecast - Episode 72 - Random Xenos of the Galaxy pt 1

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

On todays cast we begin our coverage of the random Xenos of the galaxy. Our focus is on some of the Xenos that have no codex. Thes are races that appear in stories, codexes, and some of GW’s side games. Many of these races have only a few (very well written) paragraphs on them in the lore, so it is more of a quick rundown on each of the races. On todays cast we cover: The Tepresi, Cythor Fiends, Caryatids, Rak’Gol, the Slaugth and more.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast with me, John Barcotti and Bradchester. This guy. On today's cast, we're beginning a two-part super random cast on all the non-codex Zenos of the galaxy. So this is going to be weird and probably really fun for one of us. I'm telling right now on this because this, I know so much lore of 40K. Yeah, it is that. You decided to do, yeah, you went, hey, how about a bunch of stuff that you have no idea about it?

So John sends me to 200 page and a 100-something page. You're fine. Documents and goes, I go, dude, I don't know anything about anything. I sent you some PDFs. And then I went. So you then had to figure out how to open. I did. And I read them, both of them.

One was a lot better than the other, by the way. Yeah, the liver is a lot better than the. Like a lot. Yeah, it's so much better. We'll talk about those in a second. But yeah, this is, this cast. going to be fun. I'll explain more in a minute. Before we begin, though, 40K lore cast is a weekly podcast releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern Time focusing the lore of Warhammer 40K universe.

And I did make seven with my figures. Yeah, Brad's, the Marionette puppet has continued. It started in episode one, and we were episode 72. None of you realized there's like, we could like videotape this, but just a weird thing of Brad randomly expressing himself in ways no one can see. Before we begin, as always, a couple of quick notes. Please follow and comment on the cast if you can. It helps our rating. And every morning when I drink my coffee, I have to read all your comments.

And it makes me, that else gives me joy. Additionally, in the show notes, you'll see links to our website, along with our Discord and our Patreon. And a new link for those who are interested, we are going to be hosting a 150-plus person event from June 6th to June 8th, 24. in Metro Detroit. It's 2025, by the way. 2025. Yep, that's good point. Brad, thank you.

We're going back in time. Yep, that is, look, it's January, so that whatever year it is, gets a little bit difficult. If you're interested in playing in the event, please sign up and join us. We'd love to have you there. If you just want to come see the event,

we'll be there, swing, and it's open to the public. So, come on by. And weirdly enough, you'll be playing and I won't for a change. Yeah, because the difference is if you won the event that we were putting on, people would call you a cheater.

You know what I can't do? They wouldn't call me that. They would just call me a lot of different names. Yeah. You know what I... Cheater would be the happiest name. There is, I can tell you, I will call it out right now. If I win a 150 plus person major, I cheated.

I'll just admit that now. Additionally, for those of you who like what we do here and want a bit more of it, we have a link to a Discord. both on the show notes and on our website. It's completely free, as every Discord should be, you jackasses that charge for them. And it's built around a community and enjoyment of the hobby. We've got channels to ask us questions and request new things.

Tell us what we got wrong, specifically all the things I mispronounced. My new favorite channel. We're not covering the Legend of Brad channel. There are also channels. you're not getting your praise. I was so mad they made it, and I'm going to send Alan.

We're doing this story. Randomly, the mods made a new channel where people talk about the legend of Brad, where it's like, you know. They do Chuck Norris. Yeah, but Brad killed two stones with one bird, those types of things, right? And it is glowing his ego so much

that we have a mutual friend who will end this if he gets in there. Oh, 100%. We did a cast together where it was just based on him making fun of me for an hour. Yeah, that is. And I'm going to...

It was fairly popular. I'm going to unleash him into this thing pretty soon, just to get your ego back in check where he just sends... Has, I don't know, 200 before and after photos of you. Oh, funny. Anyway, the Discord, though, is a really... It's a very, very fun place. We've got stuff in there beyond Brad and I,

more importantly for you, the listener, stuff on 40K literature, getting recommendations, tabletop play, hobbying of building and models, even general chat, memes, people who were looking for people to play Space Marine 2 with them. Memes. Yeah, the meme channel is... Meme channel gets a little dicey sometimes, though.

You say that, and... Yeah, we had some recent stuff. But before that, it's been pretty far. The meme channel is quite good. There's some good fun stuff on the mean, sorry. You know, this will be in the past. By the time this releases, that'll be... Oh, it's all in the past.

In the rear view mirror. So I do want to note to the Discord, Kevin, Masey, Brian, misspelled Ethan, Steve, Ryan, Trevor, and David. you guys doing an incredible job of moderating our Discord. There's 5,500 members right now in there. And if it wasn't that, if we didn't have the mods, this would have devolved to the bar of no rules from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, if you haven't seen that.

Would have never gotten that far because you would have set it on fire into. Oh, I would have burned it to the ground before that ever happened. I think you wake up sometimes and just go, burn to the ground time, burn to the ground time. Oh, yeah, I got the button just ready to go. Lastly, for those of you looking to play the game, Brad is available for coaching services. You can go to our website or our Discord if you want more information around it.

But with 30 years of playing and 10 years of coaching, Brad's a really great resource for people who are looking to improve their experience. When I say their experience playing the game, I don't mean make them just make yourself a better player. Actually enjoy playing the game on the tabletop more. Brad's very good at help. What sucks in this game is when you just make incredible dumb errors and lose. and it's great having someone who can come in and prevent you from doing those. I'm also just passionate about having a good time while you play. Yeah.

That's a real thing. Have you warned any coaching clients about what a Rogel Doorn Explosion can do to your army? A lot. I actually brought that up to two of my coaching people. Dom was, of course, one of them. All right, on to the cast. So just so you guys understand why we're doing this, this is entirely me. One of my favorite things to do as a child was, like, crack open the D&D Monsters Compendium

or any other self. I played rifts. I played all of his... I loved just reading through them. And you'd find, like, a random monster. Like an Umber Hulk or a beholder or a white, if you put a... Whigot, white. W-I-G-H-T.

No idea how that's pronounced. I'm going to go white. One of the best things... They had all the stories. You said you'd read... It wasn't just, all right, this is the Umber Hulk strength and blah, blah. It's like, what is an Umber Hulk? And it wouldn't be much.

You'd be like three paragraphs, maybe four, maybe four. And it wasn't much, but it was just enough to satiate you and to go to the next one. that is a love that's never gone away. For me, to this day, I'll get up in the morning if I'm playing, oh, he's Mass Effect. I'm playing Mass Effect 3. I can't play it while drinking coffee. So what do I do?

I hit the pause screen and I'll read just random things but one of the random Xenos. And it's well written, by the way. The Codex is so good. Oh yeah, if you guys don't know this, some of these things are incredibly well-written. Every game has this. What's, I'm trying to think what's around me

that I can see from here. But like Horizon, Forbidden West does all these things do it where you have all these really great little snippets that exist. I love reading that. So when it came to 40K, I do the same thing. And I love these random Zenos that are all throughout the galaxy because you have to fill in the galaxy. There's tons of space in it. So how do you fill in all these gaps? I think that you like that a lot.

And I agree that that's a real thing. I think that you just went, I want to beat Brad badly in something in lore, and I'm going to find it. Oh, I found a way to just confuse Brad so badly. I was desperately researching all of this. Yes, because what happens is the truth is Brad really is incredible knowledge based on this lore. By doing the Xenofaction, it was that piece of everything was on the edge of his brain. You had to think really, really hard of where this thing came from. Because again, everything we're referencing here exists in something he read.

But speaking of things that he read, let's go through, for those of you who find this cast interesting and want to know more about it, I want to spend a bit time where we got this information from. So, GW, when they want to have fun, knock it out of the park. Crush it. And the primer this. I think the zinologists, this was so fun. I read this in one day. In one day, yes. It was really good.

That's a good point. A lot of people don't even know these books exist. So there are two main books that the GW has released in this. In 2005, it was a book called Xenology. And then in 2021, they released something called the Lieber zonologist. We're getting a lot of stuff from this. So zinology, I read back when it came out in 2005. It was written from the perspective of an inquisitor named Raleigh.

Raleigh. Anyway, Raleigh was obsessed with learning. everything he could about the major Zenos in the galaxy, and he started working with the Imperial military to capture Zenos so he could dissect them and their weaponry. The problem is that over time, he starts building this massive tomb of knowledge. He was later labeled a heretic,

mostly because he had... Mostly because he was. Well, he kind of was. I mean... If you figure out what the Imperium thinks is a heretic, he had so much. Yeah, he had a massive collection of orcs, how chiroids, like all the weapons, everything cataloged,

writing out how much better they were been in the imperial versions of it. So yeah, he got labeled a heretic, and the Inquisition supposedly destroyed all of his works, but they didn't. They actually handed them all to the Death Watch. His autopsies are awesome. Oh, the autopsy, the videos in this book,

So actually, let's call it out. At time of recording, this has been out of print for like 20 years. So you cannot buy this book. But if you know how to sing a song that begins a yo-ho-ho, you probably can figure out my hint of where you could find a copy. It's because that's where I got it from. I like it was a lot of fun. I like reading both of them.

I said, I like the one specific. Yeah, let's talk about the better one. Let's talk about the better one. The better one is Liberzonologist. And Libra Zanologist is a random book that came out for no reason, written from the perspective of the rogue trader named Janus Drake. Janus Drake has a, is in the, comes from a different game set. But his backstory is cool as hell. He's a Terran Bourne Noble who, in his youth, had to disagree with a Navigator house and killed one of the members of the Navigator houses, which is not a good thing.

Navigator houses are pretty powerful. It comes out of an okay, though. But yeah, somehow he gets out of this and becomes... With a rogue traitor! Yeah, he gets banished from Terra, but is a rogue trader. So I'm assuming his family had some money. His family had all of the money. Exactly.

He also, again, looks like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman-type guy. Oh, yeah, the visuals on him are great. He's so cool. And so what he does, though, so he then goes into the galaxy and begins acquiring just unique relics and plying them with nobles for, like, wealth and power. So much so he actually has now taken possession of planets in exchange for trinkets that he's had. So he's built an entire road trader empire. They have a big thing when they say trinkets.

Some of his trinkets is wild insane tech. Yeah, it also might be a grav tank. Yeah. A gravtank that he happened to be like, yeah, I'll give you this for this like agri-world. And the guy either I don't care. This grattank's way cooler. Go ahead. Like enjoy.

He also, where he blew up in the game, for those who want to know more about, Adam. There was this great game called Blackstone Fortress that came out in like 19, yeah, I think it would have been about 18, 19, so in 2018, 2019, where it was kind of, I would call old school D&D where you actually had to follow a path in it, but in Warhammer 40K. You also level up. Yeah, you would level up. It was a really, like a lot of the stuff you see in Crusade, it came from this game. Really, really great game. Again, no idea how you can get out. You can find a copy of it today. If you can, awesome, it's probably overproducing. I like the way it's written, though, because it's written as almost a journal, a bunch of journal entries and his findings.

The Libra Zonologist is something that Janus Drake wrote. I love it. It's got me so excited because it was a fun read because it's this collection of journal writings from him, and they're all different. And some of them seem to be written under duress. And they're all different types of writings, and he's excited about this. and this is a humdrum kind of, you know, we found this and I should write it down. And they're all written,

and they're almost a collection of short stories for each one. Yeah, it's not like a novel where you start, you have to go all the way front to back. You can just kind of, you can flip through, read a bit of it and read a bit more of it later. It is fantastic. Also out of print. So, yarr.

Yarr. I love the yard. Yarr. Yeah, y'er. See, there's your hint, guys. It's not hard. Literally, literally you can Google the name of the book,

followed by PDF. That's how I got my copy. I like his version. I like, out of the two books, I like his version a lot, because he also gives more firsthand, I dealt with people.

Yeah, it's, it's, candidly, it's just much better. Wait, it's nice because you get that whole, like,

sometimes he was curious, sometimes he was afraid. Sometimes he just wanted to get the hell out of there. Oh, yeah, the one race he met where he was just like, he was terrified. They were supposed to,

they were supposed to be extinct. And he's just like, oh, I'm going to die now. So anyway, so with that, let's jump into this. This is going to be random as hell, genuinely random out. We're just going to do random species and go from there. So let's start with, because our last episode was on the Death Watch, I want to talk about how the Death Watch would handle a Zeno. So we'll start with something called the Tepressi.

The Teprecy are a large burrowing Zeno. What they would do is they would go into subterranean dens. These things were massive. And they had tentacles. They would reach up through the surface, which I assume are pointing and poisonous because GW probably made them that one. You grab some Marines. Yeah.

And so when a victim would walk past, the tentacles would shoot up and grab them and pull them down so they could feed. They said the death watch to deal with them because they were only on one planet. Also, this race is not even. It's not sentient. Yeah. But it was eating people. Close enough.

They had some better than animal intelligence and they went, nah. I just like this story because it's a cool story of the Death Watch. So the Death Watch sent kill teams down. And the Kill Teams would use special, basically, motion detectors, look for small vibrations on the ground. And that would meant, that told them that this, that the Depressy tentacles were just sitting there. This is awesome.

It's such a dick move on their part. Yeah, they would then walk over them to make the tentacles shoot up. And as it shut up, they would cut them with, they cut them off with power weapons. Then they would grab the remaining tentacle. And as these, again, space marines would pull the creatures out of the ground and put a hellfire around in their skull. Lather, rinse, repeat. Yeah.

They just kept walking up to their burrows, chop off arms, shooting ahead. Yeah. And they are now extinct. I love problem solved. Problems solved, yeah. The depressi are now extinct. Another one is called the agrenium. We don't, I have no idea what they look like.

All we know is that they could brainwash other races. primarily humans. War powers or like the way the towel do it, we don't know. And we don't know because they're all dead. They're all dead. And I'll explain how that happened. But I like these guys though because they, their brainwash thing, it felt like they were taking over and puppeting people. Yeah. Well, invasion body snatcher style. That was kind of, we don't, we don't know a lot about them. But we know is that they were able to brainwash large groups of people and they would send these, they would send these people as hordes into any invader, just masses upon masses of people that would just happily die for them. These were handled by an Imperial Knight Legion who got

down there, looked around, got bored of stomping on people, and just decided... They went back up in orbit. Yeah, went back up in orbit and just eradicated the biosphere of the planet. Yeah, they're like, we still want the planet, but it'd be cool if all these people weren't here. Yeah, so they collapsed the biosphere, killed everything on the planet, including these mind controllers, and then brought in terraforming afterwards. I love the solution, though. They're like, for sure, billions of people are being mind control. Do you know where the people mind controlling are? Kind of.

They're like, how about we just kill the planet? They're like, that sounds so much easier. That's so much easier. There's so many steps to figuring this out. We're going to, boop, boop, boop. We're calling a terraformer. It's on its way. Go ahead. I don't really like mysteries.

It seem like a lot of work. Here's a fun one. I'm not even trying that one. Yeah. The loxolato. L-O-X-A-T-L. I assume I'm pronouncing it loxolodal. Like an axolodal.

Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, they're both amphibians. So the loxalotl are an amphibian that looks like a Komodo dragon. Those are G-W's words. Not mine. This actually was one of my favorite things. John has a.

thing in the notes. G.W. Words not mine. Exactly. It's a quadruped with sharp claws and teeth, which is, for the record, a theme within all GW alien species. This is going to come up a lot. Sharp claws and teeth. The Loxalotl are fast and their senses are attuned to hunting prey. You know what I thought these were more like, though? We'll go Star Trek in this one. I thought they were gorn. Yeah, the picture, I mean, the picture of them, it just looks like, it looks like a black Komodo dragon.

Yeah, it's like a lizard, more... Like, by the way, in the image, DW has of them, no part of that image is amphibian. Like zero part of it. They've never even seen one. Yeah, yeah, that's like, it's whatever. What's cool about them is that they actually

largely serve in mercenary companies and mostly pirates all around the galaxy, and they're primarily used there for tracking and hunting down bounties. Because even if you're in a hive city and you're trying to track them down, the loxolodal can track, you, get you, and kill you.

Yeah. I mean, also, they're pretty good at not dying. Well, yeah, they didn't get exterminated. I mean, some of them do survive. I was just about to say, anybody that still it is in existence, good job. Good job, guys, yeah, because at some point, the Imperium became aware of you and went, well, whatever.

Unlike these ones. So the Ark, who, Ark Hyrith, are a super... I'm ready for the rim, room shot. Yeah, there's a bunch of super fun guys. They're a fun. They're a fungus. Yeah.

The archeryth, they're also known as the bone drinkers. These guys are duchess. Yeah, not a great thing. When they get newsflash, they're going to get wiped out later on. They deserved it. Yes. These guys sucked so much. Yeah, so there are a psychically active race that lived on the fringes of the galaxy,

which is, by the way, where all the best GW writing is. Any Xenos that lives on the fringe of the galaxy. Exactly. On the fringe of the galaxy is really well written and really cool. So these guys are odd because they have no technology. What they do is they just use their psychic powers to infect and take over spaceships where they just ensnare whatever's there. And whatever is they ensnare, they bring into,

it's basically almost like a pile. And they slowly dissolve them and suck all the nutrients out of their bodies. Yeah, out of the bone marrow first. Yeah, they're like getting bone marrow. Yeah. You know, something that's unbelievably terrible. parents a lot. The Imperium first bumps into these guys during the Great Crusade. And it wasn't, they were actually a huge problem to deal with, mostly because they were only on

the very fringe of the galaxy right at the top of the map. And this made them also not really a threat. So the idea was like, well, let's not really bother. But then when they did try to actually engage with them, they turned out to be really resistant. You couldn't, once they were in a ship, you really just had to blow up the ship or the colony. Because they were just, they were more than a fungus. They are a fungus, but like it was, you had to kill them down to. Yeah, a molecule, basically. And where this gets to be funny to me is the emperor decides that he's had enough of them.

And he sends a combo of space wolves and night lords, which is a pretty strong combo. There's no one to fight, really. Yeah, they got them. But the space wolves and night lords couldn't exterminate them because they just didn't know how to handle this fungus. However, Alfarious got involved. You know what? Good job, Opharius. Yeah.

Alfarious just goes and makes a special virus and dumps it over an entire section of the galaxy where any or are all Akharithar. they don't yeah they don't exist anymore i loved it because he makes a virus that specifically just kills them yeah that's it you don't even know it's there it's to be fair the records are imperial records it may not have just killed them oh that's true according according to imperial records that's true there could have been a lot of clatterily it only affected them because no one else is there to say anything about it yeah prove me wrong i dare you we'll be right back after a quick break. In my professional life, one thing I know well is how challenging managing a global team can be. Just the act of creating one has been an extreme challenge over the years. Because one thing you

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because the Iraqan refused the Tao offering of the greater good. Now, don't worry, guys, all you Tao supporters, I'm going to give the Tao. props on this one because they refused the tau and then the tau did not take that kindly. Yeah, except. And slipped on their boots and mighty ass kicking. Not at first. The issue was that the Iraqan can fight close hand to hand. You know what the Tao can't do?

Fight it all. Multiple years, the towel were just getting beat up because truthfully, the best way to beat a Tao is to hit them with a big stick or poke them with a pointy stick. And the Iraqan were an insectoid race whose limbs were raised. are sharp. However, sometimes you've got to take a name character and give him his equipment. Yeah. Unfortunately,

the Tao did have Farsite. My dislike of Tao is so strong. I'm rooting for bloodthirsty Zeno. Bloodthirsty Zeno erraticed with pointy arms. The Tau were losing. Farsight came

to town and I can only assume that this race went more Tau and Farsight went beat down city population you the iraqan also no longer exist boar fast it's a boss

by the way i again going back to my monster's companion one another area i love in the entire solar system are what they call the ghoul stars which you know are not well it's not a good spot it's the extreme upper right of the galaxy

and i'd like gw even wrote this in this is an area where the star are pretty far apart from each other. There's a lot of dark space. Yeah, a lot of dark space. It's effectively useless for the Imperium to go up there because just traveling is hard. This space is all pirates, rogue traders, and things and other.

And the other are a huge problem. Yeah. Because they can operate with reckless abandon. Because of this, any civilization or colonization that goes into the ghoul stars that disappears. It's just like, yeah, check the box and what it could have been. Well, it's a big deal on this because one of my favorites,

space hulks, which are monstrously large. It's not just a little ship floating around. Yeah, Spacehulk is not a former frigate. It is a giant thing. But you also have these civilizations that the Imperium has beat down that are trying to run away. They are definitely in witness protection right now.

But you also have larger, pirates, people that lost all these people trying to recoup their empires and stuff. Isn't it just two guys in a ship driving around? There's some shit out here. That's all, and all of that is up in this area. So for a while, no one was aware that the Scythor Fiend even exists. The Slender Man? Yeah.

And so the Scythorfein, just so it's a bipedal, you know, so it looks like a long, thin, human. But they have this weird thing where they can shape. shift in a crazy way. They carry this tiny silver disk. It's all it ever described as. And if they press the discreet, their entire body just disintegrates into little glass shards that can then move and shift around with them. There's a really cool scene in the book.

We were in the liberal zinologist about this where Drake, where Drake, where Drake, yeah, Drak describes. Josh and Drake. Josh and Drake describes this happening and it killing a bunch of, that's one of the stories where he's just like, oh shit. I have to get out of here right now. Let's stop documenting this and leave right now. Humanity going back before he met them, humanity did encounter them and they encountered them via probes and scout teams.

And every single probe or scout sent into the area instantly died. There was a Cythor just, we're like, nope, this is gone now. Later, the Death Spectors, who were a successor chapter of the Ravenguard, great name, by the way, just great name. We're sent out there to basically get control of it and kill these guys off. Once they encounter them, the Death Specters realized that they have to kill off all the Scythorphines. And they achieved none of that. They couldn't kill them. This is a big thing on this because I think that every time anybody encounters a Scythorphine,

I think this is just a brand theory on this one. They're so advanced that these are all just like when in the Predator movies, when they send one out to go see stuff. That's what I think's happening when these little smatterings, because they always just, they have crazy wildly advanced technology. Well, but they only interact. And so that was a problem. So what ends up happening with the Death Spectres is that every time they would attack a Cythor world,

they would get there and they'd find it completely abandoned. So they'd say, oh, cool, we won. Then they would leave. And like the minute they leave, the Scythos reappear on the planet. Yep. And they kind of were like, eventually they went, and this happened over and over and over again until they eventually went, screw this.

And they just built a perimeter around the Scythor worlds to prevent, just like, look, we're just trying to control them where they are. And it just gets left that way until M-41. So current 40K. Yeah, this is forever. of that this took place. Not 10,000 years, but five, six thousand years, Hellbrecht and the Black Templars decide

we're going to go conquer the ghoul stars, and they just throw everything they have at it. Same problem. Every time they arrive on a Cythor world, it's completely vacant. And also, and as soon as they leave, if anybody stays behind, night night. Lots of death.

So these worlds have, in theory, been colonized since and no Scythor has been seen until Janus Drake ran into one on the Blackstone Fortress. Fun story on that, Janus goes back to, because he actually has, I should have mentioned his way, he has Eldar archives on his ship. A lot of. A lot of them, yeah, and an Eldar with him to read them. He didn't find one Eldar book. He's got stuff. Yeah, it's not Black Library, but he's got a lot of stuff. And according to this, he discovers the Eldar have known about the Scythor forever as usual. And they're incredibly advanced. And their point was they have technology that makes it impossible to exterminate them.

You're better off just leaving them alone. It's weird because I don't know if they're doing necrone-style teleportation or whether they, the war, because it doesn't seem like they were psychers. Yeah, there's no. It's just felt like they had tech. This is why I love this, this GW writing, because they leave so much for you. Oh, I love to be like, wait, tell me more. And they're like, I keep thinking that they're on these little missions.

They're like little these. Yeah, let's see what's over here. Yeah, they're just like, oh, they're coming to do stuff. We'll just, we'll take off. If you guys pull, if you can, you know, again, yo-ho-ho, ho, if you can find a copy of the book, the pictures of the sciathorpe is pretty cool. Again, it's sketchy. It's scary, actually. It's scary, like that's scary.

Let's do another one that was another horse heresy alien, the Bregg She. The Bregg She, they are an insect species with stabbing appendages and big sharp teeth. Again, it's going to come up over and over again. It is the entire galaxy. is made up of humans, things that kind of look like humans, and things with sharp teeth and pointy claws. That's mostly galaxy.

However, I think, is there any time anybody's been underestimated to worst consequences, though? Of the break sheet, this didn't go great. Well, the Imperium thinks this is just a semi-sent race of bugs that's running at us and we shoot them in the head and that's it. Yeah.

And that was not, not, not the, case. Yes. The Braggsci are, they actually, they're kind of almost like a pre-teranid. They had a hive mind that they would be able to work out of. But was anything, they also had a really strange sensory organ that they killed them, they'd see this. And the Imperium could never figure this out.

But they figured out the hard way. This sensory organ, for whatever reason, gave them the ability to intercept Vox commands. And because they were hivebine and they got immediate commands to everyone, the Imperial Guard would give orders out, and they would immediately go to wherever the orders. They would say open fire and the brigitte. They would say open fire and the brigitte. On the F in fire, and they're just gone.

They wrecked the Imperium out here. They also had a really cool weapon called a synaptic leash, or sorry, called a synaptic lash, which was just an energy attack that could damage the brain, specifically the cerebr of the opponent, aka Brad. It just gives you a stroke. That's what this does. I wasn't happy about here. How that one feel good? Not great. I'm telling you right now, for me, zero out of ten wouldn't recommend.

One star, one star. Who's giving it a star? Because there's nothing below that. That's why. You have the basis one. We have to give me an A for effort. No. One thing I love about the synaptic lash was it's so powerful that they were fighting the iron hands. And when the lash hit a rhino, the servitor in the rhino turned on the iron hands and began fighting the iron hands with their own rhino. Well, they weren't expecting it. No, no one's expecting to be run over by their transport.

By your own tank. Yeah. So the Imperium, after some losses, decide that this needs to stop. and they send the Ravenguard and the nightlords out, which again, actually a worst combo to have to fight against as Spacewolves and Nightlords is Nightlords and Ravenguard. Unless you're fighting in a place with lots of sunlight, then you're probably okay.

So they actually successfully kill the Brigshea. Or did they? Yeah, they thought so. A few thousand years later, the entire populace of a planet is just dead because the Briggs She just wrecked. I think they just brood. To be honest with that.

Yeah, most likely. This time, they had to send the iron hands in. And what I love about this is the iron hands coming. They're like, all right, watch this, Raven Garden Nightlords and Imperial Guard. Hold my beer while I go kick some ass. Fast forward a little bit later. And the iron hands leave. Well, they did, except for the fact that they found out that they effectively burrow to the core of the planet.

And they didn't have, this is so far down. The brig sheep burrowing. so far subterranean that the Imperium didn't have weapons outside of cracking the planet in half. So the Iron Hands just say, all right, we'll just put up a do not go here sign and circle it. So I want to point out the Briggs she defeated the Iron Hands, the Night Lords, the Ravenguard, and quite a few guard regiments. They're technically still alive. Whatever that plane, you know, LV-428, don't go to LV428.

And they're just sitting here going, I didn't hear no bell. We actually should spend some time on one of the really cool parts of 40K lore. If you get away from like the codexes, this is more the rogue trader games. Is it bad? What's the space battle game called that they ran for a while? Space boat. No, no, the one where you actually had like Imperial Space. Oh, Battlefleet Gothic.

Battlefleet Gothic. Yeah. Good big game, by the way. So there are a ton of random, like, bipedal and ish races. all throughout the galaxy that have no real. So many of them. Yeah, have no real backstory. They just, these races, which appear suddenly in either a story or a game, usually as mercenaries

or as pirates, et cetera. More so in the first to fourth editions of the game, because the GW was still really at that point building the universe, and they were leaning, in my mind, more like a D&D setting, where, like, you had settlements and planets before they, because today they're all controlled by a single race, but in the early editions of the game, there were like between planets or space stations that were open to more races. They also had it so you could play different things and they had background. They had more background races.

You would have playable races like. Exactly. You'd have a lot of settings in the game that I would compare it to the canteena on Moss Isley. It would be that random. And a lot of these races would just fit in there, but they fit in with a small purpose. You'd have someone with multiple arms and eyes that was the pilot. You had some big hulking zeno that'd be there for boarding actions. Yeah, snipers, extra fast guys.

I mean, it's not hard to imagine this is kind of a copy of any sci-fi movie book or comic, but not in like the crappy IP violation sense, but in like the, yeah, that's how it would work. If we had a galaxy full of Xenos, full of races, they all, would like to not die, they're going to start working together wherever they can to form little parties and try and get rich. Ooh, we should totally do a cast on space pirates. It's pretty awesome. Yeah.

Do you actually know that that lore? A bit. All right. Anything that has pirates on the end of it, come on. That's probably true. So yeah, we should do it. So we'll dive more into them, but just to give you guys the examples of some of these, the Croutreut are a good example of this.

The Carcadashians, the Jarlich, there's tons of these. You can look them up and you, or you'll even just encounter them reading a random novel where someone will be talking about, oh, and there was a Karadashi. They do they do that. They do they, I don't know if they do it as much. They used to. They used to. They used to. It was really big.

They would casually drop a name of a race. Yeah. And I liked it because they never gave anything. I like the fact that they left. Of course you know about. Yeah. The what? You know, they always do this and you're like, who the hell are you talking about?

And Star Wars does that. pretty well to a point. Star Trek did it really well. And that's, that's where it comes from. I just think it's a great way to have a fun setting in the game. Mass Effect, Mass Effect series did this really well. It's always, every time someone does this, I enjoy it. So I'm going to always support it. I love Mass Effect so much. Everyone, how can you not? Ooh, that's something that you shouldn't enjoy. Homunculi vampires. Oh, God. We'll be covered the Dracari. These did have rules. These did have rules. Yeah. These guys are bad, bad news. I like the story. I think it's funny.

Well, the homoculus, the homoculus do crazy evil shit. And in their creations, they are trying to make you faster, stronger, better, more resilient. But also, they just do things to do things. Because they get bored. Like, hey, I wonder what this happened. Because if you live forever. It's about homunculus. Yeah, I think I haven't seen the movie. Well, as well, as the things I haven't seen, but another one, I'm not giving ground of,

oh, you really should have seen human centipede. You missed out on a lot, John, by not catching out on this one. If you've seen the ad, you've seen as much as you've seen. Yeah, I think we're good. But anyway, the homunculi, when they're bored, just make monsters and release them into the galaxy to see what will happen. They made vampires. It was a hybrid of God knows what. and they made it so they could stalk from the shadows.

And when they find their victim, they drain their blood. But not like with, not like the vampire with fangs. I think it sounds like they actually have vials. They carry with them and they suck the blood out. Yeah. And then they inject themselves with that blood.

The picture looks like they have a bandolier of blood vials. And that's what they wander around with. GW had watched movie Blade before they made that, by the way. Also, they apparently took the blood to juice up four fights effectively. Yeah. You're just taking. D&D potions. You're like...

So yeah, you could just wander into that randomly. Oh, yeah. Okay. The next one we're going to do is the Cariatids. Cremanda. Yeah, this is...

These are from Necromanda. Necromanda is an amazing setting in the 40K universe. If you like what we're describing here, if you find this interesting, the best game for this in the current setting is Necromanda. It's also really fast,

and it's nice. If you're a role-playing type person, you can get a little bit of your juice on. It's a miniature game and you level up and you do things also. Yeah. So what ends up happening in Necromanda is the game takes place, you know, in the under, in the Bids the underhives of the hive world necromunda, which I believe is the largest hive world in the imperial. Anyway, what happens in all these hive worlds is you do get xeno races who are trying to effectively flee from the Imperium. And they,

The best place to hide from the Imperium actually is inside the Imperium. So they go to the hive worlds and they go to the underhives of the hive worlds because the Imperium just isn't going to bother going down there for the most part. And you can survive, which is kind of a weird way to do it, but it's cool. The Necromunda itself is full of a lot of really cool and interesting, interesting ones. One of them is the chariotids. They're just kind of funny looking. They are a cherub.

It's watchers in the dark, but cooler. Yeah. Well, they look way cooler. They're built like a cherub, so a little naked baby, but they're blue, and they have wings. And their wings are covered in runic tattoos. They also get a Mohawk sometimes. But they look crazy. They look crazy.

You can look these up. You can buy these. But their powers are really funny. So their psykers with a really weird form of precognition, they're able to sense when someone is about to rise to power. Someone who's destined for greatness. But also, I think this is one of those things where people know that this is a thing. So if one of the chairups starts hanging out with you, it's a self-fulfilling problem. Yeah, there's a butterfly effect that thing happening here.

But it is funny. So what they'll do is if you're an upstart leader in one of the gangs and all of a sudden, like, a cariotid or a couple of them are hanging around you, it's viewed as massively good luck. And if you have this, everyone around you will do one of two things. They'll either fall in line behind you to kind of, you know, ride the wave or they will try to kill you before you can ride the wave. It's a good bed. Good bed. However. Yes.

It also gets worse. If you're, you know, riding high on the hog and doing great and your carlyotids suddenly just leaves. You insta die basically. You are, you are dead. No one's selling you insurance is what's going to happen here. What's fun about them is that while they're with you, they do help you. Wow, they are psychers and they can actually sense truth, for lack of a better phrase, and they can sense when someone around you, if you have them, if they're the ones following you,

wish to do you hard. I don't even know if it's just truth, though, because all they do is say if somebody has any ill intent, basically. Yeah. And so it prevents you being backstabbed, which is nice in a place like the necrumat. Necromat. It probably comes up. When who's trying to backstab you, you're like, yes.

Yeah. So I like the cariotids. Really cool model. If you guys just want to own something funny and weird to have on the shelf, go for it. Oh, we haven't done the chaos worshippers yet. All right, the Grell. So the Grell are a zeno species that are adamant chaos worshippers. Wow.

Talk about people that went all in. Chaos went, we have, they're like, nah, we're good. Here's all my chips. The Grell are big fans and they're chaos undivided. So obviously, once discovered, the Imperium went, yeah, those have to die. today. You know, like Zenos and chaos worshippers. So they sent the Death Watch out to eradicate them.

And for the most part, this Death Watch, the fortress that went out there was successful. They eradicated all but a few of the Grell. The Grell, though, as they were dying, reached out the warp and made contact, you know, to their dark gods with the Night Lords. There's a Night Lord chaos Lord, which always sounds weird to say, by the way. It's my only issue with Night Lords is saying Night Lord, Chaos Lord sounds silly. Finds out about this and vows vengeance. And he and basically all of the night lords attack a death watch fortress.

Kill everyone, cut it and cut out all their eyes. Which is very specific. Very specific, but very, the thing is, they did that? And I'm like, did they do that as a ritual to the dark gods or they do it because they're night lords? 50-50? Yeah. I was just like, yes. but anyway, Nightlords are kind of dicks.

By the way, good books was just, was listening to them last night to go to sleep. I was listening to the audio book from that. The one where they lock up all the children and murder all them, that one? Yeah. A lot of you guys like Nightlords, and I'm kind of like, I'm not.

It's still, I didn't say I was a fan of the Nightlords. I said it's a good book. They're bad people. Yeah. They started off being bad people, and they continued to be bad people. Yeah. All right.

Here's a fun one. that actually got retconned pretty well. God damn it. But this wreck, but okay, there's a retcon here, but it's not a bad one. Yeah,

it's about my people, though. Well, which version? Yeah, that's true. We're not talking about Toledo, don't worry.

All right, so the Demiurg were a very minor xenor rays in the galaxy, and they come from Battlefleet Gothic primarily. That's where this originally started from. So during the Great Crusade, the Imperial,

is they keep learning about this nomadic group of incredibly advanced traders out in the far right of the galaxy. Their ships are highly advanced and so was their weaponry. And these were big ships too. Oh, say they're huge capital ships, cruisers. It's funny though, because while being ships of war, all of them were still trade ships. Yeah, they were just, they'd show up with this huge fortress, flying fortress basically. then go, hey. Everyone got some de blooms?

Yeah. At least for selling stuff, you're like, I thought we were going to get killed. Yeah, it just turns into Marrakesh all of a sudden. I'm going to go buy some stuff. Exactly. Did you just set up a market? But they were also miners. And so what they would do is they would travel around this right side of the galaxy,

and they were just mining asteroids, cracking planets, whatever. And just trading. Not, I mean, where you're about to figure out what happened to them. So in appearance, they were described as being short and heavily built like a dwarf. It's a space dwarf. Yeah. And again, and they were minors. What?

Yeah. I do like the first major interaction was with the Tao, and they made the Imperium not like them because they were trading with the Tao. This leads the Imperium to mark them as enemies of the Imperium. That being said, being marked as an enemy of the Imperium, when you're on the far fringe of the galaxy. means absolutely nothing because all of the rogue traders everyone else out there was like so these guys are enemies

of the Imperium. Yeah. Why? Well they'll trade with anybody so they'll trade with me. Yeah. Well, yeah, why? What do they have to trade? Nothing, nothing cool, just incredibly advanced technology. Yeah, I'm definitely going to steer clear of them. Totally going to shoot every one of them I see. If I was going to steer clear of them, where would I not want to go? What's the best place to stay?

clear of so that I would definitely steer clear of the guys with the incredible technology that will totally trade with me. Later, though, and more recently, like two years ago, that Demure got retcon sort of. It would just reveal that they were truly the League of Votan. So is what it is that they're part of the League of Votan. And Brad's upset about squaws. I still have a Space Dwarf box with your favorite, the trike. Yeah, with a dude and a motor.

A short dude in a motorcycle. With a Mohawk, thank you very much. I know how much, I understand why you love this as much as you do. These guys are awesome. I want to drive a trike with a Las Canaan on it. Yeah. You know how easy it would be to get through traffic? Not well.

It's a trike. It's got three. You're just as wide as a car. And a Las Canon. That part's there. You're just as wide as a car. It doesn't really do you any good. Lascanon does.

The Lascanon will help. The last kind would help. We'll be right back after a quick break. Next, we're going to do the rat cool, which is spelled R-A-K-G-O-L, as opposed to R-K-H-O-L, which is the rat-gull of the game Cotor. Things didn't go well for them. That's yet. By the way, the first time I saw it, I was like, wait, that's in the Star Wars. But they have no relation other than, and I actually don't even know which one came out first.

So I don't know who stole the idea from the other one. Who stole first? But anyway, the 40K ratgoal are just pirates. That's what they are. Really, really violent, sketchy pirates. Yeah. Pirates. What do you think there's a...

Tell me what the pirates you're aware. They're running around planting trees. They're not even living by the pirates. Exactly, yeah. It's like, yarr, we're going to land here and improve the environment. The pirates are just going around the ocean. Picking up plastic. I mean of our pirates, these guys are pretty violent.

These guys are horrifying. And it's the rackles are six limbs. They're like a centaur, four on the bottom, you know, two in the top. And when you first see the image of them, they look an awful lot like tyranids. And it's, they're not, though. It has to do with just the picture in the GW book. There are a reptilian race naturally, but they've mastered the art of cybernetics and biotic augmentation.

And so as they commit more and more piracy and get wealth and power, they spend it on themselves to make themselves, you know, bigger, stronger, faster and tougher. So one big one they do is they actually implant ceramite plates on their bodies, which gives them the look of a tyrannid warrior, if I'm being honest, pretty badly. These guys love to remind me of Shadow Run cyber zombies and stuff because they have so much. As they get more, the higher you get up, the less. Yeah, less original. Yeah. They become ad mechie, the further and further you get. But yeah, they put in respiratory systems so they can fight in space,

enhanced vision for low light fighting, et cetera, et cetera. And to Brad's point, they're exceptionally violent. If they just, they lie in wait and they just attack. There is, their only way you ever encounter rackul is combat. Either they snuck up on you or you ran into the, them and they, both times, they attack. They don't produce anything. They just raid.

They just raid. They have, and what's tough for the Imperium is they have no homeworld. They're truly nomadic and they're nomadic pirates. And so this creates a challenge for the Imperium because they can't really exterminate them. What makes it really bad for the citizens of the Imperium is the rackle, despite their incredible violence and all these things. They're not really much of a threat to the Imperium as a whole. So nobody cares.

You'd have to put real resources and tell them to go into this area of the galaxy and start trying to weed them out. Yeah, because the issue is that they're technologically advanced, but not that advanced. Like their ships can take down merchant vessels, but they can't take down imperial transports. So they don't really affect the day-to-day of the Imperium. which means that if you're just an imperial citizen or a rogue trader or one of those,

you'd get wrecked. These guys are coming right after you and no one really gives a crap about it. So they still exist and they're just kind of sitting out on the edge of the galaxy. You have to feel weird about that. Hey, I'm so powerful on a threat, but not enough of a threat that anybody gives a shit. Well, it's like I own this part of the galaxy. just, you don't, I'm just, but I can't cross 35th street. If I cross 35th street, I get my ass kicked.

Yeah. I can show this part of the galaxy, unless I say it to somebody that's actually in power and listening and they will just come here and beat the crap out of me. Yeah. So, but I'm awesome, but don't tell anybody. You don't tell anybody. Definitely not the Imperium. Yeah.

Didn't know, shush, shush, shush, but I'm still awesome. Another one I like, just here's a super random one, the carnoplasm. We know almost nothing about this. because the only hint of their existence is present. If they so much as like mildly appear, the Imperium throws a full ex-lermanatus at them. They're a weird thing. They're a space-faring race,

and they all look forward is kind of unprotected worlds to invade. Once they do that, they descend on the populace, and like a spider, they then cocoon the living beings there, liquefy their bodies and drink them. spiders. Yeah. The only evidence that they've even been on a world is a world goes dark when you arrive. There's just little scraps of tissue all around because then they bail out. If the Imperium discovers them, they will just exterminate us the planet. It is, they don't mess with these things. Absolute gone, go away. Yep, yep. They're on the no-no zone. Yeah, big, big no-no zone.

Ooh, speaking of the Imperium. These guys got, this story's funny. I know, but it's just so bad because these guys came in with the whole howdy-duty. Oh, shucks, guys. Great to meet the Imperium. We're going to be great friends. Yeah. So the end of mine, Cordy, they were a, we don't really know what they look like, but the end of mind wanted to make friendly relationships with humanity.

And so their thought was, all right, what if we just trade with humanity and show them how awesome we are? And humanity went, okay, well, what do you got? And the end of mind go, well, you guys have a real issue with chaos. right? And the Imperium went, maybe, yeah, maybe. Who's asking? We've never heard about chaos. Also, what do you have and where is it? Yeah, who's asking? And so the end of mine shared with humanity,

these really special anti-demon technology that just rips apart warp beings. And they handed it over to humanity. Maddie took a look at it. The Imperians, this is pretty cool. And they reversed engineered it. And I said, thank you, and sent three Death Watch fortresses in there to exterminate him. such a big move. They don't exist at all anymore. Well, just in case it was a trap. They also took all their stuff.

Yeah. They made it a point to not blow them up. They killed everybody and they're like, you've got to leave some of the stuff there because we want to loot all stuff. Like, hey, man, don't disintegrate them. I wouldn't be able to loot the bodies. Yeah, just make sure.

Center mass, guys. Center mass. We're going center mass. All right. Now, let's talk about a real, The slaw. Now. These guys are so OP, though.

This is crazy. The slaw are amazing. So the slaw are one of a couple bogeymen in the galaxy of 40K, the GW's written in. They are wild. So we don't, the Imperium cannot figure out how old they are because they, and it looks like they may even predate the galaxy. Every single time they find a reference to them, they then find a reference to them being even older and older.

there's no origin for them. The best the Inquisition can point to is that they actually live in dark space. They're just straight, awful demons. They're pure, well, they're not demon. I know, but I'm saying that this is what you sum in D&D, this would show them. Oh, in D&D, they're a demon, yeah.

So they're close to three meters high, but they don't have a normal form because they don't have, they're made up of thousands of maggot-like worms that are just wiggling around, covered like a mucous layer. which makes them kind of hard to kill because you could just shoot a hole through the worms and they re-en-gross.

Yeah. Oh, they're vile. They're effectively immune to a traditional weaponry. That's the biggest thing. It's not you can put fire into them. The maggotty worms insta regenerate, like insta regenerate. They've had bolters, like, hit center mass and explode, and just reforms like the T-1,000. Also, super not great.

Way to die. Here's the thing. John, you shouldn't pull any jih Tjitsu on these guys. Yeah. So their touch is necrotic. It's a combination of toxins, acids, and bacteria are all being extruded by them at all times. So if they just touch you, you will melt and die to their touch. Yeah, it doesn't seem great.

Which, again, you might think, well, okay, we'll just towel the situation. We'll sit a distance and shoot at them. Nope. They can move through the galaxy. That will without the warp. Yeah, just individually, not a ship. They just kind of actually like the Eldar. They just step through a portal that no one can figure out where it comes from and appear. We forgot to mention the shittier part.

They also want to feed off dead things. Oh, no. Yeah, we're doing that now. And they want you to be dead. Yeah. Well, now that's just dead. It gets worse that. So their focus in the world is to feed, like any living being. but their favorite thing to eat is decayed flesh. The more decayed, the better.

So that's why their weird touch exists. When something's dead, they'll then put their hand over it to make it fester. And they would do so much. Them eating a plague marine would give them so much happiness. Just forever. Because that's what they want to eat. The thing about the slough, though, is in order to survive as long as they, they have, it's because they are incredibly intelligent. Because technologically, they're not

that advanced. They themselves are, but that's it. Why the Slaw become the boogeyman of the galaxy is because of how they operate within the galaxy, which is masterful manipulation. But here's my thing. Because they do. This is fully in the books. They work with criminal sin against crime lords, pirates. who's trading with the nine-foot-tall maggot worm pile? What? What? Criminal enterprise. When you come to me like, listen up, Brad, I've got this cool deal with that pile of evil

worms that's destroying everything he touches. He says he's got a great deal for us. I'd be like, no, so much no. But then he pulls out like the greatest guns that have ever existed. and allow you to kill all of your rivals. Because that's why, okay, I love, I love the slog. And I love them because of the way they, the whole idea behind them is that they, they're masters at manipulate manipulation by praying on people's, primarily humans,

but any race is desires for like more for wealth and power. It's all greed. So what the one thing they do a lot is they'll trade with these criminal organizations. They do have access to incredible technology. And they keep giving them a little bit more. and a little bit more to see if the criminal organization can grow in power. What they'll do then is once a criminal organization has grown to enough power, the law will just obviously kill the leader and take over.

And it happens every time. But not to take over to be now I'm kingpin. No, they then take the criminal organization. They use them to create a massive civil war or other type of conflict, which then, and the Imperium has numerous records of this, by the way. All they really want to do is create a giant planet of death so they can call in the rest of the slah to come down and eat the... They eat all the bodies, the corpses. I'm a big...

They're not cool dudes. I'm a big fan. The other trick that they'll do that they take joy of is they'll trade with a bunch of different pirates or something in one area. And every time they trade with them, they let them all know that there's always a little bit more. There's a better version than what they just trade them. Always a bit more. But you'd have to do a bit more for it. And they do this to create competition and again to create conflict.

Their goal is to get all the little pirate organizations to kill each other so that they can again go feed. And I don't know if you guys have seen the foreshadowing. But every time they start one of these wars, after it all goes down, the slough kill whoever's left. Yeah. One of the greatest examples of the slah with this, though, is the Ragdan genocytes that we talked about during our Dark Angel casts. The Slaw were behind the Ragnan. The Ragnan suddenly pushed into Imperial space, if you remember, the original Ragnan.

It turns out later on, the Imperial Records showed, the Slaw had actually been behind all of this. They'd been the ones pushing this. If you want to understand how much death there was as a result of this, the Ragnon genocides happened three times. It almost wiped out the dark angels. Lord knows how many Ragdans plus their slaves. Several of the chapters are really right. Plus all the ragdan slaves and this was a feast for the centuries, literally for this law. Now, the only bit of good news around this law is that they are terrified of the Imperium. And because the Imperium massively outnumbers them and does possess technology to kill them, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't do great to Meltah.

I think the flamers would probably be the best way to go. Yeah, yeah, flamers, but melted would also work. Both of that. Yeah, exactly. What are you made of? Endless maggotty worms. And they regenerate, yeah. What if I make you not exist anymore?

It's hard for me to regenerate. Cool, sisters? Yeah, we're going to be a lot of flamers and melts to come in your way. Exactly. Just what you know. To that end, the slaw really, they only live in the shadows and work from the shadows. If they feel the appearance bearing down on it. They don't tell you how many there is, too.

There's obviously less, but like... Yeah, no one knows. There's not that many of them. So if anyone's making, like, a D&D-style 40K campaign, the Slaw are really good book. Good villains. Yeah, really, really good. Behind the scenes, it would be great.

And especially because they'll always escape. In the end, they'll always just teleport off world. You know, let's do another one, the kind of random one from Battlefleet Gothic and Dark Heresy, which are these are two games. GW had some cool games in the early zeros, as they were trying to figure out and figure themselves out. So the frail, the fraal, the fraal, whatever, the fraal.

Frahaal. Fraha, F-R-A-A-A-L. They're just messing with me now. So they're actually a mystery to most the imperial. They're a nomadic people who somehow also have a bunch of planets and are also pirates. Basically, the Inquisition knows about them, and that's about it. And this is because they're a massively advanced and psychic Xenor race. and they work out in the segment segmentum obscureus,

which, spoiler alert, it's hard to see into. And the actually Inquisition knows quite a bit about them. The reason why we don't know, do they have a bunch of planets? Are they nomads? Are they pirates? It's because there is this incredibly aggressive race that instantly destroys any foreign ships that enter their space. And the Inquisition doesn't want anyone to know about it.

about them, partly because they're not sure what their real motivations are. Kind of don't know how many there are or what they can do either. Yeah. So one thing we know about the frall is that they will occasionally venture out of the segmental and they'll trade, but only with rogue traders or pirates. And this is because they offer lots and lots of technology. And what they want back is human slaves. They never say what it's for, but I don't think it's because they don't like the slave

trade and they're trying to free them. I think that probably the slaves are not going to be in good cans. I think they're probably going to have a bad. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. The challenge for the Inquisition is that the frowl are incredibly technologically advanced. Like they've got a knife that they, for example, that can stab through ceramite. Their ship cannons actually will overload shields and break apart hulls.

It is terror. They are terrifying the weaponry. and the Inquisition doesn't want to deal with them. So they're just, they're kind of no talky-talkie about the frow. It seems to be the Inquisition's overall viewpoint. The interesting thing is when you read about them, they do appear to have a lot of similarities to Eldar. Their technology is not that far off from Eldar tech.

The way that they operate, it seems to have a lot of psychic powers. It's possible the frowl are an offshoot from the Eldar. I 100% think they're. an offshoot down there. We've had 65 million years, plenty of time for this to be a complete offshoot race. Yeah. Let's do a couple more. The hellgramite, hellgrammit, hellgrammit, whatever. Everybody's going to read this and then go, these guys don't want to read because we mispronounce so many things. Yeah, I know. It's, I mean, this is, sorry, guys, the problem is, my knowledge of everything we're talking about here is me reading it. So I don't know the

pronunciation. They're not in almost any audiobooks that I'm even aware of, so I have to make up the presentation. So the Lana Rifts, which is in the upper right of the galaxy, again, Helgramites are incredibly hostile race. Imperial made contact with them, and immediately afterwards sent

an imperial force to go destroy them. In our usual diplomatic awesomeness. Yeah. And so as soon as they got there, the Helgramites turns out have pretty powerful, weapons and destroyed the entire imperial force that was set after them. A few thousand years go by and the Imperium go for round two.

Yeah, but round two is a big deal because they didn't screw around. Yeah, round two is funny. So they get to the Helgrimut main world, which is covered in a giant force field. And the Admec made a new gun for the Imperium to blow a hole in it. It was so comically ridiculous. Yeah. They just had a ship-sized gun. They shoot the gun into the force field around the Helgerman home world,

blows a hole in the force field, and then goes through the planet and breaks the planet up. They broke the planet. Where the Helgerman matters, because, like, well, who gives it crap? What's fun of the Helgrimitt is that, you know, some of them did survive, and they scattered the stars and join pirate fleets. And their hatred of,

of the Imperium. Not super big fans. Yeah, the second they encounter the Imperium, they attack immediately every time. Very, very fun. Very, very fun. Oh, you know what? Damn it, Tao.

Fine. God damn it, Tao. The Nagy. The Nagy is a worm creature that's very small and very intelligent. And they can mind-control things. And so what they do

is they're able to create entire empires of thralls. and they can rule a planet with these thralls. They, of course, were located not too far from the Tao homeworld. The Tao get there, try to explain the greater good to them, and they disagree. But while they're fighting, the Nagy discover the ethereal's. And just did the, oh. Weird.

Everybody gets along now. Weird. So, okay. Anyway, the Nagy have now joined the Tao. as advisors to the ethereal. Air quotes. Yeah. Advisors. Check asses. So the Talbaned, the aetherials were like,

oh, let's just double down in our mind control things. The Sycharis worm? This is sketch as shit. This is cool. Okay, the Sycharis worm, unfortunately, should have just been a standalone book. This would have made a really good sci-fi horror novel. 100%. The story on the...

There's only one of them. So I wouldn't have... of England. It's not really a race. It's just a cool story that I wasn't leaving out. So there is a derelict ship that's just floating in the middle of nowhere. And a captain of a ship called the Emperor's Bounty finds it. And they loot the ship. While going through it, there is this brass maggot that he just picks up and assumes it a trinket, throws in his pocket. Which he definitely was one of the guys from any of the new alien movies. He's, hey, no scans, no anything.

It'll probably be fine. Just throw in the backpack. What could happen? How could this go wrong? So while back on his ship moving around, the ship's navigator decides to take a look at this brass maggot. The second he gets close to it or even touches it, so yeah, the second he touches it,

the brass maggot becomes a living maggot, jumps onto his face, bites and claws its way into his, skull and his brain and uses the navigator as a conduit to the warp to become this insane powered psycher immediately runs into the bridge kills everybody and vents all of the atmosphere from most of the ship killing all of the crew this is all the captain's fault by the way yeah then uses its psychic powers to reanimate the dead crew creating a massive army of of the undead for it. Luckily for the Imperium, the crew, there are still some crew who survive, scuttled the ship, making it just adrift in the galaxy. I like that they got to tell no one not.

Yeah, no warning signs. So this giant ship's missing in the middle of the galaxy and another ship called the Sovereign Venture. So one thing about a large ship going lost in the galaxy is apparently there's a whole like market where you can then purchase salvage rights for missing ships. I just, this is a huge ship too. I love that they're not like, hey, they could have got an attack. They did anything like, no, I should loot this shit. They just sold off the back on some rando world. They sold off the salvage rights to go find it.

And the ship the sovereign venture gains the rights to the emperor's bounty to go just salvage it and claim whatever is in it for their own. And also just Yolo swags the ship. Yeah, let's just go. Nothing bad probably happened to that ship. Yeah, there's a massive ship floating in the middle of dark space. Engines have been disabled. Eh, let's run on board. Let's just board it.

Yeah, so they do. You're lucky they're wearing a helmet. Yeah. So they do, they run on board and are just immediately attacked by all the zombies of the worm. Now, the problem for them is much like on the flight of the Eisenstein, you can't kill these zombies because they're undead. So you shoot them and they just continue not being dead. No net change.

But there's a rogue trader leading this campaign and he, you know, him and his crew run. And they find down in the bowels of the ship, some of the surviving crew members who actually scuttle the ship in the first place. And they're able to explain to the rogue trader what happened. And the rogue trader thinks for a bit and realizes, that this being's entirely powered by the warp and does something I didn't know you could do. Turn the Geller Field up to 11? Exactly.

Just goes to the Geller Field and turns the Geller Fields on because the ship's not in the warp, but turns them all the way up, which apparently creates a force field from the warp getting in. So as that happens, all the undead minions fall down as well as the navigator. And they run in and they just, I think they melted the,

the navigator with the worm. The problem is that there's no record of the dead worm. So it's quite possible this worm is still floating somewhere in space. I look that story a lot and it's cool. All right, let's finish up on one that I'm a hundred and I'm going to mispronounce. The Oretti, which is different, which is not an ear-shaped pasta, despite being very similarly pronounced to me, like Ortechetti, it's one of those two. But anyway, they're not shaped like an ear. They had, instead they have four legs in a torso with like two small appendages just dangling down off them.

These guys look bananas. The best way to explain them, you can find the picture of them. They look like a person doing an inverted crab walk where you go, you go upside down and you have your hands and your feet on the ground. That's how the Orretti kind of look. And yes, I'm going to pronounce them with an Italian accent because it's instinctive. So weird, though. Yeah, they have like an exoskeleton. and they carry like low-level technology with them.

That's enough to kind of damage things, but not enough to actually do real, like, power. Yeah, it's just, it's an odd. They look so crazy. They look crazy. Their story's so sad, though. So they already are this, like, just super happy species that just abhors conflict and war.

And they prefer just to run away. But they are also instinctively trustworthy. And the immediate thing when I'm reading this was Galaxy Quest. It just came immediately up. I'm thinking, it was a TV show. He's just incredible power called Lie. If you haven't seen Galaxy Quest, just turn us off and go watch Galaxy Quest. That is true.

It's better than our cast. The Smashers, why is this here? There's so many good scenes in that. Did the teleporter work? The monster's inside out and then it exploded. Rock Monster. Rock monster. All right, I'm done.

Anyway, so they already just get wrecked over and over again. They keep, they lose their, they lose their home world. Because the 40K world is full of duches. Yeah. And they keep greeting everybody with a big smile and waving one of their weird spindly arms. Will you help us out? And my favorite example of this is that there's a rogue trader runs into a bunch of already who said, oh, we will give you all of our technology and all of our things.

village, you'll just help us get somewhere in the galaxy to escape persecution. And the virtue says, yeah, no problem. And sends it into an area called there's a nebulae nearby. There's a guaranteed death. That being said, according to Janus Drake, there are rumors that they already have learned their lesson and are now quite well armed and are not falling for bullshit. That's just waving. Yeah, not falling for bullshit anymore, which also means Galaxy Quest.

That's how Galaxy Quest ends. That is true. It is, I don't know. I didn't feel like looking up when this was written, but this feels like a pretty good rip off a Galaxy Quest. And yeah, I support that. That's been, you know, let's break there because we've got more of these to get to. The next cast, we're going to contain this random coverage of random Zenos.

Is there going to be a master technician orangutan? Yep. What are totally not the old ones, but were the old ones, but might not be the old ones, a slon and just some enslavers? Yep, we'll get to all them, plus a bunch more. So till then, this has been John Barsati and Bradchester. This guy.