The 40k Lorecast - Episode 81 - Knights - their origins and survival of the long night

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

On Today’s cast we begin our coverage of the Knights of 40K. We start with their origins in the Golden age of technology from the early colonists heading out into the galaxy with their STC’s. From there we talk about the Age of Strife separating the colonists from the rest of human civilization, but with a focus on how the Knight worlds survived. We than talk about the throne Mechanicum and the ritual of becoming, focusing on how they change the psyche of the pilots. More importantly, we talk about how this change affect the knight pilots to become better leaders and protectors of their subjects. We then close with a breakdown of the noble culture and knights themselves. 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 Brad Chester. This guy. On today's episode, we're going to start our coverage of nights. A nights. Yeah, just really their history and some of that stuff. Not as cool as Titans, but continue. Yeah, we'll get the Titans later.

For those new, 40K lorecast is a weekly podcast, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern time with a focus on the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe. In our show notes, you'll see links to our website, the 40K Lordcast.com, our Patreon and our Discord. For those of you who haven't, please follow and comment on the cast. It helps us out a ton and improves our algorithm a lot. What is this episode?

80. So it took what? 60 episodes for you not to say like and subscribe? Yeah. I mean, I'm proud of you. I know. Monkey see monkey do. People keep saying like and subscribe.

Then I realize we're not on YouTube. So there it is. But on the more comments, and follows that we get, the more we're spreading new listeners, which... It's a big deal, everyone. For whatever reason, the algorithm, if we can get people talking,

you can talk crap to us if you want to. It legitimately helps us get out there. I'm going to be honest. Honestly, it's whatever. It's kind of my thing. I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing this for fans. Like, I hope people like what we're doing.

We're making this for you. But I am kind of a competitive boob. And so at its core, then when they ask you, everyone to make comments and follow. It's not because I actually get anything out of it directly. What I get out of it is that we get ranked ahead of people who I don't like. And I get to know that that made them sad.

And that makes me happy. And I'm desperately hoping that someone will like and appreciate anything that I do before I die. Yeah, Brad's on that boat. I just really enjoy. We had a little bit of a run there where we got ahead of some pretty big podcasts. And I just hope some people were specific individuals. Oh, yeah.

didn't care. Brad was like, we're ranked 40th in the entire world. I'm like, I don't, fine. I didn't care because all I cared about is we were ahead of some people who I severely disliked. Hatery. Stop drinking that Hater rate, bro. It was great. So anyway, if you go to our website, you can find links to our merchandise. Which is awesome. Please get some of merch. It's so good. It really is. It actually is very good. Brad's coaching services. Brad cheating on me with Alan with his other podcast and also links to our upcoming events. If you go to my other cast, please leave a comment. Our Discord is also available.

It's a totally free server. It's built with you all in mind. It was designed as a place to you can interact with the cast itself, but I'm not that self-important. It also was about 40K literature, 40K gameplay, hobbying memes, or just general 40K. The idea was to give a place. If you like what we're doing here,

And it's because you like the topic. I hope you're not just only here because you love my voice so much, in which case, seriously see a doctor. I, however, think the other way around. If you're here just for my voice, I love everything about you. Also, Johns Bannerman, get out of the Legend of Brad channel. It's ridiculous. There's too many of you.

People like me more. Anyway, with the Discord, though, it really is a wonderful place. It's very healthy and a good community. So thank you, Kevin, Nick, Macy, Brian, Ethan, Steve, Ryan, and Trevor and David. Sometimes I should change that order up a little bit. I just keep copying, pasting it to every show note. Thanks to you guys, we have a Discord.

So huge thank you to them. Lastly, if you want to play the game of 40K on the tabletop or online via TTS, Brad has coaching services available. You can find information on our website or you can link to it through our Discord. 30 years of experience, Brad's not bad at it. You won a few events. One every year since 2000. we'll see i'll still win something this year before we'll see yeah exactly but anyway no matter

your experience level brad actually has more importantly he has experienced coaching a person like you and that's what makes him a very good coach no matter he's not going to make you on day one be like okay well here's your prep for a 42 round yeah major in las vegas where the lights only work half the time you know type set up this is he's this brad designs his coaching around the needs of customers. Awesome. Nothing makes me sadder and happier at the same time than Kevin and Nick. Yeah.

Literally handling all the things with Brad has health issues. So it may take a little while to contact here. And I'm like, thank you, but also, oh. I told him, just make the bots say it automatically. Yeah. Thanks for your contact. Brad's currently in the hospital. All right, let's dive into Knights.

So Imperial Knight Origins. are pretty interesting. They actually come back from the age of technology. So M15. So this is 15,000 years before the emperor left and 25,000 years before current 40K. Right. Well, 26. Yeah.

To be 20. True. Which is funny because this type of you're like, you're a thousand years off. That seems like a big deal. But in 40K, it's not. And this was a really good time kind of for the galaxy. This is before the Eldar. So the LDAR civilization,

that's at their peak. And the pleasure cults are just beginning to form but not heavy. So the warp was mostly tranquil. It's a good time for humanity because we're at our pinnacle of technology. And we haven't, we're about to, but we haven't had any internal, we haven't had any internal stride. But also, this is at the height of the Eldar civilization, but it's also at the height of their giving no ships. Yeah.

Well, the Eldar civilization at this point are in their peak, but they're, They're not, reason it's so good for humanity, they're not in expansion at all. Or have they, this is, they've got enough of the galaxy that they're just content and they're focusing on their things. They're apathetic now. Yeah. Because they've gotten to that point. This is where the pleasure cults are about to start. It's a great time for humanity because Eldar could recus in any time, but they don't because they're so apathetic.

They don't. It's all the way. Although it seems the way the Eldar spread through the galaxy is they actually were pretty close to Seoul, which is interesting. But that's a side note for anybody. Yeah, but they don't. I mean, they're real close. Yeah, for another front of the cast. But they just don't, they don't bother, which is a great time for us because we're just putting it out there.

And we kind of just don't go where the original humanity was really good about this. We'll get into that. I actually disagree with that. I think we did go there, but just they're all dead. They didn't matter. That's true. There was smoking people. Yeah, we probably expanded out in a circle that part of that circle got clipped real quick.

Real quick. Yeah. That was also when they went, we would reprise that we're very lucky. that Eldar were such duches because they were like, you go to something about it, but why? Why bother? It's a little snotty with their monocle on.

That's kind of what I think. So the rest of the galaxy, though, also is equally in check. The orcs are kind of a little bit stuck on the other side of the Eldar. And the Eldar, more importantly, with the orcs were very aware because they came up together

of how dangerous the orcs were. They're doing 100% preemptive strikes on the orcs all the time. There were no was affecting. They were smoking them every time. Fun story in that. There were no orquas until basically around the time

of the Great Crusade. Eldor was in charge. Because they couldn't do it. Tyrannids are not in the galaxy. Votan, no matter what, the origin story don't exist. Tao don't exist. Tao actually do not exist at this time.

Yeah, Tau do not exist. Not even you making fun of them. They really don't exist. I said it was a really good time for the galaxy. The, um, Sorry. Sorry, that was just mean. John coming in from left field, knocking it out of the park.

The necrons are all asleep. Even I think Trajan at this point is still asleep. Only person is, the silent king is the only one. But he's out in dark space. He's pouting in dark space. He's out in dark space moving his way towards, but probably were the... He took millions of years of meditation. But the most important part, though, outside of the town not existing, is that there's no chaos.

And when I say chaos, I mean, the chaos gods obviously are being to wake up, but Slanesh has not been born yet. They're still in their infancy. So there's no demonic incursions occurring into the galaxy and obviously no chaos space marines. So for humanity, so long as they didn't, as we were just as obviously, bump into an Eldar world, they're kind of free to conquer it. There were obviously other Zenos that probably would have put up a fight, like an early ragged in that kind of stuff. But we were smoking them. Yeah, well, I mean, we don't know. Probably.

they say the age of technology, we had pretty bananas. Yeah. Actually, it wasn't even military tech. We were so much better at colonizing worlds back then. Let's talk about that because that's actually a really good transition to STCs. So we've talked about it before. An STC stands for standard template constructs. I think you meant to say geck.

Yeah, it's a geck. It's what it is. And if you don't know what a geck is, stop placing into the cast, go download Fallout 1 and just be, and enjoy the better life I just made for you. Because now you've lived your life after playing Fallout. Also, you're welcome. Your life is legitimately better. So these STCs or gecks were designed so that when mankind could go out,

they were fully capable of colonizing and controlling the worlds. And I like this a lot. The concept of an STC is that when you land somewhere, you turn the STC on, and it contains all the stuff it needs to build whatever was meant to design. And they're all unique in purpose. So one would build like a chair. Another one would build a toaster.

They did whole habitats and everything like that. But they can be as expansive as you want, though. Because some were in charge of, hey, you need to build the infrastructure of a city. And they went, no problem. Yeah. An STC would build an entire factory at one STC. Right. Well, the funny thing is that there, some of them, because they talk about it atmeclaw.

Yeah. Some STCs are like, what does this SDC do? It's like it makes ice cream. And the other one made a full city's infrastructure. You're like, and these were the same thing? Yeah, and the next one built a plasma cannon that could crack a planet. You're like, they were all next to each other. Yeah.

You're like, what did you roll the dice on each one? And for the record, I'd make press the on button on all three of them the exact same way. Like, this will work great. This is ice cream. I don't have a mouth. This thing sucks. Screw you, call. Exactly.

But the biggest piece is the SDC is used for the planet. The first big one, obviously, was terraforming. And the terraforming of the planets, so they would actually build the terraformers because they would land on the planet, and it's a galaxy. Every planet's a little bit different, but humanity isn't. So we have very, we've got a very narrow band that we can survive in. So how are we doing anything? I mean, it's cold.

It's too hot or it's too cold. It's sci-fi. None of this would ever actually work in reality. It basically impossible. Well, the best part about the SEC is old-man-com. Age of Technology of Mankind. Was terraforming things like that? Yeah, it was a nothing thing.

However, the terraforming... The reason we have millions of worlds is because of this. Because most of the worlds were terraformed. Also, they were sky-hooking Feneres. Feneres. Feneres was a goofy attempt at a weird terraform. A lot of the worlds that were discovering, also the vacant ones, were terraformed.

But the thing is, is that they, terraformed a ton of worlds that they never even colonized. They just put ST, they effectively just see. I just, I read that. I disagree. I actually think they fully colonized those worlds and everyone died. Now, possibly. I'm just saying, but we have a ton of- We have a tendency to rewrite the history.

Like, yeah, we just sent a terraformer there with no people whatsoever. Dude, there's literally- That is a lot. That is canon lore that says that we just had- Who wrote it? Yeah. What? I'm just saying, we have, we,

show up and a lot of worlds are just ready to go. Yeah. Because humanity was rocking and rolling. It's the same way the British Museum of full of things they just found. I was, I was wandering through the fertile crescent, and there was this 30-foot statue just kind of leaning with a big

free sign on it. You discovered something? Yes, I'm doing air quotes again. You can't see it. The bigger piece that with the STCs for 40K lore is the weapons. And of note, quickly, as we just said, it's the ad mech want nothing more than to find all these weapons. And more often than not, it's terrible when they find them because they will just flip the

on switch, which, I mean, and it might be a planet cracking laser that happens to be positioned aimed at the current planet. And they flick the switch and go, oops. But I want to talk more about the concept of the STC is because it really is genius. the STC, so mankind when it first began its expansion, didn't have warp travel. They do get it actually in this period. But when it first built the STCs, they had no warp travel, which means you had to go at sublight or just barely above light speed.

So these journeys would take generations before they would reach their target. It's impossible, functionally, to hand down manufacturing technology and knowledge through multiple generations without them physically doing it. Having to do any of it. A theory is just it doesn't translate. It's an abstract concept. Exactly. And so what would happen is if they'd done it without STCs, the congen would just land and some great, great engineer

where you'd be trying to figure how to turn a plasma cannon on, and then they would all die. So instead, this was designed that you just kind of just kept the colonists alive and not in like the Wally style. Wally. That movie made me cry, by the way. It was so good. I've only seen it once because it was.

It was so sad. The idea is, though, is the planets land, the STCs kick on, and then it makes everyone the colonists need it. Even later, when the navigators were created, which we don't know where they're coming from, so I say created, because... Also, humanity's been douches for the entire time. There's a 100% chance that we thought there was a mutation, and we went, cool, only let these people talk to each other. mutation. Even with warp travel, though, as we discussed before, and I was like bring up, warp travel's not instant. So we went from what was what might have taken a 200 year journey is now down to a 11 year journey, which is a lot better than 200 years. But in 11 years, you still do have turnover of population. So the STC still are critical.

Now, this is a cast about Knights. So let's talk about the STCs and Knights. Let's talk about the fact that knights weren't just the awesome robots of war originally. Yeah. Like the original form of a knight was, yes, it had a bunch of these offensive. It was a devastating thing. But it also had three different shoveling. Yeah. Well, if you build a knight, when you buy a knight kit for the most part, me, some are different.

But if your knight kit has arms on it, you could build a night that has no weapons on it. You shouldn't, but you could. You know, that's how they all were. They're a multifunctional thing. So during the age of technology, mankind was sending probes basically around the galaxy, as well as high-powered telescopes to kind of scout potential systems. So they knew kind of where they could land and colonize. And they have the terraforming capabilities.

But, you know, the issue with that is that you don't know what's truly there until you get there. And so part of that is twofold. One, defensively, but more importantly, the work you have to do. So you'd land on a planet and the STCs would kick on. And these massive ships, I actually should mention, the ships, the colony ships had people in them, but they also had a horde of raw materials for the STCs. Go humanity, by the way. One of the things that we do is we make the biggest ships.

Are they the best ships? Nope. But are they the biggest wildly by far? And so the ships were designed to land with all this cargo and the ship, and actually the ship themselves would be cannibalized into the original settlement. So within a couple weeks of landing, you've got a small city. And not just like housing, you've got manufacturing and agriculture fortifications. And the knights are one of these big pieces because at their core, a knight's nothing more than a bipedal robot. Which allows, and that's important because tracks are better for a lot of things.

but moving across unpredictable terrain, legs are better. And so these things would come, the knights would come through and actually do a lot of the initial work. They would, you know,

like the loader Ripley's in and aliens, same concept. It would pick up heavy things. I love this because you're just like, and it's an evictor warsuit. You know that's right. Oh yeah, the Invictor Warsuit is a 100% rip off of aliens.

Like it's not even subtle. Like it has a same, It has a same, like the way the guys' arms are in it and the cage around it, which I also want to point out, just shoot the dude. Like, why does it have high toughness? Why can I just roll a six to shoot the dude? I saw Matrix. Sometimes you got to put a screen door in front of that guy. Yeah.

Just throwing it out there. Anyway. So the knights, the original knights helped the original colonists with a lot of activities. The arms would pick up heavy structures or slabs. The actual fair one is the chainsword that they. have was actually designed to clear forests. Obviously, it could clear other things. One of the my favorites is some of the most powerful weapons on a knight were actually mining. Oh, yeah, they're mining lasers. You're right. Yeah, there's a hundred percent mining laser.

They also had some drills too, but they had mine lasers to blow apart rocks. So these giant knights would walk over to what became a quarry and was mine. I mean, they're really cool at killing other stuff, but they were meant for boring into mountains. Yeah, they were also built for war, obviously. And the age of technology, this came up a lot because this was also the age of the Met of Iron, which just FYI, I think we got to a cast soon on the age of technology. And it just drive because writing these notes, I got into it. So, whoopsie, we had a problem with AI, click just play massive. Yeah. So it ends up happening. So we're talking about the, Brad was assessing earlier, how important this part of history was from a technology standpoint. This is

M18 to M22. In that era, we have the highest level of technology in the imperial. It's higher than it is right now. Yeah. Oh, by a wide margin. Like a wide margin. Volkite, plasma. I mean, it lies to the technology, it's coming from this era.

And the imperial knights armaments followed this because as much as we talked about the knights being helpful, they also would land on, for like, you know, building the settlement. they also would land on planets that were under claim or occupation from xenospice. And this is a period of time where mankind is just mankind. There's no space marines. There's no custodes. It's not even Skittari. So, you know, they had some genetic alteration, but not enough.

That's one thing that we actually did progress farther than them. They were much better in everything that was in civilization, regular civilization, but even back then. Very squishy. Humanity was still kind of, yeah, we're saying squishy, but also let's go with the, why do we make nights? Because every time we met somebody that wasn't humans, we have been, and we always will be dicks about meeting other people.

We've had some differences of opinions. And so we eliminated everybody we met. Well, that's what would happen is effectively mankind would make planet fall on a non-el-DAR planet, because if it was an Eldar planet, they don't get to make planet fall. Yeah, you're just kidding. some and you have other races would would kind of come to would come to fight at this point if they're on the planet I don't think um there were they would have bumped into orcs if they had orcs would have really far away at this point yeah but I don't the ragdan weren't that far off though so there's

there's a real thing that we could have met the ragdan early because ragdan was eight is an ancient right is we don't know that's like all those all them we don't know where they're from but the knights at their side the humanity really could just colonize anything they wanted to colonize, again, unless it was the Eldar, because the Eldar were just like, oh, that's an adorable knight. Meet our version of it. He just did, he did three backflips. Yeah, he's, it's literally like, you have like Robbie the robot and we have Cirque de Soleil. Yeah, yeah, we have a power ranger. Go, go. But all of this in M22 starts to get weird.

Well, let's talk about why it started to get ready. Yeah. Humanity started to have some issues, but Eldar broke the sky. Well, it's beginning. So M22 is when the warp starts to really start to shift around a lot. Which is when they're already breaking. But they have they, no, they broke the sky in M30. Yes, but I'm saying. They started to break the, well, they started to break the upside down.

There we go. Yeah, that better. We get first psychers start to appear and you're like, is that their fault? This is the moment that the first psychers begin to pop up. And this is like, this is a problem. Because first off, the early. psychers are like 30% helpful, like 70% terrible. I think that's a terrible percentage.

You think it's way more. The other thing is all terrible. 95%. Every story we get from old, the origin of psychers is psychers murdering everybody that wouldn't. Sorry, who wrote those stories? Just saying, like, according to the ecclesiarchy, psychers are bad. Thanks. Have they ever put on a falsehood?

Heresy, John. Heresy. We'll be right back after a quick break. Suffering from seasonal irritants, as the pollen count rises, support your immune system with quicksilver scientific histaid, a targeted blend of nutrients and botanicals designed to help maintain healthy histamine imbalance and everyday comfort. Quicksilver scientific's histaid works with your body's natural response to seasonal environmental challenges, so you can feel your best all season long. Get 10% off and free shipping at tryqs.com slash podcast. Again, that's tryqS.com slash podcast for 10% off and free shipping. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. So the colonies, what ends up happening is that this starts to lead the first chunk, which is civil war just in the colonies. So these psychers, in a lot of places, become warlords. And they start trying to get control of the planet, which starts devolving this age into, you know, just anarchy. Then it gets a lot worse. because in M23, what's called the cybernetic revolt begins.

This is when the men of iron turned on humanity. Well, let's pause on that because we're going to do a whole thing. We're going to do a whole cast. The men of iron aren't just our fighting force. The men of iron did, yes. Well, that's everything. Agriculture, construction, everything. So the men of iron went on strike, which wouldn't have been as bad.

It's the fact that part of them going on strike was also murder. There's a lot of, some pretty good images here to Karl Marx. Like, oh, just what if the proletariat completely stood up and murder the bourgeoisie? Yeah, well, we completely gave our civilization over to the men of iron as far as everything that's day-to-day function. Exactly. And so what happens is humanity goes to war with these robots, which unfortunately double hits them. Because first off, they're trying to kill robots, which just never goes very well. So they're getting slaughtered by them at the same.

time though the robots aren't producing food so even even if you beat them you starve to death but then the last and worst part hits right after and this is an explosion of warp storms you know around this just as a cybernetic revolt is really kind of going slanesh starts to form in the warp and this turns the warp into like an apocalyptic level storm she turned the blender on frapping you you can't see anything so in a matter of about of a few years, every human colony in the entire galaxy is, well, there's a complete AI revolt and you have no information. Yeah. And so you basically went, you got an email that said, hey, all of our society, the AI is

revolting and you will get no. And you're on your own. So it happens is basically is every single human colony that's not really in the same system as other, as another colony is totally isolated. And the ones that are in the systems are isolated. Oh, and by the way, some of the ones that are in the same system go to war with each other. This whole thing just sucks unless you were on a night world. This is actually crazy.

And I'm going to give props to this because I'm not a huge night guy. But during this time, nights and what ended up being the cast and the families of nights became badass. Yeah. So the knights have a very interesting mechanic. This is the machines into utilization. You can't just pilot a night by sitting in a cockpit and moving levers. Really?

You had so many opportunities to say one does not simply pilot a night. Come on. Nah, that was lame. That was awesome. It was lame. It's like, fuck. This is me messing with Brad because he's all excited about something. and I just do this to make him sad inside.

This is terrible. It's fun. So all the nights have a basic means of control with, like, function, but you can't actually use it. Instead, the pilot is hardwired into the night, and they become one. Basically, like Pacific Rim, but just one person. Which side note, I really want to like Pacific Rim. I really do. It's got some great scenes in it, but the acting is so painful.

I just, it's hard to watch it. The second one's even worse. It's just so, like, the entire. entire everything about Pacific Rim except for the monster fight was terrible. And they could have just stood at that hole and cut him in half of the sword. Yeah, it just, we're good. That's all I'm saying. All right.

But anyway. I do a lot of stuff that people can't see. You do. It's just, it's a very visual podcast. We should do podcast at some point in time. No, I don't feel like we have to get cameras. It's just work. If you guys want to see what Brad looks like in the dark, you can go to his other cast.

You're always in the dark. Because lights hurt my head. Yeah. It's like they just want to point out. Like, you know, it's really good for you with migraines. A big bright light in front of their face. Oh, that's the worst. So anyway, back to the Knights.

So kind of like the black carapaces is for the space marines. The pilot's able to interact completely with a knight around him and control. Because especially Knight has obviously two arms, two legs, but it's also like 11 weapon systems and a bunch of other things. So many systems. So you have to be hardwired and to be able to take it all in. Now, the flip side, though, is there is a side effect to this. And that's how you become a pilot of a night. You have to sit in something called the throne mechanicum.

The throne mechanicum is just a pod. And the, but the pod is a sensory deprivation pod. Yeah, but it's super cool because a pod's actually separate from the night. Where I like about this is that the way you, this, again, we're jumping ahead, but this is a cool thing. The way a pilot pilots a night, which is a better way for me to say that probably. Anyway, is they get into the pod and all the linkage. is connect to them, then the pod itself is inserted into the knight and it connects that way, which makes a lot of sense because nights are between 9 and 12 meters, 30 to 40 feet tall.

And you have to have a bunch of servants loading the pilot in to the throne mechanic. So just do that basically on a ground floor and then drop it into the night versus having to have everyone climb all the way up with you and do it that way. It's a clever idea. Way to go, GW. you. But on the throne Mechanicum, not everyone can get into it. You have to go through training in order to interact with it. Although, I'll be honest, the training's not that involved. Like, they wrote this whole thing out about you have to, like, you have to train for it.

It's all this practice. It's one day. You go and you sit in it and you have to, you test out. So an aspirin goes and sits in a throne Mechanicum and they're plugged into it for one evening. You also forgot the fact that occasionally people just... Oh, we're going to get there. Die or becoming safe. Remember pointing out where the space marine process is like a year. These guys, like, it's a really involved process to become a pot for a night. You have to do some cardio, okay.

Then you have to like, you know, do some studying. Okay. And then you have to go into this, you be locked into the throne mechanic. Oh, my God, is it for like a month? It's like, we go in at night. And then it's sunup, we open it and see how you, you're doing. Yeah, they basically plug you in, and if you don't die, they, they, then you're good. However, they just hose that off quite. But I'm just, but still, it's eight hours is all I'm getting

at. Like, you know, that's it. Anyway, so over the course of the night, the aspirant's mind in this situation will kind of basically wrestle with the throne itself. And this is because the throne is a machine spirit. What they're actually doing is they're actually merging themselves with a machine spirit and a mind meld. And over the course of the night, to Brad's point, Some are driven insane. Others are just killed. The machine's urban just melts their brain. Interestingly, though, the fatality numbers for this can be as low as 10%.

I feel that these are lies. Some, it can be aside. Certain night families just say that everything works out. Because the other part is it can be up to 50%. It could have the 50% of people who go in there die. But I want to put out, that versus custodes and space marines is still like, it's a pretty good. Well, especially custodes. Yeah, it's one and two hours.

Pretty good return on investment. It's all I'm getting at. So anyway, there are two outcomes of this process. The first one is the aspirant now can interface with a throne mechanicum. So they can now, you know, after passing this ritual, it's called a ritual of becoming. After they pass that, they can forever link and take control of the night without these dangers happening again. The second one, though, is more important. They're actually changed mentally forever.

Wildly so. And so the process of this implanting with the throne mechanicum is, a two-way process. Well, really, it's actually just one way, but I'm going to say two-way. The pilot-like, what's the other way? Well, the pilot has to, you're right, because the machine spirit doesn't take anything. Basically, you're right, it's a one-way process. The pilot, the pilot takes on the machine spirit into their own spirit and being. And this spirit actually changes their brain. So once it, and the first thing you see is once an individual goes through this process, their personality flips to being more like...

They completely, come on. It doesn't just... You're like, my personality changed. Right. They become obsessed with honor duty, genuinely obsessed. Anyone who's read like a book on like a fantasy story about knights and chivalry, it's that. Which I want to make a, I'm going to do a little John side tire.

Oh, you're going to make everything suck for me. Because we need to. This drives me nuts. They talk about like, oh, it's, I'm about night and chivalry. Anyone who's read history knows medieval knights are a freaking nightmare. They are horrible. The codiscivary actually really only applies to battling other knights. It is, but also they're horrible people.

Everything, the King Arthur stories are adorable, the original, not the one with like... I'll fight you if you bring up other stuff. What? Don't besmirch the good King Arthur. Well, which good King Arthur? There's the King Arthur books and there's the better one who has an exceptional knowledge of the flight patterns of swallows, both African and European. Again.

I didn't even want to fight you. I can't not quite that. I'll record the movie every chance I get. But the obsession with honor and duty for these nights. It's an obsession. Yeah, it comes out of nowhere. It is, it appears immediately after the ritual is over. And it's a true obsession becomes their singular purpose.

The second piece they take on as part of this, this really weird ego boost. They start to view themselves as solid. elected for greatness by a higher power, the machine spirit shows them not another to be able to power what is a God machine. And so this is because of their own superiority. Now, this does become a little bit of a meh when you're trying to fight with other knights because they become a little competitive. They're wildly competitive. And this competitive spirit is interesting because they become massive egotists. And so they focus all their efforts.

on proving they are the most honorable and most loyal. And this will definitely cause a ton of problems later. You know what? I want to say on this, as much as I sometimes don't like knights on the table, the knightly honors, the imperial knights, the loyalist forces of knights, have great lore to tabletop the nightly... Yeah, they're pretty good.

The duties they have to choose, you know what I mean? Yeah, their weaponry doesn't. But yeah. No, no, no, I'm saying. I'm just saying that. I just laugh at the... The old thing you have to choose and everything else, where you can't fall back. Remember killing a knight with a guardsman?

It's just a funny concept. With Lasguns? Yeah, with Las Guns. Yeah. I will say... Let's hit Las Guns? Yeah. Taking stomp's out of the game is a kind of a good thing.

But it also made... It made so much sense that my night... That's in 8th and 9th and could just walk up to you as guardsmen and just step on you and kill you. and move on with the fact that a 20 man actually just go with the 50 man conscripts and just go first rank second rank yeah and put lethal hits on them and a knight would die the knight would know that lasguns are being fired at it remember an eighth edition when you could tag a knight and they couldn't shoot weapons because because there was a there was a single grot near its toe so none of its weapons systems

were so stupid oops all right like i might not even know you're there but back to the cast so the cool thing about these changes mentally that are happening to the pilots of the nights is it appears that they were done intentionally. Not a side effect, but actually, like something that was built into the STCs. And this makes sense. Because when we talk about honor and duty and these types of things, this is a person plugged into a war machine. They are a massive threat. You could, you could wipe out the entire city that you're there to protect. And they would have nothing good at. You want this guy to have duty and honor as his forefront so that he He doesn't go, hey, I'm now warlord Ted. And so what they, and so the belief is that the early, I mean, this is before the Mechanicum,

the origins even, even further back. Again, yeah, 20,000, 21, actually, 4,000, 26,000 years. So they built this so that the pilots would have this weird duty and honor to everyone around them. This would prevent them from ever turning on the population. So as we said, not all human colonies had knights, by the way. Very few of them, actually. Yeah, it was a, it's a very small percent. However, all the night worlds ended up in a similar situation.

The imprint print of the ritual created this kind of uniform psyche amongst all the night pilots. And it's kind of hard for me to explain this in a linear fashion. So I'm going to, G.W. wrote this all in terms that from a folk history standpoint are positive. But again, I'm going back into this again, actual history, they're horrifying. So. Well, they became feudalism because they had houses.

Yes. And so let's just get this. The houses had royalty. Yeah. Or it wasn't royalty. It was nobility. Let me get this out of the way because I need to do this. We have, because obviously, thanks to Discord, I do know, we have quite a few people who

listen to our cast who are pretty serious history buffs. Feudalism was an absolute nightmare. Being out of the kings and the lords exploited anyone and everyone below them at a horrifying level that made that it was effective slavery. the great knights of legends are actually nothing more than brutal mercenaries that would actually rape and pillage lesser settlements constantly. Why do you have to make everything sucked? Because people are going to listen to this and I can't, from a moral standpoint, talk about feudalism. Like, wasn't it great?

It wasn't. It got. It sucked. It sucked. All right? They were basically pirates more than they were nobility. But the feudalism of legend is one. of positivity. You know, noble men going on quest to kill evil kings, acquire lost relics,

write the wrongs of society. I'm just saying my Bretonian army and fantasy with his sweet ass banners and cool colors looks pretty awesome. He does, but in reality, they were a nightmare. So when we use the term feudalism here, we're using the term that's associated with fantasy, like King Arthur, not with anyone who's read a book. So anyway. That is, John, making things terrible. I need to do this. It's just something that's always driven me nuts. You know what I think is awesome?

Sweet banners. Yeah, there's an option. What? The psyche that infected all of the pilots of the knights made them view society from an us and them perspective, but in kind of, but with a positive swing. The pilots of these knights were nobles, but they viewed themselves as being tasked with protecting and caring for all their subjects. And the subjects job was just to live their lives and help grow the kingdom,

knowing they were safe from harm, thanks to these noble knights that were always watching over them. This kind of work, though. Yeah, no, because again, it's not real, so it works perfectly. And the knights did it. They looked over the population where their giant walkers, they would kill. There's also things actively trying to kill. Yeah, and they did a great job. And these massive warmen, and not only would they kill the enemies of the people,

but they also used their giant machines to help. with the work of the settlement. By being said earlier, mining, agriculture, whatever, clearing a forest with their giant chain sword, these were great. So over time, all of the night worlds turned into these feudal kingdoms where the nobility class, you know, had an attachment of knights and they just looked over the population. Because obviously over time, these pilots had kids, and then those kids joined a ritual becoming.

And so the family became a family of knights, but they also became a family. of protectors. And these worlds lived in a true symbiotic relationship, as opposed to, and I'm going to call a book out here, Simplicius, Simplicimus, and for the one or two of you that may know what that is, you'll know what I'm referring to, because dear God, real feudalism was horrible.

Probably words. It's a book literally written by a guy. It's a Simplicimus, one of my favorite books. It's written phonetically. Oh, God. It's so hard to read, but it, this guy's talking about his life being, like, kidnapped and, like, watching his mother and sister get raped to death and all these things. It's awesome. Yeah, it sucked.

We'll be right back after a quick break. So over centuries, these houses and their traditions grew. We'll touch more on this later, about for 15,000 years in current 40K, these noble houses are basically the same as they were back then, which is kind of a nice piece of evidence of how powerful the machine spirit imprint is on the mind. of these pilots because no matter who goes to the ritual becoming, they all come out the exact same unless they fall in chaos. So we just accept the fact that a machine spirit's an AI. It's not, though. It's not, I disagree.

It's not an AI. It's not because it's beyond an AI. It's actually scarier than an AI. It's totally an AI. When we do our cast on the age of technology, I will make a ton of movie references to what I think machine spirit is, but lawnmower man comes to mind. I mean, good movie. Also, better story.

Yeah, not good movies. Two not good movies. Cool concepts. Two not good movies. Yeah, I mean, you got me. Settled down. James Bond was in that one. Yeah.

Well, I mean, not good, James Bond. All right. So there is a really important side effect, though, of this feudal rule. It circles back to kind of what we were discussing earlier. All these societies had a very strong leadership structure, and the society were structured. There was true symbiosis between the nobility and the ruled class. So when these first psychers start to appear, they got snuffed out on the night world.

Just snuffed out? I mean, quick, quick. Yeah, because it was a twofer. The nobility didn't want like these upstarts getting powers, but also the ruling class were writing them out because they were like, hey, we've got a good gig going. I don't really need a revolution right now. So as a result, the age of technology turned into the age of strife. The night worlds really weren't that affected.

So long as they had, you know, even the men of iron rebellion or demon possess, you know, they had knights. They were able to deal with. I don't even think the night worlds even knew about demonic possession because they killed the psychers so fast. Well, it probably was like some psychos on the village on the side of the planet. And they're like, oh, you come a bunch of weird things, you know. Yeah. When you've been a psycher for six days and a night show.

Yeah. Yeah. Cannon go burr. Yeah. problem solved. Yeah, I hit him with a volcano cannon. Was he a psycher? Was he a demon?

I don't know. There's a crater there now. Someone want to go look? Go look, yeah. I don't know. So what happens is as long as the planets had enough food to feed themselves, they survived. And so from there, I actually think we should spend a little bit of time

talking about the structure of a night world and how these societies are designed. So let's talk about the structure of the nighthouses and the societies that they're a part of. So effectively, there's multiple types and styles of knights. They're just organized big to small. The largest platforms are the rarest. And I might talk about Titans, just big knights. We'll talk about Titans in the next cast. So like your largest is you're a casest pattern.

These are just massive hulking knights. They're incredibly rare. They would only have gone to a world that was being sold that was basically in active combat. They mostly only consisted on Mars itself. Yeah, but Lancers and atropos. It's cool. No, those are smaller than this.

The case, this is even, is that's, those are the, it's like the, the largest, yeah, the next one of,

yeah. The next one are the dominus, which in eighth edition, had castelins, which I believe are missed by no one. I don't think anyone is like, man,

I wish we still had castlings at table top. After that is what you were to think of, the serastis, my bad. The serrastus pattern was pretty cool. They were this, like, they were a super fast night.

They were, They're made for it. They're made for speed. Yeah, which is, I don't know why. Well, you had a lot of, one of the enemies in the Imperium were actually really, really fast. You have something that can answer.

Yeah. They're one of actually the better looking nights, in my opinion. The most common one. And Lancer looks so awesome with that. I mean, it's stupid, but it's awesome. With his Dunn Shield. Yeah.

It looks cool, though. It does. And you're like, no, it doesn't, it's not very big. Also, it has a power shield around the entire of them. Yeah, the entire thing. has an ion shield, but at least there's a dude holding something. Which is absolutely helping. Yeah, yeah.

But it looks awesome. It does look cool. The most common variation of the Questaurus pattern. This is when we think about 40K nights, this is what this is, this is, this is, this is, and by the way, all these, I should mention, these are all chassis, every single one of them. So every, every world you got this chassis and then you would customize it based on your needs. The last one, though, actually, I'll bring this, this one makes us why I bring us up in a second, is it armagers, which are just baby knights.

These are meant to be like fast skirmishery units that would hunt and packs effectively to achieve the same value as a big knight, because they would use their mobility instead of armor for protection. The reason I bring this up is this has to do it the way a society ends up getting ranked out, because the bigger the knight, the bigger the deal. Knights, I could be wrong on this, but I do believe that you, once you've done, if you can interface, with one night, you can interface with all nights. I don't believe that the different path. I think it's the same part. It's weird, though, because I thought you were semi-tied to that machine spirit. Yeah, but that's what that's why.

Your night could blow up and you could do another night, but I still think you don't leave your existing night. Well, what I think is, I think the machine spirit is in the throne you sit in. I think that that's thrown plugs into the nights. It's kind of how I run. It's weird because a lot of the small night drivers become big night. That's true. That's why I'm saying it.

Because the way that society is structured in these worlds, the bigger than night, the more important you are. So if you're like, you know, a lowly, you know, noble, you're going to drive an armager. But if you actually become successful, you can end up running a Castellan. Is that why people running war glaves go crazy and run at you at Mach 1,000? I just wait people like to play nights. This does, although the funny thing about this, though, is that remember all of these people who are driving these things do have just a fun little side note, have a little bit of a challenge where mentally they're all obsessed with honor and glory. And being the best and honor. So the smaller than night, the more psychopathic the driver probably is to try and prove themselves to get further up, which means the small weak nights are the least reliable because they're not going to follow up.

plan. They're going to fly out of it and go anywhere and try and get glory for themselves. You overextending war glave. Yeah. I mean, and I'm going to make two comments that. One, it's still the case in the 41st millennia in the lore. And two, as someone who plays against knights every now and then, yeah, all you night players, you don't have to come. You don't have to charge forward with every single baby knight the first turn. Yes, you do. It makes it so much easier to win. That's right. Brad and I both play combat armies. It actually is kind of good for us. of my models are hidden behind a wall and you put everything in your army at a charge distance, you with your power fist and me with just my orcs, you know, like,

power claws. Yeah. What if I just kill all of them? All of these knights, though, do have one thing in common. And that is that they're built by an STC, and that STC just builds the knight. The knight then, from a societal standpoint, has to be maintained and improved. And so after conflicts and battles, the knights themselves begin to take damage. And so as we said, all the knights were originally kind of, they're basically identical. And they were designed as take all comers. But they're not because after a few battles, the knights look like fast in the furious

cars. Yeah, because they have to add more pieces to it. Yeah. But not only that, but even before the battles, they have to be customized because you land on a planet, and depending on the climate, the terrain, the type of enemies. Yeah, they would customize the knights up. And so when we talked about before, all the night pilots, their nobility, ranked top to bottom, big night to small knight. You know, either the big knight is the king and the king's 32nd, you know, removed nephew is riding an armager, probably aggressively, you know.

Probably way too far out. Way, and way too fast. The next tier down is this subclass of nobility who became the masters of working on the knights. And to Brad's point, they would, you know, upgrade the armor to adamantium because it's always adamantium in sci-fi. Apparently, every ship had a bunch of adamantium on it along with the SDC. The funny thing is it's supposed to be this rare element, but everyone has just stockpiles of it.

And it's also like apparently they can just make it. I don't, they never go into it, which is actually a good call because they've gone into it. I could just, I'd crap all over it because it gets wrong. So these, but these people would then also. upgrade the armaments. They would use the STCs and they would actually change weaponry tooling, better chainsores because the forestry's denser, more focused cannons for blasting through harder rocks. Wider array cannon. Blocano cannon. Bocano cannon. Concept awesome. Tabletop. And man, when that thing misses, it just hurts inside. It's worse than the rail gun. They would also make

like wider ray cannons, though, if we're dealing with hordes of enemies. You know, this is where it's I think stubbers shoved all over all these knights because they just had hordes to deal with. You think that if these guys would have went to the ad mech, they would have been in charge because in the knight society, they just don't get in. They get there. You're jumping. I'm jumping out. I'm just saying.

Originally not. Yeah, because that's a really interesting point. Initially, these artificers never gained any real prominence in society. They were critical for the nobility. Without them, there are no knights. But they took a very distant backseat to the rest of it. Wildly distant. My theory on that, though, is I think that they viewed it as a self-serving task.

Because if they kept the knight more powerful, they were safer. So they mean, greater good. Yeah. I mean. If you're a night world, if your nights are better and you will probably be safer. But I would also admit that probably the works of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie weren't being listened to it this era. And if you don't know what I'm talking about? Settle down, heritage.

Although over time, these artificers did pick up a second role, which is kind of cool. Artist. They began decorating the knights with symbols and logos, you know, just like, you know, any feudal house, both fantasy and real, they did have banners. I want to go into 40K, though. Some of the most beautiful freehand is on some of the larger nights in 40K. Because we have the space to do it. Yeah, just saying. A lot of the best painters in the game will move at some point.

I'll throw props out to Nova Dome, Josh Ford, just people that just do wildly beautiful artwork. Oh, it looks insane. There's some nights out there that you're just, you look at and you go, please don't put that on the table top. I don't, like, I don't want to be in the presence of that night moving around. I want it behind a display case. Don't let me touch it. I don't get anywhere near. I'm worried one of my dice will hit.

That being said, the knights themselves, as they took on their roles of nobles, also changed a lot. They became less warrior and more diplomat. Because as a noble of a society, you have to handle all the manners of state. Allocation of resources, setting up settling local disputes, arranging marriages to strengthen and weaken other houses. I mean, all the Machiavellian stuff also has to come into play here. And what's kind of cool in the stories is that these just aren't, these weren't the passions of these nobles because at their core, their psyche has been changed. The right of becoming has made them, they just want to be warrior kings.

Yep. But they can't. They have to go do BS all day. And so one of the things that they talk about a lot in the books is these, these nobles are at their happiest when they're piloting a night. Joyous when they're at war. This is where they want to be. And so because all the weights and all the weight of decisions and the state disappear, they just operate their war machine and do what they do best. It's come up more in our next cast.

But, you know, sometimes a noble just hops in their night and leaves, becoming a night of legend. So we're going to deal with that on our next cast a bit, a bit more, but just calling it out now. One flip side of this, though, there is an issue the night lords have, and this is rival factions. So over thousands of years of darkness, the nobility classes grew and grew. And, you know, the first night pilots were not necessarily all related to each other. So when I started having kids and making noble families, at the core, there's only going to be one king.

So you've got numerous families that all can pilot knights. how does this get settled? Always the word competition comes up. Some were more positive than others. So sometimes they would just hold big actual literal competitions among the night warriors. Well, they kept coming up with different competitions. It wasn't even the same competition. Yeah, because every world was different.

But some of them would be like, hey, we're going to go on a grand hunt. Whoever can kill the most like Xenos wins. Or there'd be like a game, like the, like the special. almost jousting, basically, about it. Yeah, I don't, see, I don't like any jousting. And I don't like that, but that's the mistakes you'd injure the night. I want it be more like the Scottish Highland games, where it's like, just shocking stuff. Just who can, whose knight can do can run the fastest, whose night can throw the heaviest tree over its head.

It, to me, is more entertaining. And what they would do is, this is more, by the way, the functional worlds. Whoever won the competition would then take the mantle of King for a set period of time until the next set of games came around. this for the most part by the way was on the up and up there's not there there are some rumors now that's there might have been some cheating at play in a few of them but for the most part it was pretty even but not on all worlds at some worlds the rival factions couldn't come to terms of each other and then they just kill each other and that'd be a best case scenario which is subterfuge but off more than not pure war and a lot of these worlds didn't survive luckily though

for the ones that did survive, Slanesh was born. And I say luckily, because when Slanesh was born, Warp Travel was back. Warp travel comes back on the table and for the first time in about 5,000 years. Or more, depending.

Exactly. Depending on where you were, and to be out. And the admec, to be done, to be found. Yeah. The admec and a soon-to-be-d

Imperium of Man are about to break into the stars. The Crusade. I think we're going to break there because next week we're going to pick up the nighthouses from that point about their discovery by the Imperium being brought back into the fold and a lot of that changes to their structure and that kind of that came as a side effect of that. And the alignment with the Mechanicum, well, depending on what house, because some are

allied pretty close and some are not. Yeah, well, some just aren't allied with the mechanics. Yeah. So, but until next week, this has been John Barsodi and Bradchester. This guy.