The 40k Lorecast - Episode 94 - War of the Beast pt3

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

On today’s cast we continue our coverage of the war of the beast. We open with the invasion of Ullanor. On paper it looked like it was going to go great, but it did not. From there we go back to Terra with the formation of the Death Watch. Then we follow the rediscovery of the Sisters of Silence and a new plan for how to kill the beast. We then close out with the second invasion of Ullanor.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 Varsati and Brad Chester. On today's cast, we'll be continuing our coverage of the War of the Beast with the Invasion of Olenor's, plural. Or I guess it would, no, it would be invasions. Invasion of. Yeah, fair enough. As always, 40K lore casts, a weekly show, focus in the lore of the 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern time. If you like the cast, please like and comment it. It helps our algorithm a lot and pushes up to new listeners.

In addition, in the show notes, you'll see links to our Patreon, our YouTube, and our Discord. Our Patreon exists for those of you who like the cast and want to help us out further. For 499 U.S., you can support us. That's, by the way, 678 Canadian, 770 Australian, 368 pounds in English, and 684 Nepalese rupees for those of you climbing Everest and want to still help us out. I really knew that this was going to happen because you said multiple times, you want to know how much of rupees and everything else. Oh, every time.

I'm just discovering new currency every day. That's how we're going to do it. If you join our Patreon, you do get all of the casts ad free. You can still listen to it on your normal streaming platform. You don't have to listen to it via Patreon for the record. So I wanted to put that out for you because I felt bad asking people to give me money and not give them anything back. So that's what we're trying to do.

Speaking of, we also now have a YouTube channel. Thanks to the support of our patrons, we were able to build this out. On our YouTube page, you will find the old cast that are being updated every single Friday morning with imagery, subtitles, etc. So you can figure out what it was Brad and I

were trying to say while we mumbled it or yelled it into a microphone. That always helps. I do like the fact that I mumbled so bad that sometimes the software says, I have no idea. None of those words were English. Yeah, I actually have chunks in it

where there's just a dots because they didn't know what he was saying. But more importantly, if you come over to our YouTube channel, you're going to see our new shows. We have the history of 40K, which is a show where Brad and I are interviewing people talking about the history of the tabletop game, along with a new show for Brad, Brian, and Horton

called Two Old Men and Their Handler, talking about more of a competitive style. And we have Q&A sessions. And when Brad and I go to events, we now have a streaming of the setup. So you'll be able to see us playing live games. So if you're interested, please come over to our YouTube.

We'd love to have you there. Last thing, Discord. We love our Discord. We want more of you in our Discord. And it's great seeing how people are there. Time of recording, we're at just about 9,000 people in our Discord. It is a great place for anyone who loves 40K and 40K lore. we have everything from literature recommendations, episode discussions, favorite movies, video games.

The biggest piece about it is it's full of help. That's why we really do love it, is it's full of a place you can go to to get help on recommendations or help on learning more. So links in the show notes, please come in. As always, huge thanks to our moderators who are helping keep the space what it is. But now, on to the guest. So let's recap where the hell we are. A lot of stuff has happened. Yeah, these are, as we said, guys, we're taking 12 books, actually more than 12 books

because we end up going beyond the end of the World of Beast. So in more than 12 books, we're compressing down to forecasts. And good news is some of those books aren't that well written. So we're actually saving you guys a lot of hours of your lives. Not wrong. But it's sad, but it's true. So recap, seemingly out of nowhere, the entire. empire was beset by an orc incursion, not just like a small horde of orcs appearing, but much worse.

The orcs had new technology that was allowing them to teleport attack moons into systems, and these attack moons had portals inside of them that were teleporting billions of orcs out, completely wrecking the Imperium. The Lords of Terror, of course, proved massively useless during this era, choosing instead of the baker amongst themselves or just be feckless in their leadership. the initial invasion was seemingly stopped at a place called Port Sanctus only by the Imperium throwing the entire Imperial Navy at them, which did destroy the attack moon, but lost well over half of the Imperial Navy.

That victory was then short-lived because a new attack moon appeared in the orbit literally above Terra. I think orbit is way, way too broad of what was actually going on. I guess very, very, very low orbit. Like, hey, man, I think if I jump high, I could touch that moon. Yeah, it wasn't in an ideal location. I mean, it was if they were trying to check out the giant celebration that they were throwing for the utter defeat of the orcs.

That was, yeah, it was mildly awkward. To make matters better, the Lords of Terra devised a genius plan to handle it by transporting tens of millions of citizens of terror to the moon armed with whatever they could find. Yeah, I was what to say. Citizens, you act like it was people that are trading for the event. No, they sent the dude that owns Duncan Donuts and told them to grab a broom and charge. And it did work because we sent a whole bunch of Ted's from Duncan's.

And well, until they clapped two mountains together and killed. and killed all of them. So at this point, it was looking like it was all over. Luckily, the successors of Dorn's Imperial Fists all arrived in the system, attacked the moon and destroyed the orc forces, saving humanity. During this period, two things were discovered. First, the source of the orc invasion was Ulanor Prime, which was, for those who remember back in the Horace heresy episodes,

this is where this was the end of the Great, This is the end of the Great Crusade, where Horace and the legions defeated the orcs kind of forever and supplanted humanity's superiority in the galaxy. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, it didn't work apparently. So now they had to go out there and deal with that. But before they could do that, the prime Vulcan reappears super randomly. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So they had to go and grab Vulcan. So now we've got this. Well, they kind of. Well, they did have to go. Vulcan said I'm not going anywhere until I take care of this. Yeah. You're right.

Vulcan wasn't waiting at the bus stop for them. There was a side quest. They had to go on to get Volker. We're talking about this for just one more second because I love Vulcan. It makes me super happy that he was on the planet, just wrecking people with his hammer, like Sauron in the beginning of Laura the Rigs, just smoking orcs. Oh, the stories, that's actually one of the funnier stories. You guys should read that.

I can't remember which War of the Beast book it is. Just Google, like War of the Beast Vulcan returns. It is hilarious because there are, he's literally killing thousands of orcs at a time with a hammer swing, which the math isn't great on. Sorry, which the physics isn't great on. You shish your face, John. But anyway, so let's get to it.

We now have Vulcan has rejoined the Imperium and they're launching the invasion to Ulnor to crush the Ork Waugh once and for all. Let's talk about the invasion of Ulinar. So this is now the largest kind of invasion since the Great Crusade. There were nine space marine chapters. Actually, nine space marine, yeah. It's nine space marine chapters came in.

And the big thing about this in using it already, boom, went to biggest. I'm going to use literally almost in a second. It'll be great. We have five successive chapters of the Imperial Fist because the Imperial Fist are now Ted. So we got the Templars, the Fis, the Crimson Fis, Fis exemplar. the Iron Knights and the Xcorriaries. And then we've got Ultramines because it's a GW book. The Blood Angels, Space was Dark Angels.

Every one of the factions that's played all the time is now on the board. This is also wildly, since the Horace heresy, we have not had a large gathering of Marines. This is a thousand years now that we've had anybody in any rariness. in any relevant number show up. It also, we haven't had, during the Great Crusade, we had all these combined forces all the time. Since then, all these chapters since they broke up

have been very almost separate entities. They helped the successor chapters, but there was a lot of just Yolo solo between different peoples. Now, I will admit, in the books, the Ultramarines, Blood Angels, Spaceals, and Dark Angels are present. But they're not one of the, they're not the key part. The key part of this are the Imperial Fist successors. And actually, I should also point out, we said there are five successor chapters.

There also is the Imperial Fist, the one guy left. Oh, Corman is also there. The Fist. Yeah, there's a Fist who's also present. Additionally, we've got close at 10 regiments of Imperial Guard. We've got Imperial Knights, Ligio Skittari, Ligio Cybernetica, even Titans were all deployed. So this force was designed when they went out there. their expectation was we're going on an ass kicking mission and we've brought everything we need for

this. Well, is that even just the ass kick mission? They're not going to win. They're going to grind them out so there's no, nothing left. That was their whole point. They're bringing so much. It's the round way. I don't know how many guys it was going to take, but I know how many they're going to use.

Yeah. But the whole journey to Ulanor is fraught with foreshadowing. As I said before, these books aren't that well written in some bits. So the first kind of warning sign they get to is Vulcan just hangs out by himself. He doesn't take like a mantle of leadership. He just goes and sits in what is actually Corlin's room and just hangs out there for the entire trip. So then Corland is, along with the head of the Mechanicum, are the ones planning the entire invasion while there's a, like, Primark. And I want to put out, when we say Primark, the absolute smartest person tactically and everything that

existed in this entire thing by a power of like 20 is just sitting back in a room playing a game boy. So whatever. I hate it every part about that, by the way. It's true, though. The next big warning sign they get is they're trying to pinpoint the main base of the orcs and they can't do it. Something that came up in this book that's kind of cool is when the Imperium goes to war, they actually use their librarians to scout ahead. They use warp site, which has been in the game has not been in the game, depending on the addition, as candidly, to scout ahead and look for enemy encampments, fortifications,

and this is how the Imperium plans, this is our invasion plan, et cetera. But every time they try to do this, these librarians would burn out. Some of them, the lucky ones, their brains melted. Say burn out. They were getting their heads popped off like the tops of dandelions.

Yeah, well, those were the happy ones. The good ones were the ones who just screamed and their heads exploded. The other ones went insane. somebody even attacked their space marines on the ship. And this is because the orcs possess a very strange warp presence. They're not in tune to the warp the way the elder or humans are, but with enough orcs come together,

their effect disrupts the warp massively. And so you just can't scry into it. They're unique, by the way. When they do this, this isn't like, I guess it is kind of similar to Shadow of the Warp from Tyrannids, but it's more violent. But it also at the same time... Shadow the worst return is something they're specifically doing.

Yeah. But the same time, though, when they're able to disrupt the warp this much, it doesn't affect chaos. Like, because normally if you're talking about, oh, there's a heavy disruption in the warp that's like burning people out, then oftentimes that would be accompanied by a break in the materium, the immaterium that would allow the imiterium to enter the material. That's not orcs. Orks are goofy. Weirdly enough, the log is almost like a self-contained network. It keeps getting larger and more powerful as it grabs more orcs. but trying to get into that network,

there's a lot of firewalls that you're going to encounter. Yeah, it seems, and the thing is cool is, I wish this would be in the game, by the way, but in the lore, it affects both. It affects humanity. It also affects chaos. Screw that. It used to, John.

One of the best parts, the old best parts about playing orcs was when you got enough boys around one of your weird boys, he would get a bonus. Was it up to six? Oh, you used to smite. things off board with that guy. He'd get extra damage, extra

power, but if he got a result over 12 with your 2D6 plus whatever the thing, he took damage. He just died. But what I'm saying is that in the lore, it also negatively affects enemy psychers, which it didn't, and anything you're right, I got a better

deny, but I'm talking about it should be almost like a null field should be coming off. If you read the lore, like if you're a psycher and you're trying to cast the power, like you're a thousand sons and you're fighting the orcs, there's enough or boys, those powers start to struggle because you can't get to the war because there's so much disruption happening around you. But anyway, orcs causing chaos and shenanigans? What? I know. It's why they're the best army. After a bunch of attempts, though, they are able to scry in

and they kind of figure out where the headquarters are. And it is, surprise, surprise, exactly on the site where Horace and the forces of the Imperium and the Emperor celebrated their victory over the Orcs, there is now a massive structure. I need to talk about this, brother. because not only is this whole planet covered with different fortifications and everything else, their main fortress is a comically large orc fortress, which means that there's stuff on it that shouldn't work at all. And it's just wildly too big. It's like if you're trying to play the wildest game of Jenga ever,

and they just built a fortress into the sky, it's fantastic. It's just they kept putting guns. and stuff and kept building up and out. The last big warning sign they get, though, is they can't get a fix on the position of the bulk of the orc forces within that fortress. They're blind to it. So they just knew, all right, that fortress is where we're going.

And again, the imperian's viewpoint was, we've brought more than enough forces. Screw this, let's land, and then we'll go beat these orcs into the ground. So then we get into the invasion, which doesn't go great. Upon, literally, my turn, upon arriving in orbit, the orcs launched this incredible attack on the fleet. And orc shooting, as we said before, is orc shooting.

And orc armor is not much better. So the Imperium beats this fleet back pretty well. The fleet comes in. They're more of a nuisance because as it comes in, this incredible size of Imperial Navy just pushes them to the side. At which point, the Imperium starts to get confident. And they decide, cool, let's get a beat. head for an invasion. And this is when warning sign number one occurs. The entire planet. Warning sign number one, it's a pretty big warning sign. I'd say a red flag, sir, because they

had a force field across the entire planet. It wasn't like an area was covered, but they didn't for it, you have a force field across, oh, I don't know, a couple of the structures. They went, hey, I didn't know where to put it. So we just surrounded the planet with a force field. You're like, I want to point out when Horace invaded Terra, the emperor's force field was just over the imperial palace. This was a force field stronger than the emperor's one that was around the entire planet. Because go orcs. The ordinance that the Imperial Navy fires down just starts bouncing off of it. And more importantly, they can't teleport down, which is one of the space marines' favorite tactics is they teleport down.

You bombard. Then we teleport down behind you. and we crush you. They can't do that. So now they have to do a manual landing. So they start landing and landing and landing. Despite some initial losses, the landing is not that difficult, but once they get down there,

it becomes a pretty solid issue. Because as they arrive in the outskirts of the city, the local population doesn't really offer up much resistance. More importantly, as the space marines are killing orcs, there's not a lot of reinforcements coming. This is a pretty good warning sign, guys. Hold, please, sir, because you're stepping over one of the things that might be the best part of this story. John, where did they drop down to?

Orc City has a name. I'm going to say, my friend, I meant to say, Comrade John, what was the name of the city? So for some dumb reason, they decide to call it Gorkograd. I mean, there are a thousand better options here. Gorkopolis, Morka Gorkaville. big green city, orc door, is what I would have gone with. They probably would have gotten sued for an insured. Still worth it. Worth it.

But anyway, the imperial forces reach Gorkogrod, and this is when the beast unleashes his first trick. The entire planet of Ulanor was not really an orc settlement like the Imperium thought it was. It was a planet-sized attack moon, being the orcs could manipulate the surface the way they do on the attack moons. as the imperial forces come rushing towards Gorka Guard, the planet itself starts to shift and change and creates basically a kill zone. Mountains just pop up all around the place. There's only one valley into Gorka Guard,

and the Imperium goes right into the valley and discover the thing about orc shooting, as we've said before, it's not very accurate. We don't have to be very accurate when all the bullets can only go one place. And they just are getting slaughtered. Then, Ork Forrest part two shows up.

I'll say, come on. Stoppa lovers are going to be pretty happy about that. Oh, the next part's gross. The orc forces open up just this psychotic level of gargance, which is the orc term for gorkanats, morcanots, and stompas. This is just, like, the Imperium's never seen this level ever. We're at, like, 50, 60 times what they probably thought orcs even possessed, and they're all right here.

pretty quickly the battle begins to turn to a stalemate and the imperium's taking catastrophic losses over 50% of the imperial guard are dead a third of the space marines are dead close to half the titans nightens and legio forces are gone so luckily brad's buddy decides now let me in here baby so things are going bad i get i feel you could check all bad because well they're also a little We already said that they were pretty cocky on this. The way they positioned the Titans, the Knights, was pretty bad. They actually mentioned this in the book. And they get hit by all of this anti-vehicle stuff that they didn't think they had,

even though they already were showed that they had it the last time they fought. So whatever. However, Vulcan decides that the entire trip here, he was putting on his boots and mighty ass kicking head to lace them extra tight and then push the making so many gestures that no one can see, tightens them up with the 80s. The 80s pumps. So he grabs his hammer and starts just waiting

in and wrecking shop. Oh, yeah, he's taking his hammer to Gorkanauts and they're just dropping. This is no joke, Vulcan time. And he begins to turn the tide and the imperial forces start driving their way toward the imperial palace. Now, at the same time,

we talked last time about Isad Wire. So he was the super assassin, that Van Goric pulled out out of retirement to help him. Esot had also gone to Ulinar by himself. They never explained how he got there or whatever. I don't care. But he's not part of the invasion force. He's an independent.

He was deployed like an assassin. And the idea was he would go there and just kill the beast from the shadows because he's a venom assassins. He's a master of poison. Also, it cracks me up because he's just doing the Steve Bouchet, walking around going, hello, fellow, Orks. I am also, I am with you too.

Those silly humans will be here soon. Please don't pay attention to me. And Isad is, he's a super spy. So he finds his way into the massive temple dedicated to Mork and Gork. Inside, he never finds the beast, though. And the reason why is as he's getting in there, he finds tens of thousands, not tens of, not tens of thousands of war boss orcs all wearing heavy armor. These are mega knobs, but two or three.

times the size. Also, this is one of those things where, hey, man, you should have grabbed a radio and went, someone should know about this before. Yeah, exactly. Before the invasion was going. But the scene isn't written as well as it could be because it should have been happened. He should have popped his head in there and just going, oh, shit. And then ran out. But there's a bunch more drama. But there's also, by the way, orc gargantz and mega gargant. Oh, see. A mega gargant was there also. Which is, yeah, which is the orcs version of a Titan, which I don't, this is the first time we'd ever even seen one? This may have been the first sighting of a mega gargant in history.

100%. Yeah. So Isad realizes he can't infiltrate past tens of thousands of war boss orcs wearing mega armor. And he also realized this is a trap, that the second the imperial force will get close enough, this whole force will come out and they're going to get slaughtered. So then he does a weird thing. He steals an orc plane, no idea how, and flies it back to the imperial forces, which, by the way, don't shoot it down. But in by bide, someone did shoot part of it. In by bide, Aesad shows up like Jack Sparrow, when the ship's sinking, and he just gets out at the very last second to walk in.

I assume that's what he did, mainly because he walks instantly out of the plane and just starts talking. Like, well, yeah, and it's, there's a whole, there's a lot, obviously, there's better details, but my interpretation of it was he effectively went, hey guys, super assassin here, just doing my own thing while you guys were all dying and struggling. Anyway, I want to give you a heads up. I already infiltrated the place you're trying to go. What? Why didn't I show you how to get there?

That's not important. And why didn't I kill the beast? Anyway, fair point. But look, there's a huge trap waiting for you. What did I do about the huge trap? Oh, nothing. Absolutely nothing about the huge trap. But I'm here now telling you that the greatest poison.

assassin in the galaxy. Poisoned Zero people. Did zero poisoning. And I'm just letting you know you guys should be careful if you keep going that way. Peace out, deuses, and then leaves. It's just like, I gave them some undercooked chicken. Yeah. It's like, wait, that would have been a nice step.

Give him a little bit of undercooked chicken. He literally went, wow, that's a lot of bad guys. Someone should do something about that and then leaves. So Corland, this point, decides to halt the salt in the main orc fortress because he realizes they'll never get there. And again, the story takes a weird turn. Randomly, orcs now apparently need food, which they do need, but it's just randomly. He then decides that he's going to attack all of the orc food supplies instead of invading.

Because somehow Corlin knew the orcs were suffering from a lack of food, and they'd already begun eating the Gretchen, human slaves, and other things. This never happens outside of these books, by the way. This is why this whole part's really weird. So Corlin's grand new plan is I'm going to attack all the food supplies of the orcs to increase the stream of their logistics. And that'll force the orcs to come out and fight us instead of us trying to go into their fortress. This doesn't make sense because that's what you do in a multi-month siege. You don't do that like, all right, I'm going to attack your food stuff at 2 p.m. And I wait for you to attack me at 4 p.m.

Which is what happens. Right. In the book, he attacks their food supplies. like twice and they're like, oh, we should probably attack now. I mean, he could have just yelled out that they wanted to fight and they would have came out. Yeah. Luckily for Corlin, the admec had brought a group called the Legio Ordinata, you know, ordinance. And they're in charge of the massive guns of the Mechanicum.

These are weapons that actually have to be assembled on site. They're that big. And they bring the Wamp. And so as the orcs come out into Corlin's new fancy trap, these religio Ordinatus open fire and actually do wreck a bunch of the orc stuff. And so now that they're, yeah, so now the tide is turning. And the orcs are a bit more disjointed and the Imperium can attack again. And they make their great big push.

And they get right up to the kind of the edge of the temple of Mork and Gork. Hold on. surprise. Because you know what the best way to be awesome when you're worshipping gork and morgue? Make the whole temple a giant. A stomp. A stompah.

Yeah. It just stands up. Literally, the temple, the temple gets up and begins shooting at them and just starts wrecking shop because they're fighting what might be the largest titan in the galaxy, powered by the orcs.

It did a, Braveheart on it. Willie Wallace was shooting fireballs out of his eyes and lightning bolts from his eyes. He was actually doing that and they describe it as a matter of fact in the book. That is true. Yeah, it does shoot lasers

out of its eyes, which was super cool. Vulcan then decides again, all right, I'm going to solve this. And Vulcan leads because he's Brad's favorite Primark. Hey, Brad, what's the equipment Vulcan uses here? This is so silly. He did a spot

versus spy. He jumped out of a plane. Yeah. Yeah. Vulcan leads an airborne assault. Flying planes into the giant gargain and jumping out of the planes as they're coming. He didn't have a jump back. He didn't have anything. He just

jumped out of a plane. Yeah. If you were a raid of fire, McConae, he jumps at a dragon with the worst plan ever. I'm going to hit something in the air with the hammer. I forgot how bad that movie was. When you're like, could have just moved any way and you would have just died

pointlessly. But Vulcan does it. He lands. He does it. Yep. And Vulcan lands and luckily it's not that protractive of a battle. It's just montage time. Vulcan and crew lose, almost lose, but claim victory over and over and over again. And they push their way to the core of the structure. And when they get to the core, they find a 10 meter tall statue of, you know, of an orc and me, to an orc. This is the statue to the beast, except that it's not. It is. It is. But also, but you got to go back just a big because when they fought through, this isn't a small thing. They fought stop us inside the stopper.

That's true. Yeah. I forgot about that yet. They were fighting because we're talking about a mega gargant, which is the size of a city almost. And they're fighting gorkina. morcanots and stompas walking around said city they're fighting war bosses that are almost vulcan size yeah it's just but it's a you know there's a really great music going on behind this you know city size i think this is definitely Toledo could definitely be a mega gargant no and I'm saying no because Toledo hasn't earned that right anyway so they find this massive 10 meter statue to to the beast. And it turns out it's not a statue to the beast. It is the beast. The beast is a three-story building orc who's covered in mega armor who stands up. And they just, this is the

largest orc by the way ever recorded in imperial history to this day. Also, but is he? He's not a crook. And we're going to cover that in the next episode. He's not a crook. We do get in a different book. We get clarification on that. And I will give you guys all that in our next episode. But as soon as the beast stands up, the space marines start trying to attack it. And he kills two chapter masters basically instantly. The chapter master of the crimson fists and the ultramarines just die. I'm calling this out because this is like in the movie when the guy that you've never talked to before goes, I'm sure hoping to get back home to my family. And you're like, that guy will die instantaneously. Both of these guys know it was the same thing. They're like, oh, I'm

I love my men and they're great fighting forces and everything's going to be perfect. You're like, you guys are going to die in like three pages. Yeah, effectively, obviously these books don't have, when you buy a novel from Black Library, there's no pictures in it, but these guys were wearing red shirts. Oh, sure. 100% red shirts. The beast just wrecks them. And then Vulcan steps forward with his hammer because his plans, I'm going to kill the beast.

Cornland looks at the boss on boss fight that's about to happen and just tells everyone in, hey, let's get the F out of here, which does have an interesting side note. There is a Black Templar High Marshal named Bowman who has been here the whole time. Bowman is a very seriously Black Templar character. He is grumpy and he yells at everybody all the time. He's right a thousand percent of this because he calls Coralid out for being a coward and abandoning him, but he's not wrong. Like, who is not wrong?

This is the smart move. Vulcan's going to kill the beast. We're all going to die because the beast and Vulcan are fighting. Literally, if the beast turns too hard to the left, he'll kill a Chapter Master just by bouncing into him. So maybe we give these guys some space. Settle down your rattling sniper and your no bravery. I mean, Vulcan's also a perpetual. You know who's not a perpetual?

Anyone else in the room. That is the least moving speech that's ever been given. Guys, here's the thing. just let him fight because if he wins, it's cool. If he loses, well, just come back. Yeah. No big deal. It's you, like 10 of your buddies,

and the biggest, strongest one of your buddies is also a Highlander. Why don't we just let the Highlander fight? Why do we have to die? Because the guy he's fighting is not a Highlander and therefore won't cut his head off. I think we got time. So this actually gets funny because Corlin and Bowman get into it. And Bowman knocks into the ground and stands over him

and starts basically yelling at him. And Bowman, to his credit, backs down at this point, but just wanted to point out if we get to look, because this is going to come up a few different times. Bowman is not happy about this. But they do leave. And Vulcan and the Beast have their duel to some Japanese anime music. And because that's all this fight is. Vulcan eventually says, I'm a perpetual are you and grabs the beast and tackles it into the generator. And I don't know, the whole thing explodes.

And it detonates the core. The gargant explodes. Vulcan does actually die this time. I mean, sort of the sense of, well, Vulcan does one of his deaths where Vulcan dies. Disappearing acts? Exactly. And it doesn't reappear immediately. So there's somewhere, Vulcan is now somewhere else that's not here.

Who knows where? But this does cut the wa. So all the orcs on the planet become a listless mob. And this allows imperial forces to retreat. They actually, they don't just go back to orbit. they go all the way back to Terra from this battle. And this is because they took a brutal amount of losses here. Well, let's talk about the thing on that,

because this is the first time that you've ever seen some like that. For all you Star Wars fans, the Beast was effectively using battle meditation on everybody, which is why it was such a huge loss of why. Because typically you lose the log because you cut off the head and it slowly kind of goes away. In this particular scenario, You know, they just, it wasn't they didn't stop fighting at all, but they kind of just lost all will to fight.

Yeah. What's interesting is the Imperium has this moment where the orcs are all listless, but they've taken so much losses. They actually can't attack. I mean, it's usually the idea is if your opponents are sitting there just standing still, you wander around and just shoot them all in the head. But the Imperium didn't have enough people or bullets to do that. So they had to leave. And the plan was to go, it was to come back again later and wipe them out. So they go all the way back to Terra.

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Vulcan's gone. they've lost two chapter masters, the crimson fists, and so between the ultramarines, and the crimson fists who are now short-handed, get it. Yeah. I mean, let's talk about who actually took the most losses, because the Marines are like, we lost so many people, the Imperial Guard went, oh, my God, it was a,

we jumped into a wood chipper, so many Imperial Guardsmen died. And the Imperial Navy and the AdMAC. I mean, these are catastrophic losses. And the problem is, as we just said, the orcs are still out there. They're less organized, but there's still trillions of them that have to get dealt with. But things get worse. And what gets worse is suddenly every Vox channel in the Imperium.

Actually, I could be wrong. I thought it was the Imperium, but it may have just been on Terra or in the soul system. I couldn't quite grasp it when I was reading, I was everybody's books a long time ago. And so I had to go back there and reread the Cliff Notes. But what you get is, I am slaughter. I am slaughter. I am slaughter on repeat. And now we know that either the beast has lived or what everyone really what kind of Coraline team

think happened is that one of the thousands of war bosses has stepped in to take its place. But either way, the orc menace is not over. However, got kind of a problem, guys. The Space Marine legions just took close to 50% losses. So those chapters, they're below functioning strength. fight at these levels. In order to redeploy to Ulnor, they'd have to recruit other

chapters. Or Reform into new ones. So now we're going to get into the Death Watch. We've covered Death Watch in the prior episode, but it's more fun to do it again this way. Corland has this idea. What he realizes is that in the war with the

orcs, he's struggling because they had to engage in force. This is the way the space Marines fight. They deploy themselves with heavy weapons, support teams, et cetera, all at once. And the goal of a space marine fighting force is to overwhelm, is to just overwhelm their foes with force and with numbers. The challenge is that in order to fight the orcs, what they needed was small groups of five or ten Marines to deploy in specific, very tactical missions. Missions that themselves wouldn't do anything, but when done in sequence with a lot of other

missions, can actually reshape a battle. It's specialized, too, though, because they were specifically designed. They put these kill teams together to do a specific thing. Fight a specific type of foe. Blow up a specific type of thing. And they would send them, boom, do your thing. Get the hell out. You weren't responsible for anything else in this.

And this is something that space marines really didn't do. So his idea was, I'll form these little kill teams. And to exactly Brad's point, they're going to disrupt supply lines. They're going to mess with communication. They might just work and kill a key war boss in this case or a key foe. And the idea is really good, but there's a huge problem. These are space marines. So they would have to be led by a space marines because space marines only take orders

from space marines. That's just one of their things. And what he's proposing is to create a new branch of the space marines, which the lords of Tara were not okay with. Much. Yeah. And the reason they're not okay with it is that this would effectively be the most elite fighting force in the galaxy outside of the custodes.

and they didn't really want it being an independent body. And to their, when I say their defense, let me say it this way. I'm not saying they're right. They're not. But refresh real quick for everybody. When they're forming the Death Watch, they're talking about taking people from all the different chapters and reins, but they're best in the brightest, their best candidates.

This is why it's so scary because not only are you creating a new branch or creating a new branch of, the best of every chapter is going to be outside of any control for us. And to defend the Lords of Terror, the reason they're thinking this way is as it stands today, they had no control over the Space Marines or the Custodes or the Assassins. That part's going to be a problem later. Adding another collection of just basically unstoppable killing machines, the list of things they have no control over, and by the way, don't like them very much, wasn't great. Of course, they put it to a vote and Corlin loses badly.

He actually only gets one vote in favor, and that's from Van Gorich, who's the head of the assassin. So it looks like this is over. But remember that attack moon above Terra that the bunch of space marines conquered and beat? Well, they never got destroyed. And it suddenly reactivates and a bunch of orcs start popping out of it. Could the ad mech have disassembled it and turned it off? Probably. Did they throw it into the sun?

They left it there. Why? Just been sitting there. So a new broadcast comes out to Tara, and it's the beast, and he's telling him that I'm here to slaughter all of humanity. So Corlin says, hey, guys, remember that vote we just had? Any chance you're willing to have a second vote on it. And this time around, the Lords of Tara agree. Vote with real well.

Yeah, real quick. Turns out, oh, yeah, you're super special for us. It'll fight the orcs that I'm now looking at. Yeah, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, I'm going to vote yes. But there was one small change. And this does matter more. It doesn't really matter for this cat.

but it matters to the future. In setting this up, Corlin made one sacrifice. The sacrifice he made was that this new chapter of space marines would be led by space marines, but it would be under the Inquisition. It would not be a truly independent body. This way, the Lords of Terror, because the Inquisition is part of the High Lords of Terra,

would still have some level of control over it. Important thing to note, by the way, is that none of the Lords of Terra know the Grey Knights exist. So this is now the second chapter that the Inquisition is getting, but the only people who know that are the Inquisition and a few chapter masters. So all the survivors of the first Ulanor siege

sign up to join this new force called the Death Watch and they paint their armor black as a tribute to their fallen brothers and for people like me to paint my army a lot faster. They do the shoulder pads though to let you know where they were from. They do, but I'll tell you what, man, it is really nice painting Death Watch. It is not a complicated process if you would do it quickly.

Some black armor. Go, go, go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, assemble model, Abadon Black Rattlecan. So I'm now one-third of the way done. Yep. But anyway, if you want to know more about Death Watch, by the way, guys, episode 70 and 71 are the ones that we covered them. So you can go back to listen to them. We went very in depth.

But for this story, the Death Watch deployed to the moon, and they did some work. The Imperial Navy kind of flies around the moon and keeps the orcs just contained so they can't get down to Terra. And the Death Watch deploy weaponry from the Admec. And as we said the last one, the admec wanted the teleportation technology from the orcs, and they stole it. And so what they'd done was they actually created their own version of this tech that would allow them to teleport large things all around it. So they gave it to the death watch. And hey, just deploy these beacons, whatever it is. And then once they're activated, we're going to try to teleport this moon into the sun.

Problem solved. Everyone's like, yeah, this is awesome. Hey, Brett, how functional is ad mech technology? I mean, sometimes you've got to roll the dice. Yeah. And it's not, let's say it's not a two to six. You're going to need a hard six. I actually think we're going to have to get some percentile dice out for the D&D folks. Yeah. So anyway, when the teleportation is activated, half of the moon teleports to another galaxy. Yep. In my mind, though, I really, really think that there's a couple ad back guys. It would all the Death Watch and everybody else was asking how this was going to work.

they all went very confidently. It's going to work kind of maybe, probably. I'm going to back up just a little bit. Yeah, exactly. They had no idea. It's that scene in Ghostbusters where he turns on the proton pack and the guys in the elevator, so it's just leaning away from it. That's basically where the ad mech were here.

So they flip the switch and again, half the planet teleports away. The issue is this not structurally sound so that now the remaining half of the orc attack moon collapses in on itself and debris, because remember, this is in the atmosphere of Terra, just starts raining down on Terra, millions of citizens die to the falling debris. Oopsies. Yeah, but my bad. That's on me, guys. Yeah.

Sorry, Admec does raise their hands and say, well, I mean, we did say turn it on slowly. So the good news is the imminent orc invasion of Terra has again been ceased. The bad news is the beast is alive. I'm going to do something about that. Now, despite the success of the kill teams, Corland still couldn't attack Olinor because the last time they were there, they got overwhelmed,

and this time they have even less stuff to bring. So he needs a secret weapon to fight the orcs. And what they realized was they had to fight the power of the wa. Because as they saw, once the beast went down, it was easier to do it. But getting to him is going to be tough. So they have to figure out how we can fight the war. And the wa is so powerful, they literally imperial psychers can't get through it.

So it's burning out librarians. They had to fear a different tactic. And now inquisitor Veritas, we mentioned before. We have two inquisitors here. And Veritas is at this point like a 1,500 years old, so he knows all the secrets. So he comes up with another idea. And after the end of the Horace heresy, the Sisters of Silence actually became outcasts of the Imperium.

I don't know why, by the way, but they just were. It would be useful against all of your main foes. Yeah. And they were just outcasted by the Imperium for what seems to be no reason. Quick recap, scissors of silence are called that because they carry the pariah gene, which makes them blanks. Blanks create a negative space in the warp. And so that negates the powers of psychers or anything trying to even get power from the

warp. If you put a blank next to a cyker, they can't cast powers. because they can no longer touch the warp. Yeah, except for the given the other part, even if you're not a psycher and a sister of silence is near you, they create an aura of dread, depression, sadness, everything around you is lifeless and no longer worth living. So they're not somebody that you invite over, say, to your parties,

which is why you keep them away from everybody else. And so that's kind of hinted as to why they left that, like, well, you know, after the end of the Horace heresy, we weren't needed. I'm getting that for that in a second, guys. And so therefore, we're just going to go off to the other side of the galaxy. Not needed, by the way. They were one of the emperor's elite forces. It's them and the custodes were together.

I don't know why they went on a Uker tournament picnic. Yeah. So anyway, the emperor has been interred in the Golden Throne, and I guess they had no formal group to be part of. They still were on all the black ships, by the way. But because the astrotelopathica loved them, but it's a very small number. And they leave the Imperium's core and they settle some fringe worlds to go just, I guess, hang out and farm.

Also, Veritas knew that all of them were there instantaneously. Also, this is, you know, I'm going Brad rant on this. Because you have one of your most rare, most powerful weapons. And you went, hey, they should all live on Nabu. hanging out being farmers with no defenses. So if anybody went, that's a terrible, powerful weapon that they could use against me. I'll just go down there and they'll throw sticks at me because we left them with no defense. This is the dumbest idea ever.

Yeah. As DeBrad's foreshadowing, they're out in the Segmentum Pacificus, which is the far left of the galaxy. And as Corland and the team go out there, they discover the orcs are also there. The orcs had sensed the presence of, I guess, sorry, the lack of presence of the sisters, is by the way of saying it, and went there to kill them. So, Corland and team saved the sisters, but then found the sisters of silence were less than thrilled to join him, probably because they'd been outcasted by the Imperium, and they weren't anti-imperium, but they also weren't pro-lords-of-Terra Imperium.

Yeah, they also were pretty mad that the emperor personally had. said, this is what I want my empire to be. And, well, it's not right now. Yeah, I will say reading the data scribes of what's been going on since they left the Imperium didn't go great. The sisters effectively say to him, we'd rather watch this version of the Imperium burn down than help it. It sucks.

Yeah. Because this is everything that we hate. Because the sisters of silence are extremists in their belief of the emperor. Corland agreed with him about the Imperium as a whole. And he says, look, you know, the only way we. we can save the Imperium, though, is to write this ship and defeat the Orch threat. And he justifies himself to them by saying, look, Vulcan was just here, and he agreed with me. He name drop the crap on a Vulcan with this.

Oh, yeah. Which is also funny because, and again, the book doesn't do this, and I wish they had. Because he's talking about, we have Vulcan reappeared, he's fighting with us. I mean, the most noble primark was on our cause. And none of the sort of said, great, where is he right now? which should have been your next question. I'm like, so the Vulcan's with you? Yeah.

Can I talk to him? Oh, he died. I have no idea where he is right now. And he didn't come back to help you again. No, why? Cool. Yeah, I have to give you credit. On our show notes, there's never been a more accurate synopsis of what's going on

than what you say right now. Yeah, they agreed. The Sisters of Silence agree. and they put together an A-Team-style plan to go do this. Not McGiver. McGiver would make a small thing. This is full-blown. A-team is locked in a garage and is going to attack with a very strange tractor.

It's trying to fly that tank. Which, again, by the way, guys, for our longer listeners, A-Team's another show. Don't go back and re-watch it. It will ruin you. It's not good. It's okay. It's better than some other ones, but it's not that good. What you're talking about.

I love it when a plan comes together. It's a lot of great things, but again, they throw grenades at people and the guys jump through the air and get a concussion. That's how grenades work. Everybody knows that. So the Imperium decides to make an antimatter bomb for like a better phrase. They're going to use the pariah power of the sisters of silence, and they're going to combine it with orc wae energy, and it's going to create a negative orcua energy. And if this negative orc-wha energy hits the real wah energy, it'll explode backwards and destroy all the orcs. And they actually test it for once, go ad Mac on testing.

And it works. So they decide, we've got it. Let's go. By the way, they tested it one time. One time. It did work. It burned out the mind. 100% more testing than they usually do.

Yeah. True. So this is their new weapon. This is their new tactic. They go back to Illinois. This time, they're bringing more space marines. but the problem is they're bringing less support. So there's less Guard and less Navy.

And that's actually important because we talk about numbers. For the Guard, for example, the Guardsmen outnumber the Space Marines, 1 million to 1. So when we say we're bringing 100% more space Marines, but 50% less guard, that's an astronomic reduction in force size. They decide, though, that since they don't have as many people, they need to sneak up on Ulinor. And they decided to go very, very sneaky style by using the black ships. This is one of my favorite parts

of this series, though. Because they use the black ships which are cloaked and are effectively immune to being scried by worm, you know, using psychers. And so they just kind of cruise

in right to Ollano with absolutely nothing. Yeah. And their plan actually is pretty cool. So what they decide to do is that force field's still an issue. So what we're going to do is we don't have the guns to blow through that force field. And if we try to, the orcs will attack us. So they bring a bunch of derelict ships, which, by the way, is GW loves this tactic, by the way. It comes up in so many books. What if I just crash a ship into it? Comes up a lot. Just quick quotes here. Obviously,

Cadia, but it happens, I think, three different times during the Horacea just in the invasion of Seoul. This is how your brain escapes the Kamara. It is. This is their always go-to. Crash ship into thing, you know, then success. But so Corlin does this. They crash the ships and they, so Corland brings a bunch of these derelict ships and they crash them all into the planet to overload the force field. Then Corlin and himself and some Death Watch kill teams in a bunch of very short-term

characters, very short-term characters, all deployed down to the surface to kill the beast. I think you're just like all right this is guy this is guy one this is guy two this is guy three the writers of these books spent more time thinking up their names than they did the rest of their entire existence like it's just the opening so now they go and this is now the opening of any action movie you get introduced to a bunch of people who you get their name and you know pretty quickly that all of them are going to die because they, it's just, this is my name. This is what makes me the world's greatest fighter, the world's best survivalist. This is the second suicide squad movie.

Would you meet all the guys that everyone dies? By the way, for anyone who doesn't know about this, the very first suicide squad movie was hot, hot, hot, hot garbage, like one of the worst things they were made. The second one is epically funny. Please go watch it. The opening scene alone is hilarious. and then the John Sina versus Idris Ilba is Magnific. Wow.

That whole scene is so funny. And at the end, where's all my bed? No one let radio get an alarm. What? They must be gone. Even Sylvester Stallone playing the shark, fantastic. So anyway, let's get on to the second invasion of Ulanor. As always, the initial phase goes off without a hitch.

The ships crash in, the force float overloads. then they open up with an orbital bombardment, taking out all the best surface to air defenses, Coraline and his team, transport into the temple, and then it all falls apart pretty quickly. The beast has set a trap. Yeah.

Brutal book cutting. Man, these guys suck at planning. Yeah. Okay. Because for one, two, three, four, well, in the books, this would be the fifth time. Yeah.

That the Imperium went, oh no, we followed into another, trap because I'm assuming that he was sitting in a black robe going, this planet is fully operational. Yeah, let's call it out. The only thing this scene was missing was a guy yelling, it's a trap. That's because that's exactly, they ripped off return of the Jedi brutally here. They land on the planet immediately after landing inside of the temple, the force field reactivates, instantly reactivates, and an entire orc armada comes out of nowhere. And,

and begins attacking them in orbit. So Corlin and his team are looking out the Death Star window at all their friends being murdered. Sorry, it's just, it is, it's not verbatim, but it's just, I mean, kind of. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so Corlin recognizes he's been tricked by the beast. Also, this is how lame I have, because you're like, this is such a rip-up for the return of the Jedi.

I love every part about this book, by the way. Oh, it's a great book, and to be fair, like, all right, let's give them some credit here. They ripped off Return of the Jedi. They didn't rip off Phantom Menace. They ripped off one of the better movies ever made. So it's, oh, hey, this scene here reminds me of on the waterfront. Oh, you mean the best movie ever made in history?

Okay. It's simply a fair. It's fair to steal. But maybe don't rip off the movie Ender's game. I just do that. Occasion guys to piss Brad off. It was also just recommended to me in my movies. By the way.

You probably, you would like this, wouldn't you? So Corlin recognizes that he's been tricked by the beast, but he knows that he can't pull out because then they're just dead. So he and the squad press forward, and they're going to kill the beast, and they're going to deploy their super secret weapon. And there's just a plethora of many battles here until the assassination force reaches the inner sanctum of the orc fortress.

And when they get in there, they see there are six banners coming down from six statues to orcs. These are actually statues this time. that partner being six, we're going to cover on our next episode, but it is important. Once they're there, amongst all of these banners is a massive orc in mega armor. And given the last time, it took a prime arc to kill one of these. Things aren't looking great. The kill team engaged the beast, not to kill it because they realize they can't.

They're stalling for time. Yes. While the sisters of silence start enacting their ritual. And let's go with the good news. The good news is the ritual goes off. It creates massive feedback all across the surface of Ulinar. It overwhelms the brains of a lot of the orcs. And it doesn't kill them, but it makes them just not paralyzed.

Well, a lot of the weird boys just died, though. So, like, this did cause a huge amount of problems. But my point is that it doesn't kill the orcs. Corlin sees this moment and sees the beast kind of almost felled and runs over and kills it. And yay, celebrate. I killed the beast. Then part two happens. The beast is lying on the floor

and a loud sound comes from the side of the room and a larger beast comes walking in. This one looks identical to the one that Vulcan killed. And it speaks... Hold on. You hate this so much. You hate this so much.

I need everybody to know. You'll see it when we do our next Q and A. I'm summoning my chi right now. Because what's about to happen? Yeah. Go ahead. The new beast speaks high Gothic. and he begins a bad guy monologue to the group.

He explains the Corlin that he killed one of his six primorks. Boo! Yeah. Boo! Then, after explaining the Primark thing, which does genuinely give me, like, deuce chills when I read that, he then kills Corlin by stepping on him and crushing him under his boot. The rest of the group engages combat. They were able to pull Corlin's dead body out, and they flee back to Terra.

marking the second invasion of Olinor a complete and total failure. Go team. With that guys, we're going to break. And the reason we're going to break is because our next cast, we're going to do the conclusion of the War of the Beast, both the wars themselves, but more importantly, we're going to cover the aftermath because I want to spend some time talking about

not only how this affected Terra and the Imperium for the short term, but also the galaxy at large. This affects the orcs. This affects the Eldar. This affects everything. And the next one we're going to, is the last invasion of Olin. Spoiler alert,

the Imperium wins. These probably figure that after we're still playing, because we're still playing the game. But I want to spend some serious time talking about how this one event shaped all of 40K lore, because that's what makes it really critical. But until then, this has been John Barthotti and Bradchester.

Scott. See you next week.