The 40k Lorecast - Episode 96 - What is an imperial crusade

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

On today’s cast we do a side topic coverage of the crusades of the Imperium. We open up with what a crusade is by definition. We then talk about what the crusades really are in function and behavior. From there we use examples to show what the crusades really are. With a dive into a number of key crusades such as the Macharius, Aegisine, Jerulas, Margin, abyssal and more.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast with me, John Barsati and Bradchester. This guy. On today's cast, we're going to dive deep into a topic that will dominate a lot of our future casts, the Crusades of the Imperium, with the breakdown of what they're meant to be, what they really are. Today, we're not going to dive, for example, deep into the Damocles Crusade. The idea here is to give you guys an idea of what the Crusades are, and a lot of the way G.W. talks about them. But as always, the 40K lorecasts, a weekly show, focusing the lore of the 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern.

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series, video games, tabletop play, really anything and everything around the game. Pictures of Brad's high school mullet. That's also in there. Also people's pets and workouts. There's a bunch of stuff. Big thank you to our moderators. You're doing a great job of making the Discord easy to navigate. Despite there being almost 9,000 members and lots of channels, it's very easy to get through, find what you're looking for, ask questions, and get them answered. So huge thank you to them for that. With that, on to the cast. Let's start today with what is a crusade.

So a crusade in 40K is any large-scale military maneuver that the Imperium takes part in. It's obviously rooted in terms with the emperor because all the crusades are drawn back in kind of influence to the great crusade of the emperor of mankind. They're all designed, in theory, to further the reaches of mankind by bringing. one portion or another of the galaxy to heal. Let me bounce on this real quick. Say that one more time and let me jump on it. All the Crusades are designed to further the reaches of mankind by bringing one portion or another of the galaxy to heal.

The Crusades can target an ever wider reach of needs. They could be something as simple as conquering new planets and systems. It can be reclaiming lost worlds and systems to rebellion, reclaiming lost worlds to heresy, purging Xenos, really anything. And that kind of is the problem for the main subject of our cast, because on their face, the Crusades are all a noble endeavor. The Imperium coming together to fight the foe and improve the lot of mankind. But they're also, some of the reason that they can be bad is sometimes there's just the chapter reclaiming its honor, reclaiming vengeance on someone,

basically sometimes it's just retribution. We're going to get back. Think about it. We had crusades right after the Horus heresy, and they did kind of just be awful because it was just us striking back at chaos, for instance. We did a whole thing on the Black Templars on it. Black Templars have some good crusades.

They have some bad crusades. But all those crusades were drawn from regaining lost honor. Exactly. And I think that's the main kind of overarching of this episode is the Crusades, like the Crusades of the Middle Ages, the truth behind them is a lot darker than the stories told about them. So let's get into this, the good, the bad, and some of the downright awful about it. So first things first, when we talk about the Imperial Crusades is how one comes to pass. As with all things, Imperium, there are rules. They don't always get followed, but there are

rules. According to the Imperium, a crusade can only be called for an author of by the Lords of Terra. And this is because the Crusades traditionally will involve the interworking of numerous branches of the Imperium, Navy, Guard, Admex, Base, Marine, sisters, and more. And in order to get these groups to work, they also need the forces of the navigators, they administer, the Ecclesiarchy, and more. So the act of declaring a crusade will impact numerous factions. And without orders coming from the Lords of Terror, a lot of those factions would just say no. And so the Crusade will never start. You're going to get, don't forget, anytime you declare a crusade, it's not a, hey, let's go over here and occupy this planet that has nothing on it and there's no resistance. Every crusade is going

to result in a lot of death. And so every group who has to go to it has to either agree to it or have it agreed that they're going. You know who's declared a crusade did not bother to ask the Lords of Tara? Bobby Jane. Also, Spacewolves a bunch of times. Actually, all of the imperial, every imperial fifth successor. Yeah, that's why I would laugh at it. That was the rule, but all the time, these things just happen without them. We have numerous stories of, heck, even the ecclesiarchy will declare a crusade and just go.

And everyone goes, oh, okay. Now, I do, I have an opinion on this, though, and I view it as more of a scenario. I think what happens more often is groups like, for example, the crimson fists will decide to, go on a crusade. And the Lords of Terra will find out about this. And they're left with kind of an awkward choice. They can either oppose the Crusade and say, no, you're not allowed to go, but then they could end up like the Lords of Terror we discussed during the War of the Beast when the Crimson Vists come back to Terra and say, why did you say no? Or more likely what I think they do is they agree with them tacitly. And so this way, the Lords of Terror say, oh yeah, you could have your crusade. And if the

crusades successful, the Lords of Terra get all the glory of like, hey, look at me. We reclaimed more of the galaxy under my watch. But if it fails, they just say, it was a terrible idea. The crimson fist are kind of on their own, whatever. Classic politics. If they go back into the ecclesiarchy, declaring crusades, there's super nothing they can do about that because, and what we will talk about in a future cast is how much bigger and more powerful the ecclesiarchy has gotten in modern 40K. Because if they tried to say something bad about the ecclesiarchy, you know, the thing that's basically keeping the entire Imperium together right now. Exactly.

You're like, hey, what's the most popular thing? Worship of the Epair? Yeah, let's just not touch that with a thousand foot pole. Exactly. Now, once a crusade has been declared, it will continue on until one of really three things occurs. one, they achieve their goal, and they set up for initially, so all the Zenos are dead, the systems are reclaimed, the rebellious governors are all executed very publicly, whatever it needs to be done.

Second option, which does come up quite often, is the Lords of Terror just declare that the Crusade is completed. This one comes up a lot. I was just going to say, this comes up a lot. The one, I hate saying good things about the Lords of Terror, they are pretty good at stopping your crusade by just declaring that they won. Yeah. That's the best way. That's, they can't stop crusades because, well, they can, but it always leads badly.

But this is the best way they do stop a crusade is just go, congratulations, John. You've achieved everything that you need to do achieve. We're throwing a party for you. And you're like, but I was going to do other stuff. And they kind of lose momentum. They lose their rides a lot of times and everything else. Well, yeah, I kind of compare it to if you have ever gone to the gym and you've set out to do an hour on the treadmill and then at minute 40, you convince yourself that's as close to an, that's effectively as good as an hour and just get off the treadmill. That's what the Lords of Tara do.

They either get bored of the crusade or they see it bogging down and see a potential problem where this is just going to, the effort's not going to be worth the reward. Now, there are some funny stories around that, like we covered during the Black Templar cast, the Benedictine crusade, where the Ecclesi are. halfway through said, oh, we've succeeded in our goal. And the Black Templars went, we haven't, and finished the job killing every Zeno in the sector. Yeah, I don't. Is anyone ever won an argument with the Black Templars because they're pretty set, even if they're wildly wrong. What Corland did when he punched Wats is nuts in the face and knocked him to the ground.

Sorry. He won the argument by beating him down. He wasn't giving you. I feel very confident that's the only way to win an argument with the Black Templar is it's just, what if I just physically stop you? Speaking of, that is the one other way the Crusades end is they fail. Everyone dies. This do happen, and this is always the fault of the local commander, never the fault of Lords of Terror.

A key part, though, the last key part I want to cover, though, is when a crusade is declared, it comes with the full authority of the Imperium and the Emperor himself. This is important we talk about these things. because refusing to take part in the crusade is tantamount to heresy. It's not tantamount to heresy. It is heresy. You can't even talk bad about it. Matter of fact, if you get a full crusade and you say that you haven't achieved objectives

that are supposedly already achieved, they'll also shoot you on that. That's 100% heresy. And this is where the Lords of Terra can use a crusade for some pretty nefarious. purposes. They can declare a crusade and then declare that you are part of the crusade. And that's that. What makes this even nastier is the crusades are a really fervent disposition in general. They're viewed by the populace of the Imperium as a critical and holy thing. So to a regular citizen, every crusade must be well thought out, planned, and meticulously executed event, not this random whim that they often go off on.

And what makes us worse is the power and authority behind them means that this can be used really nefariously because the citizenry themselves, and I'm talking more specifically here, guard regiments, don't know that they're being sent off to a wood shipper. Yeah, also to either be killed because you're one of the Lords of Terror's enemy or being sent to kill a Lords of terror enemy. And as this has happened multiple times in these crusades,

they suck. All right, but let's talk before we get into the crusades. I do want to take a little left turn here, back to what we were covering a few casts ago, the fists. Because as we discussed in our coverage of the fists and then the Black Templar, all of the Fist chapters are on Crusades. But it's not really the same term.

because a black Templar, for example, had been raging the Great Crusade, Part 2, Electric Bugaloo. Yes. For 9,000 years. But it's not really a crusade that they've taken part of. They've just been crusading for 9,000 years.

I'll argue this, though, because they are crusading, but the crusade is their purpose in existing as chapters, a chapter, period. So, yeah, I just, my point is, I think when we just use a term crusade for the Imperium, it usually is a set thing. We're going to go, this is, we're doing in the Macarius crusade, the Adominus crusade, they have a purpose, whereas the Black Templars crusade is we will conquer the galaxy. It's a little bit broad.

And I think when I look, read the Black Templar and the fists, it makes me think more about the fictional writing about the Crusades in the Middle Ages, where knights were, it wasn't true, by the way. but the idea was that knights were completely obsessed with reclaiming the Holy Lands, and they would never stop fighting a crusade until it was done, except for Sir Robin, because he wasn't really that end of it. And then Sir Galahad... I think you meant to say, the brave, Sir Robin, thank you very much. No, the not so brave and not so pure, Sir Robin. Sir Galahad ran to a little bit of a distraction,

but Lancelot was all in, Bedivir was a bit mad, and Arthur eventually realized the whole thing was silly. But black to the back Templars. The Black Templars, because they're just never resting after success. And so they just hurled themselves into the next engagement. And their viewpoints were not going to stop until the galaxy is tamed. So in this end, Black Templars effectively take part in dozens, maybe over 100 crusades, all across the galaxy, against any and every type of foe of humanity. There's a reason that they have entire units that are called Crucades.

Crusaders. Yes. Because that is what they do. They should be called Leroy Jenkins, because that's really more what they do. The Black Templar are in the middle of a crusade, and then someone says, hey, we've got a crusade over here. And then the Black Templar yell, Leroy Jenkins and go across the galaxy and fighting that one too. I mean, Karsa Orlong should be one of their chapter masters. With us.

Absolutely. But the other FIS chapters are not dissimilar from this. They tend to be a bit more judicious about their selection of crusades. they still do it. More importantly for the fists and the Black Templar, though, is the air of authority that they carry with them around the Crusades. Because as I said before, I think that the fists and thereby the Black Templar are the most famous of all the Space Marine Legions to the regular citizens of the Imperium. Because they're the number one ones for propaganda because they're always crusading. They're always killing heretics, killing Zenos, purging rebellions. This is what they are. So they are probably the most known factions within the regular citizenry because the 1940s newsreels, a lot of fists.

I should like the fist more because they've killed the Lords of Terra multiple times now. Yeah, and that's like the funny thing. The only people I'm aware of who led Crusades onto Terra have been the fists. They purged Van Gogh, and then many, many years later, they were part of the group that purged Ghosh Vandir. That's kind of badass about being honest. They're the ones who invade Terra the most. But for today's cast, we're not going to really talk about those crusades of the fists

and they're endless, I'm going to conquer the galaxy. Instead, we're going to focus on the crusades that do effectively run through the Lords of Terra and are carried out by the variable forces of the Imperium. GW does a really cool thing when they write about the Crusades in this setting. They are either part of multiple novels allowing for really deep character development and storylines, that's going to be like all the Gaunt's ghosts, those are Crusades,

Caius King, Crusade. I think Eisenhorn bounces in and out of a couple. Like, there's always a background story there. Yeah, there's something, he usually ends up doing a story inside of a story. And I do like this because they give structure to when we're pushing out. We're not just fighting to fight.

They're fighting to accomplish goals. And that is one of the biggest things about their crusades is there giving focus to a galaxy that's completely at war, you're going to get war attrition. You're going to get that feel just of, this is the same thing all the time. If you give a name and a purpose to a piece of this war, then you get people behind it, you get people excited,

you get people fighting with fervor as opposed to just fighting because that's what we do every day. Exactly. Now, at the same time, GW will also do, something that we all know I love is put these things in codexes. Little multi-paragraph stories that show the truth of the nightmare that is the grim, dark future. So it's really cool how the Crusades are a very nice narrative tool that GW uses. And we're going to steal from GW here a little bit. And I'm going to do the same thing. We're going to discuss what the Crusades are.

And then we're going to use some of these Crusades themselves to explain how to explain my point. First off, you have the Crusades of Expansion. Now, a Crusade of Expansion is exactly that. Let's increase the size of the Imperium. Let's spread into parts of the galaxy that have, you know, resisted the Imperium. Oftentimes, these are mainly human worlds that were never returned after the age of strife. But sometimes they were part of the Great Crusade and got separated by a warp storm. And since abated being part of the Imperium, not necessarily in rebellion, by the

It just may have been a, hey, we haven't talked to that planet in 3,000 years. Maybe we should go check on them. Well, then there's one of my favorites, which is the oopsa daisy. We have to go get this planet back because we settled it. And then one of the Zenos races went, yeah, this was always our planet. Didn't you see the Zeno sign that you can't read and or communicate with? Or the last one, which is same thing. Hey, they find some Zenos and gay.

nice planet you got here. Be a shame if something happened to you all and became a human one. After that, though, those kind of lead us into the next chunk, which is the Crusades of Conquest. This is ones where there has been conflict,

and to Brad's point of, these are more, all of them's kind of revenge. These is less about conquering a system or a planet as much as killing an enemy. So these are done when the Imperium, you know, always does when they conquer new land,

but the motivation is different. Like, let's say we have worlds and rebellion. Those are crusades of conquest. We are going to go there, kill every planetary governor, kill most of the citizenry too, and repopulate. Or we'll have stuff like the Scythorphines, where the Black Templar went, hey, we're going to go just eliminate every single one of them

and remove them from the galaxy. And if some of the planets they're on turn out to be nice for us, we'll colonize those two. But that's more of a side note. Yeah, there's a lot more punching than there is, Yeah. Taking back. And a lot of this obviously has happened as we get to the latter part of 40K history with the heretics going in and saying, okay, these worlds are run by world eaters.

Well, we're going to go there and kill every single world eater because it's more a matter for moving the world eaters. And again, do they even colonize these planets or do they exterminate us all of them? Fliquois. The third one, though, which is the dark one. And these are Crusades of Penance. And I am actually only aware of these being part of space marines, but the back of my brain is tingling and telling me that they have these for guard regiments as well. Their Ecclesiarchy runs these also because they put together anybody that's repentant or supposed to be repentant and send them on their way.

Yeah, but what I'm saying, but they don't send their own troops. The Ecclesiarchy, the sisters have the repentia, obviously. Let's talk what they are first. So what these are is this is when a space marine chapter primarily, It may have been a guard, but I appreciate they would just kill all the guardsmen, but they've decided a Space Marine chapter in some way has betrayed the emperor or is showing some sort of signs of disloyalty. Howard is?

Yeah, they will then, yeah, true. They will then send that chapter on a crusade of penance, which is effectively an almost, well, Sisyphian would be a step up. It is an impossible task, usually, knowing that they will all die, but should. they survive, they'll be forgiven for their sins and welcome back into the Imperium. The Sisters cast, we cover this pretty well. The repentia just are a small portion of the sisters who do this in a battle. When we talk about these Crusades of Penance, this is much grander. We're talking about hundreds, potentially thousands being deployed to an area, and the goal

is die in service to the emperor or succeed in service to the emperor, but those are the only two things you're going to be able to do here. Now, I think it's going to be easier with all those broken up to give you examples of them. And the reason I'm going to do it that way is, A, some of these stories are pretty cool and they're not really long enough for us to a full cast on, but also, B, they do all tend to have a dark turn at the end, which GW, I give GW a lot of grief from their writing. And so when they do writing well, I like to give them rewards for doing it correctly. So this is where John tells you, he's not, he's cheating you, but, you know, not doing the Indominus Crusade immediately

or Damocles. However, you did completely placate me by starting us off with the McCarray Crusade, which is the story of the baddest dude ever in Imperial Guard, and I will die on this hill. That is a fight you're going to have to deal with because you have a bunch of Kyphus Kane novel readers

who would just tell you, go pound sandbra. Individually, he was a super cool. He's the funnest in the stories. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm a huge guy of his cane fan. But as far as just dudes that were hardcore and changed things, Lord Solar Macarius is a tactical genius that led one of the most successful crusades ever. Since the Great Crusade.

Yes. Let's talk about Lord Solar Macarius. Lord Solar Macarius is not the current Lord Solar. That's Leonis, who is on a horse, which we all know I hate so much. This Macarius, who I wish I could use instead, because, you know, no horse. Because he was also on a tank. Yeah. Where he should have been.

I'll be honest with you. I will take it if you just give me this model and it'll scribe behind him banging coconuts together. I will play that. I think it might be modeling for an advantage. But if someone who has CAD skills wants to design that for me, I will print it and I will paint it and I will play with it. I love the idea of my Lord's soul. having a scribe behind him, banging coconuts together, making horse snap noises. But anyway, Macarius is like any guardsman, rose through the ranks from a lowly beginning.

He became Lord Solar mostly by fighting in the protracted campaign, mostly by fighting in a protracted campaign within Segmentum Solar in the earlier part of the 41st millennia. I don't really know the full details around this. It's covered in the books, but not even well, that there was just a bunch of human colonies start falling to civil war within segmentum solar. It's mostly over the Lords of Terra, obviously. It's higher than too much. They taxed him and didn't give him stuff.

I love this because Marcairius, who's supposed to be placed after Alexander the Great, and one of the things he does is when he takes back over these places, not only is he's so successful tactically, but also his diplomatic skills were insane because a lot of these early guys became his generals, these warlords that were in the Civil War came over to his side. It became one of his most loyal followers and generals in his crusade pushing out of here.

Yeah. And that's the key thing is that with Macarius, he is a cult of personality. And we're going to talk more about that as we get into it. Where the Macarius crusade comes from is in 392 of M41, he goes to the Lords of Terror and tells them, sorry, and asks them. He really more tells them to help him launch the greatest crusade since the great crusade. Of note, he's super popular at this point in time. It's not like Ted showed up and's like, hey, I want to lead a crusade. He basically showed up with bright lights and the news on him going, hey, I'm going to do this.

It's cool, right? Of course it's cool. Why wouldn't it be cool? Yeah. One thing I want to point out in GW writing is this is considered the largest crusade. since the Great Crusade. That phrase you will hear a lot over the course of our lore cast over the coming years. GW, to their credit, does do this chronologically. At this stage of 392M41, this was the largest crusade. There were about 300, not that many, well, maybe prior largest crusades since the

Great Crusade, and each of them gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Damocles and Indominus are obviously bigger than this one, et cetera. At a certain point, starts to feel like when a car manufacturer says we made the fastest production car ever because that's five horsepower more than the last one, and then three years later, they do it again. You go, all right, I'm over this, guys.

But let's talk about what this crusade was. This crusade was, again, a crusade of conquest, which is the first group that we talked about, focusing on getting more worlds for the Imperium, increasing the Imperium's logistic capabilities and everything. and they focused on the segmentum pacificus, which is the left side of the galaxy.

Now, the segmentum pacificus is a little bit of an oddity, and I call it that because it's not a very large segmentum, especially compared to the other parts of the galaxy, but it has been rocked by chaos. Specifically by chaos. Yeah, and so you have there, this is where Colchise is, which is the planet that Lorgar grew up on.

You know, it's cooler. It's cooler. It's also Tanneth, which is where Gond's Ghost is from. Exactly. If you haven't read Gons Ghosts, you should be doing that. It's really, really good. But what makes it interesting is that the light of the Astronomicon doesn't project very well into it. If you look at a map on the far edge of the segmentumicus is about as far, that all the way left edge is about as far away from Terra as Nocturn, which is where Vulcan was from.

It's less than half the distance to where the Tao Empire is. And we know the Astronomicon can reach out into those areas because we routinely do work-travel into those areas. So no one understands fully why the Astronomicon can't reach into Segmenton Pacificus. But what we do know is the Imperium didn't really focus on the region because everyone was afraid of going there. Because the viewpoint within the Imperium is if you can't see the Astronomicon, you are not under the protection of the emperor.

You're not in the light of the emperor, also known as the protection of the emperor. Yes. But Macarius was born and raised in this system, and he was determined to bring it into the fold for the Imperium. Now, much of this system had fallen away from the Imperium in M36. This is when one of the major ecclesiarchy conflicts with the Imperium occurred. Also, one of Abidon's Crusades was in here, too. Yeah. And so during this period of time, a lot of the war,

lot of these systems just left the imperium. Some of it was self-preservation, some it was influence of chaos. It wasn't really known, but literally thousands of years went past, and these systems just sat independent and either resisting any imperial outreach or just ignore. I was going to say, there was actually more that were just ignoring context. Oh, there was so much new phone, who this, that kept going back to the messenger is like, imperial tithe, spell it, you know. Yeah, I'll get back to you. I need it.

I'm glad you played Tuesday. Yeah, man, I got a bad connection on this end. All I'm hearing, you're just breaking up. Can you try again tomorrow? Click. And the cool thing with the Macarius Crusade is it is massively successful. Over its banana pants successful. Yeah.

In seven years, Macarius brought back a thousand worlds. Again, a thousand worlds. Yeah. That's a lot. And also, and these worlds, and also in these worlds, not little cute ones, like some of the worlds you went to in Mass Effect One, where you just drove around for 15 minutes and found everything. He found hive worlds, like Persepolis is one of the largest hive worlds of the galaxy. He reclaimed that. The resource boost that the Imperium got was insane.

And as the campaign continued, more and more worlds were brought into compliance. Further increasing not only the resources of the Imperium, but more importantly at this era, increasing morale amongst the Imperium. During this, Macarius, this is where they start to get a little bit sad, is Macarius fought everybody in this campaign. Chaos, Zenos, rebelling humans. Some of the stories are he fought an orc that had 23 billion orcs, and he killed them all. He also made a bunch of of Zenos species extinct, including one that was basically a jungle triant. You mean the last March of the Ents? Yeah, that would have been cool. I want that model. I want that model. anyway. But as Brad was saying earlier, he was written more like Alexander the Great,

he was written exactly like Alexander the Great. He's supposed to be Space Alexander the Great. One of the biggest things is people, worlds he reclaim just completely embraced him and the Imperium, but mainly him as they got reconquered. Yeah, and this was important because these worlds didn't feel like they were being conquered. They felt like they were being conquered. They felt like they were being liberated from the dark. In some cases, they're being liberated from chaos. But other times it was, even the worlds who were independent and were doing fine, they still

felt, having met Macarius, that, oh, this Imperium is something I want to be part of, and I need to be part of. And so he liberated them from the darkness. And Macarius, also, like the Imperial Fists and Black Templars, just kept going. Every world he conquered,

he fortified, and then moved on. I was trying to say, however, he is really good at having a system of as soon as I'm leaving, all of these people are showing up to start fixing stuff, propagating stuff, setting backup trade. Oh, yeah, you got another tithe. I'm glad you're back. Also, by tomorrow, you should have X amount of widgets ready to go. Yeah, it is cool because in the stories you have, like the missionaries show up to help make sure the citizenry understand what being part of the Imperium is. Agents of the Inquisition come in to make sure that they did eliminate all of the bad actors.

Adeptus had been Estratum show up to Brad's point. Hey, here's what you owe us. Here's when we're showing up to collect it. Here's how you make it so we can collect it. And also, because some of these worlds were in rebellion, a bunch of new colonists were showing up. And so people have to fix the stuff that fell to the orbital bombardment. But overall, pretty massive net win.

Now, this is about the part as it got further in. It starts to take a dark turn. And this is because, as we were just discussing, the worlds of the segmented in Pacificus were, heavily corrupted by chaos. Macarius consistently found himself leading troops in battle against cultists, even a few greater demons, one of which, by the way, picked him up and he looked it in the eye and screamed in its face. Macarius is a boss. Yeah, Macarius. Yeah, no time of fight. Things started to go, as all things in 40K go, dark and evil because Macarius went from the most popular liberator

in what, 10,000 years, to kind of as everything is in 40K, the grim dark because he keeps more and more chaos and chaos does

crazy stuff and they taint and they corrupt and they make it and I feel like it was a lot of small betrayals from the people he was trying to take over. He becomes

made more ruthless at the end of this campaign. Yeah, Macarius, as the campaign continues and gets to basically the end, he reaches something called the Halo Stars. And we discussed in episode 90, 91 warp travel, but the Halo stars are what they call everything that rims the Imperial Galaxy where the Astronomicon cannot be seen. So, for example, the Imperium reaches pretty far into the Milky Way, but it stops before dark space. And it's because

the Astronomicon can't get that far. Humans don't go into the Halo Star. because you can't. You're now doing blind warp jumps in an area that, especially Sigmata Pacificus, has a lot of chaos in it. And where this story comes to a sad conclusion is Macarius had to stop when he got there because all of his troops just refused to go any further. They'd conquered a thousand worlds for the Imperium. And most of the troops felt they'd done this via a miracle. Macarius himself had been elevated to a living saint because the viewpoint was no one could have done this.

without being... Chosen to the Emperor. Yeah. And the Halo stars are beyond the light of the Emperor. So the troops were terrified that if they crossed this kind of line, that all the power that the Emperor is putting through them

would go away and they would die. And so at this point... They weren't wrong. No, they were not wrong at all. Yeah. This is dead accurate. And so what happens is Macarius has to turn around. And this leads,

the death of Macarius is in imperial records. And what's publicly known is that after reaching the far side of the galaxy, his crusade concluded. And that without purpose of just this crusade, Macarius did fall into a bit of a malaise, which is normal. All generals do this. You're a warring general. You're a warring general.

And when you stop warring, they get kind of tired. And he got over it and began leading his troops back, but then he died. And he died because while fighting in some rammed. random place, he contracted jungle fever. Having contracted jungle fever during his campaign and the lack of purpose, his body just wasn't able to fight as it was while he was campaigning, and it

overtook him. And he died. He died a hero of the imperial. I'm going to give you the Brad theory on this, because they talk about it a little bit. I actually think that his soul was injured from all of the chaos that he was had to fight. He was taking part. He was so close to chaos. And he just

took damage, like actual soul damage, which the Imperium not really great at healing. I mean, I'll go ahead and give you some credit here. Your Brad's theory is correct, because that's literally what they wrote. It was infected by a nergal, but by Nergal plagues, plural. Yes. Normal plagues. But that's the way thing is, yes, he was the Nergo plague. But I actually think that he, the reason he couldn't fight them off was because of the fact that his soul was damage.

And during the times when he was fighting and everything else, he was powered by the light of the emperor. He was had the emperor's protection against it. And then when he wasn't fighting, because his own soul has been, his light had been diminished so much, he couldn't fight. I know that's what they wrote. But I'm saying by theory goes into the,

he doesn't fight it because he's no longer getting that direct emperor mojo, but also he just took a lot of damage himself, and he was no longer able to fight that off. Yeah, and the example I would use of what you just said there is during the horse, during the siege of terror, when my favorite primark, Jagad I Khan, gets wounded and poisoned by Mortarian. As soon as he's brought, his body's brought back onto the basically, it just goes away. Of the emperor, yeah, all the infection goes away. And so it's possible, the emperor, and we've talked about this also in the sisters cast, that the saints tend to burn really hot and hard and then they suddenly burn out. the emperor probably was infusing macarius with energy.

And then when Macarius's crusade ended, the emperor went, well, that's taking care of and looked somewhere else. And now all the Nergal plague that was inside him started rising. But the part we're getting to is what really happened to Macarius is he was killed by the officio assassinorm. And they don't necessarily say why, but the belief why is that he was becoming overwhelmed by this Nergal plague. And this is the ultimate hero for the Imperium.

He is a propaganda just coup de grace. And they could not have any video that of him becoming corrupted by chaos, speaking out against the Imperium. So they killed him and made it look like he died of natural causes. Also, I think that they probably would have killed him anyways because he was pretty vocal about mankind not being, basically being cowards. He was pissed.

that they did. He was furious at the end. And all of his troops said no. He just couldn't shoot them all. Yeah. But one important piece is that after Macarius died, more than half the worlds he conquered fell into rebellion. Because they'd all joined the Imperium to be part of Macarius. And then when he died, they discovered what the real Imperium was. And they all went, yeah, no. So within about a century, most all of the gains from Macarius were undone. And this is a common story in Crusades. In the short term, they're successful, but in the long term, that success, they have wanes. Because a lot of times, we're conquering parts of the galaxy that just don't want to be conquered. And unless you want to put consistent effort into it, it just doesn't go.

It doesn't really do much. You know what? Ending the Macarius crusade with a Brad theory that people will throw back at me. I think Macarius used, it was a psycher that no one knew was a psycher. He didn't even know he's a psycher. Yeah, that comes a lot up in the Imperium where they're just like, I can channel the emperor and whatever I believe in. Right. He was just magically putting people to his side. But another one I want to talk about, and we cover this a bit in the Black Templar cast, is the Geroas Crusade.

We'll be right back after a quick break. So the Jerales system predates the Imperium. It was founded back when mankind first stretched into the stars, and it survived the age of strife. I only survived, they actually processed. He didn't survive. They showed up and they were like, hey, man, you want a cup of tea? Anything? Because we're totally doing great here.

We can. Yeah. And also situated in Segmentum Pacificus, it really went unnoticed by the Imperium for a long time, even during the Great Crusade because of just, it was an area that was kind of hard to get to and wasn't seen as all that valuable. But eventually, the Imperium did take notice of the system and sent missionaries there to explain to them the glory that is the Imperium, which the Geraldist system killed all those missionaries. So then the Imperium went, well, you know, shame.

Next verse, same is the first. Exactly. Kill the next. More missionaries, and they murdered those ones. So the third missionaries came with the Black Templars. And what I find interesting about this crusade, though, and it really is I'm going to bring it up is the Jerolas system is all human. A lot of these crusades, we talk about conquering a system.

It is because they're doing stuff with Zenos, they part of Zinos. not the Jerolus or chaos. Also, no chaos taint anywhere in Jerusalem. They weren't chaos-tated. There was no Xenos. They just had information about how the Imperium was working and went, you guys are awful. They weren't wrong at all. And so the Black Templar killed all of them and they resettled it.

But I just want to bring them up because this is someone who were not enemies of mankind in any way, shape, or form. They were not rebellion against the Imperium. The only time they fought the Imperium was when the Imperium. told them to come join them. Yet still, they took out of the full brunt of the Imperial forces. Now, the opposite was the second, not the first, Achesine Crusade, in which this is, this one's a much rougher crusade, because in this one, you had an entire system that had been isolated by warp storms, and when the warp storms abated, they discovered all the worlds had fallen to a heretical mechanicus. So this is basically the dark, like,

The dark mechanicum are gone, but in the same way humans can become heretics, so can ad mech. So in this case, it all came out of one forge world, and its main, I don't know, whatever the leader of that was, became horrifically corrupted, turning all of the people in the system into servitors, skittari, mutants, and abominable machinery. We had basically demonic engines before demonic engines were a thing. Yeah. And so the Red Scorpions, who are a chapter of unknown origin, so we don't know who they're a successor of. We'll cover them more in the future. We bring to a bunch of casts and some of the random super cool chapters. Red Scorpions are, the problem is there's a lot of them are awesome.

They were deployed in force with Titan legions, nighthouses, and even imperial regiments, and they just scoured the entire world completely. Removed every single piece of evidence that anything had ever even been there. Which sucked for the imperial because of the fact that these worlds were unbelievably valuable and they had to destroy effectively all of the everything that was there because it was all corrupted. Yeah. And there have been a number of these types of genocidal campaigns waged as crusades. The Abonian genocide where an entire subsector was declared Diabolus incalculus, whatever the hell that means, and perched. Every single living being in a subsector was perched. the Scarab Crusade, where the space wolves were purging a system. This one almost used to the story, except for one really cool piece of the space walls doing something clever. Well, not just clever, really awesome.

The space wolves were purging a system next to the eye of terror. Surprise, surprise, it was a trap. Good job, space wolves running into something. But what I love about this is that while they were trapped, they realized the auto-cantler predator tanks couldn't pound through the enemy dreadnought. and tanks. So all the long fangs walked over with their last cannons, they strapped the last cannons onto the predator tank.

And you're welcome for the predator annihilator. Exactly. The predator annihilator is a space wolf invention. But I've never seen a spacewell player run a predator annihilator, if I'm being honest. Yeah, you know, I'm going to run two in my next space wolf army, just to make, you say that. Yeah, and the GW will point them into oblivion because every time you play space wolves, GW points into oblivion. You're welcome to space world players.

One of my favorite ones, though, was the Lepus Crusade. And this was when the Knights of the Round found themselves faced with a kind of mutated beast. And the beast was guarding a cave that had a data slate, taking the location of a holy relic. And despite being surrounded by the remains of prior crusaders, the Knights underestimated. No sense, by the way. Yeah. That's written in, that is written there,

that they saw all the fallen comrades, and they still underestimated. These are like, there's so many dead people wearing exactly what I'm wearing. It's probably an easy kill. But the beast eventually arrives. It's got huge teeth and a vicious streak a mile wide, and it can leap. So the initial losses of the campaign were pretty significant, and they had to force the campaign to retreat. But luckily, they had a sacred weapon.

The holy hangarade of Antioch was then discovered. and they were able to destroy the beast once and for all. Look, if they would have just looked at the signs that were written. I warned you. I warned you. But did you listen? I warned you. No. And if you don't know what I'm referring to, guys, I'm sorry, but a bunch of you do. And you're welcome. There's no scenario I wasn't going to costly quote that movie while talking about crusades. Now, let's talk about one that actually is in 40K, the Gool Star Crusade. And this is the one where the black Templars under Helbrick decided to just,

rid the galaxy of the Scythorphines. And this was a true genocide campaign. They conquered and destroyed every single planet that the Scythor that they could find till they got the Scythor homeworld, which they found abandoned and no evidence of the presence anywhere. And Helbrick, because he's just awesome,

his solution is, was what if we just start burning all of these worlds, maybe that'll make them come out of hiding so I can stab them with my sword. And I'm still mad that GW didn't follow. through with that because as they were about to start burning the world, gas reappeared, and Helbrook had to run over there. But I'm still upset about that because that's one of those storylines I would have loved to have heard of like Helbrick just burning systems until the Scythors reappear and he gets

to kill them all. But let's talk about how some crusades are not as successful. Not as successful. Yeah. That's like saying, I'm not the. that tall. Some of these were not successful. Yes. The first one is the Dune campaign, where Arthur and his crusade went to capture a holy relic, and they ran to fierce resistance. The walls of the fortress were just all but unassailable, and the defenders literally sat on top

and mocked them, like made fun of their mother, told him about how they smelled. And despite an attempt to sneak into the fortress using what was akin to a Trojan horse, but shaped like a rabbit, they were rebuffed and had to move on to other targets elsewhere. I told you I'm not going to stop. Can't stop, won't stop. Elder berries. It smells like you smell of elder berries. Your mother was a hamster.

All right, but more complicated was the Aegevian crusade. And the Aegevian crusade was launched to reclaim an area called the Kaleix expanse, Kalex. Anytime you have a Y and X together, I'm not going to get that pronunciation right. This is in the segmentum obscureus. And right up by the Halo Stars. And this was an incredible force was drawn together. 17 million human troops, five chapters of space marines, including black Templars,

Howling Griffin's, Tigers Argent, just a good name. Ligio-Titanica obviously went along with Admec. And the first year of the campaign was a massive success. Two major systems. We also crushed three Zenos races. And we took pretty much, for all practice. purpose is no real casualties. Yep. And so what happens is, and this is, of course, where it starts to take the bad turn.

This incredible speed and success gets the eye of the Lords of Terra, who now want to double down on it. So they just say, all the troops you need, go, get us more. And the crusade continues. For the next 12 years, it goes very well. About 200 worlds are added to the Imperium. A lot of them were exterminatist and then reclaimed, but that still counts. And the successes were so great at this point that several guard regiments were actually given worlds to settle, which is something we hear about in this promise to every guard regiment, but there's not a lot of examples in the lore of it actually happening. More often than not, they just all die.

So that's how successful this was being the keyword, because in the 16th year, the Lords of Tara once again wanted more. and the third time's not always the chart. A couple things happened. First off, they're running out of places to conquer that are easily conquered. They're now pushing right to the edge of the galaxy where, remember, when you get to the halo stars, their humanity has never gone this far. If they did, it was during the age of technology.

So there's a lot more resistance when you get out to the halo stars than you do in what's I would call the astronomical part of the galaxy. To make matters worse, all of a sudden a massive warp storm. engulfs the region. This storm rips apart ships that are in transit, and they don't give you it's an actual number, but it's like from implication, I'd say close to 50% of the fleet. I was going to say when you use words like devastated, it's probably pretty big. Yeah, it's probably, it's more than 2%. But I feel confident it was higher than 2%. In response to this, the current Lord militant over the crusade orders the whole crusade to halt and to fall back. And they fall back. And they fall back,

just in time for an Orkwa to show up and the Uvath to appear. I actually think this was a bigger deal on this because the Uvath are a chaos and a few Xenos race, and I got the feeling that they had the ability to mess with some of the planets that were taken. It wasn't completely said, but yes. Because behind them, a bunch of the colonnays world started to rebel, and they started to rebel when the Uvath showed up. Yeah, so just to set it, the problem with this is crusades go forward. They go forward, forward, forward.

Now they fell back. Okay, we're going to fall back and we're going to go again, but we can't. Because all of a sudden, one side of us is getting slapped by orcs, the other side of us being slapped by the Uvath. And then to Brad's exact point there, all the world's behind us that we were relying on for support and logistics are falling into civil war. Chaos is all over the system now. to make matters worse, the great spiritual leader of the whole campaign gets assassinated.

Not by the officio, but by actually the chaos or someone, one of them kills him off. Now, this crusade is effectively collapsing in itself. Luckily, the upside of it is that there was a leader amongst the imperial forces named General Drusus. And Drusus is very similar to Macarius because GW doesn't write things that differently. He leads his troops from the front. The worlds that he's on all love him. And he sees the campaign not only stalling, but on the verge of collapse.

And he begins making just a bunch of noise. The good news for the Imperium is that the Inquisition also notices this. And they take all of Jerusalem's kind of like noise and all of his grandeur and all something, these are projecting it out. And pretty soon he becomes a folk hero amongst all the troops in this region. In a completely random event, though, he was offered an upgrade to a new position because the old Lord Militant apparently slipped on a banana peel and fell down the steps. Yeah, he had a million-dollar baby moment where he just fell funny, a weird thing.

In truth, he was assassinated by the 50s he assessed. A thousand percent. Because he sucked. And so Drusis has then promoted to Lord Militin. Drusis does reset the footing of the campaign. and ends up purging the youth from and all the rebellious worlds. So in the end, the Aegevian Crusade is a victory, but it's a Pyrrhic victory because the Imperium lost a ton of troops in this whole process.

And the net gain of the worlds that they achieved probably won't pay dividends because by the time they make up for all the losses it took to reclaim them, those worlds are probably all fall to chaos anyway. And you have to have a huge force here of probably Inquisition and Ecclesiarchy because of the forces of chaos are very strong and very firmament in this area. Exactly. But now I want to get to the end of our cast by talking about some really messed up crusades. And this is the stuff where you really discover the true darkness behind them.

So the first one is the Ophidium Gulf. And this is one where the Black Templar led a crusade into the veiled region. And they went there to kill off a primitive Xenos species who somehow fell into worship of something of a god called the voice of the emperor. This is a really cool story. It's a really cool story. It's worth to read on this one. Yeah.

I mean, it's not much of a read, by the way. It's not like it's, I think it's two pages. It's not even. It's not there's a entire, there's a, dude did a whole animated fan fiction of this. Oh, yeah, but I'm talking about what he, what's based out of us, I think it's two pages and a codex. I'm thinking of the fan thing. Of course, yeah.

So anyway, the Black Templar want to know the reason behind this and they start progressing into it. And as they reach the system and they start moving towards the core and they notice something odd, all the worlds that they find, they're devastated. They've all actually, what appears to have been orbitably bombarded. But they are still have the core of the system has this transmission. They're heading towards it, heading towards it. They eventually reach the core of the system and the main planet there.

And they discover a dark angel's fleet, just hanging out right by it. And the Black Templar reach out of the Dark Angels and say, hey, we're looking for this voice of the Emperor. Is that what you guys are doing? And the Dark Angels give them a maybe. And the Black Templar say, look, why don't we're here? You're here. Let's work together because we're both Space Marines, right? And we'll work on this as one.

However, if you could see this right now, I'm doing a lot of air quotes for also a space marine. Well, I mean, sure. Why not? I guess we're related. The Black Templar and the Dark Angels deploy down, and while fighting the main capital, it's actually the Black Templar that come across the voice of the Emperor, which is just a being clad in all black power armor who does not speak. They capture him, all proud of themselves, and jump back to their ship. When they get back to their ship, there's a message waiting for them from the Dark Angels, saying, we would like that prison please, can you hand him over? And as the Black Templar leader goes to reach out to the

Dark Angel saying, well, no, we captured him. We would like to do the interview. They discover the entire Dark Angel's fleet are powering up their weapons. At which point, they say, you know what, maybe we don't need this guy. You guys seem to want him more than we do. And they transfer the prisoner, at which point all of the Dark Angel ships leave the system. Fun story, though, is no one has seen those Black Templar ever since. They sent the message that they were translating into the warp, and they've never come back out of the warp. Is it a complete coincidence? No, the Dark Angels 100% murdered.

Yeah, for sure. Probably in the warp, by the way. The Darken is, I assumption, we're waiting for them in the warp, and when they translate in, that's where they killed them all. It is still the Dark Angels, guys. Bear sketch. Now, an even more messed up one, though, is the Margin Crusade. This is, ugh. So the Ministorum decides to declare their own crusade to claim an area called the Kaleiix sector,

C-A-L-I-X-I-S. This was declared by the Minnistorum both as a crusade and as a war of faith, which means this one cannot be ignored. All the attention of the Imperium goes to this. Millions of troops are converted into regiments. But it's crazy because we have no sisters, There's just nobody in power armor. There's no Marines, no...

Yeah, exactly. This is crazy. Yeah, they launched the campaign with... They do have capital shifts, but yeah, no Admec, no sisters, no space marines, nothing, just pure human troops. It was an all-human campaign. And unfortunately, the Ecclesiarchy are not known for their battle acumen or tactics, and this campaign is into one of the most difficult reaches of space.

And it was led by, because a high confessor, which is a... effectively a priest. And not a priest, by the way, who graduated from some, like, esteemed military academy or a guy who's sat next to a major general through numerous campaigns. No, you got Ted from the bar down the street. I'm going to make our Irish friends of it. We got Father Ted. Actually, no.

Father Ted. That would have been a lot better if it was Father Ted, but it was not. It was just Ted couldn't have led worse if he was. drunk from the pub down the street. Yes. Because this thing goes to shit immediately. They didn't even get, they got zero wins. Yeah, they actually began perishing before you even got there because the part of the galaxy

they were going to has not good for warp travel. Massive chunks of the fleet just die in the warp travel, never reentering the materium at all. And those that do reenter the materium, a lot of them are horrifically ravaged because their Gellerfields didn't hold up. It really drive home how bad this goes. There is no organized Zeno threat in this part of the galaxy, and the Xenos, the random Zenos out there slaughter this crusade.

There's six dudes with sticks that beat up this crusade. Yeah. And within four years, the crusade is ended. The high priest is dead. Everything has gone wrong, except the Ecclesiarchy couldn't have. afford such a pathetic failure. Remember, when the Ecclesiarchy does something, they declare it. So the whole galaxy, including the Lords of Terra, even some space marine, everyone's aware of this incredible crusade that they were waging. They can't come back and say, yeah, we didn't

claim a single world and, I don't know, 30 million people are dead. So instead, I love that. This is so great because they keep the crusade. I can't even do enough air quotes. I need multiple people throw up the quotes for me. They just keep grabbing people and saying this crusade's going on and that just ship them to actual real things that are going on. Yeah. Yeah. The Ecclesarchy just fires up the old propaganda machine and goes full on Potemkin village on the situation. Yeah, this crusades still, we're 300 years in. Crusades still growing strong. But what's fun about it is what they do. Because the problem is the crusade still going. So if the crusade is still going, that means we still have to raise regiments, we still have to make equipment, we have to do all this stuff.

So what do you do with all that stuff? The cool thing is that when you put someone on a ship and fire them into the warp, unless they're a navigator, they don't know where that ship is. So you have millions, potentially more troops, equipment, all this stuff that loads onto a ship, translates into the warp to go out to the Colexis sector and actually find themselves, on the exact other side of the galaxy taking part in a different crusade and campaign. That crusade's doing very well, by the way. The Achilles Crusade?

The Achilles Crusade, depending on which front you're on. Yeah, it's doing well. True, true. Multi-front campaign crusade. One of them sucks, and I think that's where all this stuff is going into. But I want to close the cast out with really what I think is the darkest crusade I can find,

which is the Abyssal Crusade. Oh, God, nothing happens good here. Yeah. So the Abyssal Crusade occurs in M-37. And this is when the Ecclesiarchy had a massive leader named St. Basilius. St. Basilius rose very quickly through the ranks of the ecclesiarchy, and he was known for performing miracles, miracles of faith. And as a result, he was granted the title of living saint because the fervor with which he worshipped the emperor and the success and the true grandioseness of the actions he performed. everyone just assumed that the power of the emperor flowed through him.

Except for the fact that old Basilius was pretty crazy hardcore. He was a hard, hard, hard, wait for it, hardcore Puritan. And he decided everybody was a heretic and a traitor. You're like, I don't like the way you cut the crust off your sandwich heretic. He was petty about this too. Yeah. And what ends up happening is he gets so strong. He actually has certain space marine chapters that work effectively just for him.

They're not part of the ecclesiarchy, but every time he says, hey, go punch that guy, they go punch that guy. And working closely with the Arbytes, which I'm not pronouncing Arbides, despite rogue traitor telling me that's supposed to be pronounced. Nope. And the Inquisition, he begins to change the Imperium for the worse. He starts demanding, for example, that all the citizens turn on anyone they suspect of heresy. And if they don't suspect enough people of heresy, then it must be because they are the heretics themselves.

G.W. has this weird obsession with Stalinist Russia. I cannot figure out where it came from, but it is a deep obsession with it when they do their writing. All this takes a turn for the dirty when a major warp storm appears and covers about a dozen systems. Once the warp storm abates, those systems are discovered to be horrifically corrupted. All the citizens have turned to chaos. It's all chaos, cults, etc. Where the story's interesting is that some of those worlds that were then sent to be purged were 30. Yeah, there were 30 of them were home worlds and space marine chapters. Two freaking chapters were involved in this.

This guy probably got more Marines killed. I mean, it's up there. Yeah. And so Basilis declares that these 30 chapters are corrupted because their gene seed is on these planets and these planets are corrupted. I want to point out, the people he said are corrupted weren't there in the warp storm. It is because their home world was covered by a warb storm. Their home world was corrupted. Therefore, they are corrupted. And he gives them all a choice. The choice is die, right? now, or go on a crusade and prove your loyalty to us, probably die in the process. But all 30 legions agree, yep, I am not a heretic. I am going to prove it by doing this. Where do I have to go? Oh, into the eye of terror, to purge systems inside the eye of terror.

All 30 are lost. There's stories about what happens to them. They all get slaughtered, except 800 years later. So everyone's dead at this point, you know, who wasn't. alive at this point, some of this legions start coming out of the warp. And one such is a chapter called the Vorpal Swords, and I love that name so much, come out of it and decide to start their own crusade. And they're starting their own crusade because while they were stuck in the warp, the Vorpal swords learned that Basilius was not a living saint, but was actually an agent of chaos. All the powers

that he was displaying, those were granted him by the chaos gods, I assume it was Zinch, in an effort to deceive humanity and weaken it, which makes sense. You did a great job. He weakened the hell out of him. Yeah. Basilius killed 30 space marine chapters and billions, probably trillions of imperial citizens. Yeah. In the ultimate act of petty revenge, though, this is so fantastic.

Because they go about their crusade, and they go in fine. Bacillus' burial spot and legitimately dig up his bones and launch them into a star. Yeah, that was how, yeah, the Vorpal swords wanted to remove Bacilius from history, and apparently, remember from history also included grave robbery. It was a good move. It was a good move. But that's, I like this one because it does. It shows these crusades how dark these crusades are.

30 chapters had no option but to go be sacrificed because one, person declared that they were heretics with no evidence, by the way. And that's how these crusades are. So with that, I want to break it and call it. Obviously, there's a lot of crusades we're going to cover it. And much like we did the War of the Beast, we'll be doing them in that session. We'll be going through them really deeply and talking through all the key players and how it happened. The goal of today was to use some of the smaller crusades that are very short writing of the book to explain what a crusade is. and that helps us with some of the other. We tell the stories later.

Next week, we've spent a lot of time on Imperium now because between War of the Beast, the Fists, all that stuff, we're going to flip back to chaos. And I want to do... Brad's for Army, baby. Yep. We're going to do World Eaters. They've got codexes now.

They actually had a new codex that came out not that long ago. So we're going to be doing the origins of the World Eaters, the tragedy that really is Angron. Angron's probably, I think, one of the saddest stories of the park. 100%. And obviously we'll also cover Karn and some of the devolution of their Legion. And now the real, the more like kind of, I was a revolution, not a word, but the rebirth of the Legion, it's more recently now that Angron is back and all this stuff's kind of going. Because the World leaders were broken up at that point in time. We're going to that.

Yeah, the World leaders more effectively just war bands for seven, eight, nine thousand years. And now they are not. So this has been John Barzadi and Bradchester. This guy. See you guys next week.