The 40k Lorecast - Episode 98 - World Eaters pt 2

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

On today’s cast we continue our coverage of the World Eaters with a deep dive into the legion post the events on Ghenna. We open with a deeper dive into the butcher’s nails with a focus on their affect on Angron himself. After that we go into Angron in effect purging his own legion of anyone not fully loyal to going ham on the crazy train. This then leads us into the confrontation between Angron and Leman, which results in Angron being sent to the other side of the galaxy to crusade solo, which just allows Khorne to get a better hold on the legion. We then move to Isstvan 3 and 5 and the actions of Angron there. We then close with Angron ascension to Daemon Prince of Khorne.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 Lordcast with me, John Barsati and Bradchester. This guy. On today's cast, we're going to continue our coverage of the World Eaters from just before the start of the heresy to just after the start of heresy. It's actually the World Eaters are one of those ones that have a ton of stuff really jammed into a small section and a gap and then another section.

A ton more stuff. Yeah. First War of Armageddon. First War is not that long, though. Candidly. The first war, I actually think I'm going to argue, and we'll get to it in our next cast after this one, I think the actions of Karn and the warp are more interesting and have more detail than the first war Armageddon. 100%.

Because we talked about that in our last cast, which is primarks weren't the movers and shakers because primarks weren't part of the game. Exactly. The chosen of each one was the part of the game. Exactly. As always, the 40K lore cast, the weekly show, focused in the lore of the 40K universe, releasing every Monday. at 7 p.m. Eastern time. A lot of you have been doing this incredible thing of following and commenting on Spotify. I cannot thank you enough. It is crushing our algorithm in a good way. We are now the number one ranked 40K podcast globally, which is kind of cool. There's countries we have listeners in.

Yeah, we're doing really well. And so I thank you all for doing that. And if you do like the cast, it takes just a second or two. It really does help us a lot. Thank you so much. Additionally, if you want to help us out some more, you can always join our Patreon. It's available. You can link to it in the show notes. It'll give you the show ad-free. And it's only $4.99 a month.

Or if you're in New Zealand, $8.4 in New Zealand, and that's just a currency conversion. Not the weird thing GW does when you guys try to buy models down there. Good God. How anyone in the Southern Hemisphere plays this game is mind-blowing to me for a financial standpoint. Yeah, because apparently they send them gold miniatures, because that's the only way I could figure out why they cost so much. It is just like, if you guys don't know what I'm talking about, go on Reddit.

You can see people have shown the financial calculation of importing a GW model into Australia and New Zealand. They do the, it's currency conversion plus tip. Additionally, if you like the cast, you like Brad and I. There's a link to our YouTube page. you can come over there. YouTube's got a great spot for us now. I'm taking our older cast and we've added video to them. Well, still imagery, subtitles.

So you can see what we were saying. We also have our live Q&A sessions. We do them there. They're recorded. Even some streaming games Brad and I have played on. Yes, we played a game. We played a game plus some others. It got it.

It was interesting. It was fine. But we're going to do some more of those in the future. It was a good time. If anything else, you know what, I do want to set a some more of those. I'd really like to see people choose our armies and stuff and do some historical, you know, see, we could

do some battles and whatnot. I'm going to make you play Imperial agents and I'm going to play something good. My God. Why? Brad, let me help you out. If we had our listeners pick your army, they're just going to pick armies you can't play. It's just going to be all airplanes.

It's going to be. That made me so mad just thinking about it. But also over there, we do have our other show. The history of 40K, which is a every fortnight show that focus on on the history of the tabletop game of 40K. We have guests on and we discuss like second edition. We're now third edition. He's up to think we'll be diving through quite a lot of stuff over there.

I just think it's fun as hell. So I hope you guys like it. Lastly, in the show notes, our Discord. Please join our Discord. It's completely free thing. The idea here is to build a community where people can come to ask questions, get help, really interact around the cast. You can see a bread and I book pretty active in there, but even beyond us. You shouldn't join it for us.

You should join it for the community. Because there's so much stuff because we talk about lore. We talk about theories. We talk about literature. We talk about movies. There's a little bit of everything, video games. And it's a nice place to get references too. People are so quick.

We've got so many active people in there. You ask a question. You can immediately get it. I've seen some stuff answered that was so obscure and I love it. Oh, yeah. Because the number one question that we see in there is, hey, I read this. What should I read this? read next. And you don't get just a, I mean, it should be Eisenhorn, but you get, you're getting

people like you really breaking out. What is it you liked about this? What didn't you like about this? Real solid advice. So cannot recommend it enough. But with that, let's talk about shoving nails in people's heads. I think I had that done this morning. I think it might be a step up from your current migraine level. What if I just put a railroad spike in here? I mean, could it be worse? I don't know if I'd be any more mad than I am right now. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Brad has a special place as heart for the butcher's nails because if they just cause migraines, he's like, oh, I know what Angron lives in every day. I also understand the world leaders, which again, my first army. But we left on, well, Karn had just been patient zero. And we have crapped on a world leader's with the butcher's nails. Angron just kind of popped up after he got told to sleep.

Yeah. Go to sleep. And he was unbelievably angry. but goes, oh, cool, this horrible thing that I want done is being done. Yeah, and let's talk about that horrible thing. I wanted to dive. I want to open this cast talking about the butcher's nails because they really are. They're going to come up a lot more here. So the nails the Nusarians placed in Angron were built for mortal men. They were not built for a primark.

And this is important because the Nusarians didn't really care if Angron lived or died, to be honest, but the emperor does. And so once Angron joined the 12th, Legion, the Legion's Tech Marines and Apothecaries began inspecting the nails. In fact, Malkuro the Sigelite was actually there as they were looking at it, along with a representative of the Mechanicum. And this was for a couple of reasons. One, this is Dark Age of Technology Tech. So they wanted to understand it and probably take it. What they found was a huge problem. Well, Angron is his own problem in this because all of the Primarks have superhuman healing.

and they can't figure out a way to take these out without killing him, basically, effectively. Yeah, what happened with Angron is, so exactly to Brad's point, all of the primarks can regenerate to a point, some of them more than others, Vulcan. And as a result, as these nails were in his skull, kind of destroying parts of his brain,

his body began to regenerate around them. And they actually effectively bonded with the nails, but not in a good way. This process, the nails actually seem to also be triggered by this. And so as Angrod's body is healing around the nails, the nails are digging deeper and deeper and doing more and more damage. Effectively, Ang, he is just as a clock, he will die. That's what they discover. Is that these nails are going to either, they won't kill him.

They will drive him so insane that he will die effectively in combat. That was what was included. be completely. Yeah, he'll be lost and all he will do is fight, and he will fight and fight and fight until he dies. That was it. And, of course, they told us to the emperor. Who read, hold on, who read it and did what he usually did and went,

I have other stuff to do. Couldn't you delegate this to somebody else? Yeah, probably. But I've got other stuff to do. Yeah, and this next bit actually does get a little bit retcon. So for over a decade plus, we were told that the, apothecaries and what have you, inspected him on board the ship of the 12th Legion.

But then there was a book that came out, not like eight years ago now, like 2016 or so, where in fact, Angron was taken from that flagship all the way back to Terra to a dormant. There we go, John. There we go.

I was about to say, don't slide over where they took him. They took him to a secret laboratory inside a dormant volcano. Obviously, we're a guy petting a white cat to have some people work on him. Yeah, because they have to build all their super secret laboratories.

Hold on. It gets better, though. Because who's running the lab? A guy named Arkin Land. Which is a James Bond villain name. Yes. He's also, by the way, fun side note in Arken Land. The Land Rader is named after him, and it actually was originally called Lands Rens

Raider, as in his name in the possessive, but everyone just took the S off. And he doesn't like that, by the way, his invention, no one gave him full credit for. But that's not important. Land at this point in this novel does give us a bit more information on the butcher's nails. And what he says is that the butcher's nails are actually a very crude version of something he's already seen. And what he's seen was they were actually originally designed to pacify and control a population. Again, controlling the endorphin release, and this way, forcing a population into compliance through a positive negative and positive positive reinforcement, depending on how you want to release those endorphins. But the butcher's nails that were shoved into Angron are much less complicated. They were

actually almost self-sufficient. They would, as we said before, when his adrenaline went up, it released endorphins. If there were no adrenaline, no endorphins. So endless pain. But what was causing more of an issue is that it had actually eaten parts of his brain. There were sections of Angron's brain that were gone now. And there's no way to regrow them. The butcher's nails are there. So he tells us to the emperor. And what the emperor says is effectively, well, how much time is he have left? Because Angron is, these nails are turning him into an actually a better warrior. and if deployed correctly, Angron could actually aid the war effort, not hamper it.

And so the emperors, I think the emperor's thought process was always, I'll just kill him when he becomes a problem. But right now, he's not really a problem. That most of the legions were scheduled for exterminatus at the end of the emperor's plan. That is a big debate all the time with it. That's what the chaos gods were definitely pitching to. That's what I'm saying.

That's why it's such a big thing. Like, as soon as you're done fighting, he's got a pool acid ready, just ready for you, exactly your size. And so it makes sense that the emperor being told, yeah, Angron is a devolving warrior who's going to cause nothing but problems. He's like, all right, well, I'll just make sure I don't put him somewhere that you know who's not coming back to Terra. That guy. Yeah, exactly. He's going to be on the outer rims, quite a bit. Exactly.

Yeah, we'll just leave him in the bad neighborhoods. So let's get back to Karn. Now, Karn, Angron, and Ghana. So at the end of our last cast, as we said, Angron had been put to sleep by the librarians because he was having a shouting fit. He was murdering people. I never had anybody say a shouting fit

while he was cutting people's heads off. He was probably also shouting. I'm just saying, you are technically correct, my bad. 100% technically correct. Yeah. The neighbors banging on the ceiling. Keep it down up there,

but there's actually a murder happening. Yeah. So back on Gena, as we said, the world where the rulers were nowhere to be seen, this place had been long ravaged by the war of storms, and so they engulfed the world. So these people were actually using scents to run everything. This is where the 12th Legion apothecary,

Surlach, figured out how to make the butcher's nails work. At some point, it don't really explain when, after the world leaders had gone down there and failed and come back, they must have brought some scents with them, because Sirlock was able to look at how these scents functioned and realize that's what he was missing as far as placement of the butcher's nails. And now, thanks to Karn volunteering,

he's figured out how to get the butcher's nails into their skulls. I should also point out butcher's nails are external just so we will understand when you see any pictures of Angron or early pictures of Karn to them. It's weird because the game, they describe them as dreadlocks,

but they look more like cornrows to me. I can call it out. Either way they're on the outside. They're having. Internal and external. Exactly. So the reason I bring that up, because that's why when Ron wakes up and he's furious and he looks at Carn and he can immediately see the butcher's nails are in Carn's head. So that's just quick note. So you can tell. And by the way, you can't hide them for that reason too. So if anyone else was looking at the Legion, they would see, hey, everyone here has things shoved in their skull, apparently. And Gras wakes in the slumber, as we just said, sees Carn there and there's thousands of these implanted legionnaires all ready to go. And they all want, thing. They want to go back down to Gena to go do the 31-hour thing that they failed to do before. Angron's up for a party, so he joins them. And Angron and a couple thousand of these, I guess,

could we call them berserkers at this point? I was just about to say that. I think even though they're not corn berserkers, they are berserkers, though. Yeah. That's what I was going to call them, what are you? Berserkerers, whatever's. They go down. And yeah, that they check that. 31 hour mark pretty well. They slaughter every single thing on the planet, every single synth, whatever it is. And they eventually fight all the way to the head of Gena where the actually only true Genens are living. And they rip apart their life support pods, at which point, it's actually Karn is there. And one of them pleads for mercy with Karn, who has butcher's nails in his head now. And you know what Karn doesn't do?

Provide mercy. I just assume that he did the Roershack on that one. And I'll say no. Yeah, he is. So they slaughter all of them. But we're not done with Gena. Real quick on this. This is another thing that shows you again,

how the world leaders operate, though, because remember, they're slaughtering people in pods. These are guys that haven't moved in hundreds. We don't really know that. Could be thousands of years. Yeah. Yeah.

They don't care that these aren't honorable combatants. or anything. They're just people that need to be killed. And that's how they have always operated, too, though. It just kind of shows you more of how the legion works. Yeah. That's a really good point. There's no fight here. By the way, the level of violence that occurs here, because even though they're synths, they're not necessarily fully synthetic human beings, it still created a disturbance in the warping. And the disturbance in the warp was so grand from the slaughter that was occurring there. It was so violent. It was so, it's probably more just it appeased corn so much. it actually blocked out the Astronomicon.

There were astropaths who throughout the segment could not see anymore. They couldn't even, it couldn't communicate. It created almost like a warp storm. There was so much violence occurring over here. But after the battle, Magos, who's the guy we talked about last time, was a centurion who'd stood against Angron when he told him to decimate, has basically had enough. He's up on the ship and they look down and they watch this. Well, this is a big deal in this, too, because this is my first big deal?

And whatever. We'll count them out. At this point, I think that Corn is starting to really favorably look on Angron. Corn, one of the biggest things, he's anti-psychar, but he also provides protection against psychic powers. So I feel at this point in time, they go for round two. And I think that Angron is fortified by corn at this point. Oh, yeah, very much so. But after the battle, Magos goes down to the planet.

along with a ton of other world eaters who all were saying, this is wrong. Like you guys, no butcher's nails, none of this stuff. You're not doing this. And effectively, a mini civil war breaks out on the surface. And by the way, Angron doesn't take this well, by the way. And again, because he's juiced up by corn, there's no more sleepy night-night time for Angron from these guys.

Yes. And so these guys, the fight breaks out. It actually does end with Magos gets actually killed. He gets beheaded by Kahn. Yeah, not Angron. And Karn is, who, Karn's having a party at this point. So at this moment, now we've got Space Marine on Space Marine murder. I don't know how, but a message gets back to Tara about this. And Tara basically gets notified that they're putting butcher's nails in the heads of

space marines. And B, they just had a little fight amongst themselves. So the emperor is less than pleased because don't forget, these are his space marines. These are not, you know, emperor still views everyone here as his. And he decides to send Lehman Russ to go bring Angeron back to terror to talk to him. And if I had a nickel for every time Lehman Russ was sent to bring a prime mark back to terror and had a fight, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot of money, but it's weird that I would have two of them. And before we dive into this confrontation with Lehman, I do want to spend a quick moment about anger. his overall viewpoint of the other primarks.

He wasn't a fan. He was not giving good Uber of his, the Yelp reviews on Primarks were not high for him. Yeah. To be fair, Angron was a really proud individual. And he'd immediately found himself in the back foot when compared to other Primark. So first off, he's the only Primark who didn't conquer his homeworld,

partly because I don't think his homeworld actually existed. I guess technically Alferius would also fall into that category, too, wouldn't he? Because Alfarious never conquered in their homeworld. Well, he didn't have a homeowner to conquer, really, though. Yeah, so it's okay, so there's two of them. But Angron's... It was already conquered.

It was the Emperor's home. Yeah, but the difference is Angron's homeworld was not under Imperial compliance and never came under Imperial Compliance because it's in the war. It's in the Webway. You're really staying on that line. Honestly, I think it's a better story. Candidly. If you take the whole story and you make it actually, it was a dark Eldar planet he landed on,

and the Emperor wiped his mind that everyone's mind around him to make him think it was humans, not Eldarios or not. It's a better story. But anyway. It makes more sense that he wasn't just getting chumped by idiots. Exactly. That being said, Angron is aware that other legions gets to look down on him because he had to be rescued, whereas everyone else uplifted themselves. And so he needed to prove that he was better than everybody else, at least in combat.

The rest of the stuff is lame, but he wants to be the best combat. That's lame. Yeah, not lame. Oh, I'm the best logistics. Have fun, nerd. But second off, though, for Angron was equally problematic because his Legion wasn't in very good shape when he took it over. He did actually, interestingly, he's one of the only primarks

who never had to shadow another prime mark. I think we all know why. I think they all just said no. No. He's like, no. He'll figure it out. But that's what it was. Everyone else got shadowed and taught,

except for even Horace was taught by the emperor. Angron didn't even spend time with the emperor. They just said, here's the 12th Legion. Bye. And so he had to bring these guys up. And this was a fractured Legion that had been separated and that brought back together. So he's not like really in a great spot. And while they'd had a lot of like battlefield recognition, he had to form them into his own image.

And his own image was not ideal. Well, they also. Well, let's go over a couple things real quick on this, which is one, they had a ton of victories. They are Ws. But they don't pacify things. don't set things up. They're not fortifying. They're not helping logistics. They're just wrecking stuff. So they weren't really good for the campaign. They were really good to wreck stuff. And it also means that they don't have worlds to point to of, oh, these are the worlds we brought

into compliance. They brought no worlds into compliance. They destroyed them all. I mean, the bigger thing is, Angrod hates all of this. He hates the other prime marks. He hates the emperor. Yeah. He hates everything that he's doing. He also hates his own legion. where at one point early on, Angron, by the way, left. He grabs a frigate and disappeared. And the world leaders couldn't tell anybody, but they spent two years looking for him.

And it was, of course, was Karn that found him. And Angron had found a feral world that was loaded with just monsters. And he was under and right at fighting, waiting for something to kill him. And Karn, of course, yelled at him and Angron came back. The reason why is, and Brad says really well in our last cast, that Angron hated himself and he more than almost he hated anybody else.

And he saw in his Legion all of his weaknesses. Worse. Way worse. He hated them even more because they reminded him of all of his failures because they were, because they were worse at everything. He was bad. Yeah, exactly. He hates himself.

They're all shittier versions of him. And they also have way they're all, he feels that they're all cowards. They're all failures. they can't accomplish things. And it's just one of my, they're just shitty mirrors and a fun house mirrors of me making my life even suckier.

And he's so angry about all these things. And it doesn't make him that much fun to be around. So then he meets the other prime arcs. And what I assume was mostly video calls. And they all were like, nope. But he hated them too. He saw all of them as weak. He would look at each of them and say,

basically because that's the only world this man has ever known is a world of combat. He looked at all them that I could defeat all of you. You're all weak. All of you have flaws. You are nothing compared to me. And they really didn't like listening to that. So overall, no one really wanted Angron around, which is fine because Angren also didn't

want to be around. And that is important because usually when we're covering these casts, we'll talk about how the Primark had friends. Like Folgram was really good friends with Ferris Manus until he cut his head off, but also Horace, even more Tarian, Magnus. they all had friends, not Angron. Angron was a solo act. So back to the World Eaters.

The history, by the way, we're going to cover here gets a little bit convoluted from timeline. Everything that occurs in the early part of the heresy, the timeline gets a little bit tricky. Just candidly, it's... Yeah. The biggest thing is, we don't know exactly when, but the World Eaters were becoming more and more violent, and they were.

almost actually acting against the crusades sometimes, because people would have to come back and do something, because they never left anything. They didn't fortify anything. They didn't set up anything. They just wrecked worlds and moved on, and they kept getting reports of this. Also, none of the other legions wanted to work with the world leaders.

Yeah, and let's talk about that for a minute, about how bad this was, because the stories coming in from the other legions were really hard to ignore. Time and time again, It was barbarism is what they were doing. And this is beyond what the emperor wanted. They're destroying worlds that were meant for colonization. And inside it was the full exterminatus.

Well, they're also, they're going to worlds that were supposed to be pacified so they can use the populace to make things for the imperial time, blah, blah, blah, and instead they're just killing everybody. My favorite example, and I think most people's favorite example, is Arigata. Aragada is a world that was resisting compliance, and the emperor sent the world eaters and the ultramarines. So tactically, really good combo. If you're playing on the tabletop and you were allowed to bring world eaters and ultramarines, you're winning that game. Unless, of course, one of your part of your army doesn't pay attention to the other side.

Which is what ends up happening. So at the center of Aragata is this massive citadel that was built during the dark age of tech. technology. And it's so powerful that a full orbital bombardment barely puts a dent in the walls. So the ultramarines pull back into orbit to assess kind of the defenses because it's the ultramarines. They know they can find a weak spot. Let's investigate, figure it out, and we're going to, we'll get through this pretty easily. While they're doing that, the world eaters went, Yolo, Swagons, freaking Leroy Jenkins, and went, nope. And while the ultramarines are planning their assault, they get notified that the world eaters have breached the walls.

And the way they breached, they breached. They breached. They're right. They climb over the walls. Let me say it better. They get notified that the world eaters are inside the fortress. That is true. Yeah.

And they look down and they see that the world eaters have built a ramp to get up and over the wall. Pretty clever idea. Question is, what, they build the ramp out of, Brad? Tens of thousands of course. Yes. The world leaders deployed to the planet and all the people who were not inside the fortress, they killed them, carried their bodies to the wall of the fortress and built a ramp. Who knows how high this? We say tens of thousands. It could have been hundreds of thousands, could have millions of bodies were piled up. And then the world leaders ran up the ramp and jumped into the fortress. So the ultramarines see this and go, oh shit. And they run and they rushed down there to join in. Not necessarily, no, on the frame, like, okay, let's go secure it.

And they go to secure a fortress. That is a nightmare zone. Oh, yeah. They murdered horribly every, and again, everyone. It doesn't matter if you were a defender or you were Ted that cleans the third floor. You all got killed.

Yeah. And pretty brutally, too. They decorated the walls. That is what their ultramines. The ultramines got in there and they found bodies pinned to the walls, pieces of bodies. The world eaters didn't just kill everybody.

This was, they didn't know what corn was, but this was effectively what corn cultists would do. There is blood, there is gore. It is just, this is evil. Gilliman finds out and freaks out. But the thing is, the world leaders, though, had already gone, well, we killed everybody. That's all we came to go. They left system. So Gilliman calls back to the emperor.

And, you know, the difference, the Gilliman still carried a lot of war. wait at this point, and he's pissed. And he tells the emperor, like, this is basically just not acceptable. So back to Gena. Now, this is not, we don't really know how this happened so quickly. So the Ancron has just killed all of Kenna, had a mini civil war. And then in that period of time, the emperor gets a notification and sends Lehman Rust there. And he arrives quickly. So Warp Travel, we talked up before. It shouldn't be this quick. I'm just going to point that out because we did a cast on warp travel. And it feels weird that Lehman Russ was able to, like,

they got a note, he hopped in his ship with his whole Legion and arrived that quickly. But that's the story. So he did. Well, dude, Lehman shows up. I love the fact that they make the quote of, the blood is still fresh on Hank Gras armor when Lee walks up to him. Literally, like, he just finished doing a slaughter.

And Lehman got there like 10 minutes from the other side of the galaxy. So, Lehman, I'm assuming. said it very politely, but he says the emperor has enough of this. Butchers nails, nope, we're not doing that anymore. And the world leaders, hey man, stop killing everyone.

It sucks for our campaign. And Angron took this very well and said, I comply 100%. There's one more piece. You missed. He also says to him, I and my Legion are here to escort you, Angron, and your Legion back to Terra, where, and this is important,

they would remove the butcher's nails from your head. Not, yeah. I was going to leave that for the end because everything is going kind of whatever until he says this last part. Yep.

And then shit goes down. They instantly fight. I don't know if he says it exactly, but effectively says, we're going to take the butcher's nails out of your head one way or another. And Angron immediately realizes that Lehman is starting to kill him.

And GW does, yeah. I give the whole Doc Holiday, given the quick wink over to really start the fight. I feel like they were at, they were standing there at an impasse and then I'm just going to talk a little extra shit to make sure this goes down. And that's what goes down. Yeah. And so they do with this, that's solid Star Wars, who shot, Grito shot first. No one knows who shot first, but they start shooting. And both legions start attacking each other.

There are no records. All the records are expunged. We don't know how many died, but it's not a small amount. We are talking two very aggressive legions went right at each other. And the fighting only ends when Angron knocks Lehman Ross to the ground after shattering his own axe in the fight. An axe, by the way, he'd had since New Syria. And as he's about to kill Lehman, he realizes he's completely surrounded by space wolves who are about to murder him if he takes one more step. So Angron backs up, Lehman stands up, and Lehman turned to Angron, and then look at him

realize there's no redemption. There's nothing, this cannot be solved. And he takes his leaves and leaves. Yeah, this is a weird thing on this, and the timeline's weird on this, because there's plenty of time for something to be done about this before the whole events of the Horacee take place now. Because Lehman Rust just goes, hey, man, I'm a pretty crazy dude that we all love to battle. and this guy in all of his legion are completely...

Yeah, that's right. These guys are not usable. We can't be part of this. There's no glory. There's no honor. There's no heroic. Exactly. This is just trash.

And he tells the emperor this. And we kind of, we don't know. I don't... Between this and the stand v. 5, you know... Yeah, let's go into what the emperor does. Because actually, this is interesting. We'll be right back after a quick break. So the emperor...

decides he's in a bit of a bind. The Great Crusade is still going. The world eaters have performed the actions impeccably when the actions are murder everything. But the problem is that their actions are now starting to force his hand because the Lords of Terror, the other prime arcs, everyone's saying, this, this legion cannot be. Like, this is horrible. So the emperor does somewhat of a clever move, actually. He just, because he realized, is Angron's going to die eventually anyway and just decides to say, well, I still need conquering,

but I'm going to move him away to where his problems aren't mine and sends them to the fringe of the galaxy. Which is, I think I know what I made was he sent him to the bad neighborhood. He just went, nope, you can go over there and I don't care what happens.

Yeah, he just said, go over here, it's all Zenos, I don't care what you do with the Zenos. Yeah. And Angron just, goes and he slaughters out there. The problem is that it also means he's far enough out that the light of the emperor is not quite there. He's on top of us now. Let's watch. There's a world leader's, and no other Legion has this

autonomy. None of them. They all were reporting back to terror. The world leaders were basically sent on his request. Yeah, if you come back, cool. If you don't also cool, this puts him far enough out. Also, he's also sent there with not the regular support. Yeah. Oh, it's just him. It's all, it's him and it's completely world leaders and they're whatever support staff they have all out there. This is a John theory, but this one I'm pretty sure I'm right. I think him being this far out allowed corn to be much more aggressive, whereas if you look at the actions of all the chaos gods with Horace and everyone else and Grimm, all the people through this, it was all very subtle, things. It's like small, insidious as they go. This one was just, I'm jumping ahead.

Arn, Carn gets fully converted while he's out there. That's the thing. That's, it is, it is the most, Angron's the only part of the Legion who's not officially a part of chaos. I mean, just straight. He starts, he's the eightfold path at that point in time. Eight being the number of corn. Exactly. It's, yes, I think that he's also outside of the reach of the protection of the emperor's psychic abilities to protect him. And that's that, I think what we're both saying the exact same thing. Emperor was somewhat shielding the primarks from chaos. Remember, the emperor, when he was conscious, could do this. He was powering the Astronomicon while being like 2,000 light years away or 2 million light years away from it.

Maybe not 2 million. It's funny because we talk about the emperor that we'll do another cast on what he's now. But like, Emperor before he was put in the Golden Throne was wildly multitasking, powerful things. Yeah. And just like he was the protecting, and now he is because he's the fifth KS. guy. We don't talk about that. But he just is.

But. Exactly. And that's the point. He's all the way. And that's the more I think is that he doesn't have that force field over Angron or his Legion. And I, and because your reason I say this is because they are very corrupted shortly thereafter. And the shortly thereafter is horace. Yeah.

The thing is that this is, I think this went to crap. immediately, to be honest with you. Because they get out there and they start slaughtering stuff. And the plan, I'm doing wild air quotes, by the way, everyone, is working for the emperor, but it's not. Because I think the Legion almost instantly completely sold out to. They didn't mean to. They just sold out to corn.

They are killing Zenos, but they're doing it basically in corn's name, not the 100%. So moving forward a little bit in the timeline, Horace now has undergone the Serpent Lodge conversion, and he has to start picking allies. It doesn't take him long to pick one. Angron gets a phone call, and I think the phone call is,

hey, want to kill the emperor? And that was kind of the end of the pitch. He couldn't say yes fast enough. Yeah, yeah. I think Angron screamed, and all the ships started coming right back to wherever Horace was. Literally the hardest part's going to be

getting him to hangar on to wait. I assume he's, I assume the phone call was, hey, you want to kill the emperor? And Angron started going towards Terra. And Horace said, no, no, no, come here first. Just come here first. So now we're going to move on to Istvon 3.

As one of the first converts in the heresy, Angron, of course, is with Horace on the flagship, planning out Istvon 3. And these, by the way, this... Blabing? Yeah, so, by the way, this is another one of those ones that's been retconned, because depending on which story you read,

there were either half of the world, were still loyal to the emperor, how that was possible, I don't know. Not even remotely. Almost none of them were much more, much more likely. But I have to honor the fact that both have been written. So there you go. I just know. Obviously, the ones of Butchers nails in their head, not Team Emperor.

In my mind, they're just straight wearing like berserker hats and stuff at this point in time. Yeah. Is that a symbol of corn? Nah, it's something else. Someone else. Don't worry about it. Yeah, don't mind your business. So the plan on Istfahn was, for those who don't know about it,

was to place all of the space marines who their leaders felt wouldn't follow them against the emperor, down on Istvon fighting a Slinash rebellion that was barely a rebellion, if I'm being honest. And then while they were down there, they were going to bomb them from space with virus bombs, which hits the atmosphere, turns any organic material into basically methane, and then lights it on fire. the whole planet burns in an instant. Luckily for the loyalist, Saul Tarvitz, who actually was Emperor's Children.

That's right. Saul was Emperor's Children. Found out about it, took a ship down and warned everybody. So about almost half of the soldiers. A super cool book, by the way. Flight Eisenstein's insanely good. Yeah, but I'm just saying. He does a Yolo Swag, drive-by maneuver to get outside of the block.

Whatever. We've done this. We've covered it. We've done this cast. One small show. ship flew in front of multiple battleships who just didn't shoot at it because it's the Star Wars thing of there's a pod. I don't bother.

There's no life forms in it. Why waste the shot? You know, even a bolt shot? Yeah, exactly. So because of this, over half of the space marines down on the planet actually survived the initial bombardment. And there's so, the problem being there was there's a ton of clouds that are formed by the virus bomb.

Horace looks at this and says, okay, well, everyone down on that planet does. doesn't have a ship. Everyone not down on that planet does have a ship that has guns on it. So we'll wait for the clouds to clear. And when the clouds clear, we're just going to bomb them into oblivion with regular munitions. Angron heard none of that plan because he was in a drop pod heading down there to kill him one by one, along with a bunch of his legioners. And this whole scene plays out in my head as Horace ordering a bunch of people to reload munitions, get ready, blah, blah, blah. And then someone saying, hey, where's Angron? And then you just see on the radar screen behind in, this blip of a drop pod heading down

towards the planet. And it clicks over to Angron, and all you hear is just death metal blaring from the inside of a drop pod. Like, we're doing this. But for whatever reason, Angron and his world eaters hit the planet and then just start slaughtering all the space marines there. At which point, the other traitor legions go, well, we got to help. So the death guard and empress children also fired down.

and they just start going this giant battle. There's an important thing on Karn here. Well, there's just, what I want to pull is, this is one of the first times you see the effects of the chosen thing of a god, anger and slaughtered corn. The people behind Angron actually start fighting faster and stronger. Because they're powered by the slaughter. And he's an, basically, he's a living icon of chaos.

Even really, he becomes more of it when he becomes a demon primar. but even now you see the beginnings of this. Also, Karn gets smoked for the first time, first of like, what, four? It's hard to gauge how many times Karn has died because I would argue that Angron killed him. Yeah, I agree on that. I think that he actually did die,

and Korn kept him alive. Karn, at this point, I don't think he fully understands that he's a chosen of Korn. I do believe Angron killed him. And we talked about last time. I think he killed him. And Karn just was kept getting powered back up and resurrected by Korn.

It happens again here. And Karn gets in a fight with Garville Logan. And in the fight, Garville basically just shoves him right in front of a tank that has dozer blades on it. And he gets impaled under the other one and pulled under the tank on this. He's dead. Yeah. He's dead.

And Garville leaves. Until later, when some of the other world leaders walk over and they feel. And Karn basically pulls himself off of the dozer blades and gets up really angry, by the way. Really, really angry. And Karn and everyone around him thinks that, oh, he's just stubborn and super space marine healing. The truth is, this is the powers of Korn. Korn does not let his champions die. That is actually all the chaos gods.

Zinche is kind of a dick. But all of the chaos gods. No, no, no. If you fail them, you let them die. That's true. But if you are a good champion, they will keep ready. resurrecting you. And so Karn gets resurrected. So another reason to read the book,

fights actually really cool. Oh, the fight's cool. Garville also realizes that there's a real chance that Karn's going to caught him in a tiny little bit since, yeah, no. One of my favorite parts about this is that as the clouds above clear, Horace is kind of like, all right, guys, you've had your fun. Can I just kill them all now? And he radios down and everyone's heart's leaving,

but he realizes his anger, it's not going anywhere. So he has to send Mortarian Folgram over to basically grab Angron and bring him back to the ship. And he was not happy about it. He was not happy about it. And he only went back because they promised him

he'd get to kill more in a week or so, which is exactly what happened. So the next thing that occurs is Istvon 5. And in Istvon 5, the Angron actually is the bait. Because, you know, they told the loyalists, hey, look what Angron just did. And Horace, go kill them.

And Angron is the bait. Loyalists deploy the big ones who start hunting down Angron of the Ravenguard. In fact, Korax really wants to kill him until they realize it's all a trap. And Corrin and his band of merry men, all like 30 of them, have to flee. Oh, well, well, there was 50. That's right, yeah. 50 of them flee. And this is kind of a key part for Angron here.

Angron and the royal is start pursuing them and chasing and chasing. and they eventually corner them. And just before Angron can leap forward to go kill Korax, all of them, a Ravenguard ship appears, and Korax and his guys jump and bail, leaving Angron just screaming on the ground because he was ready to kill this Primark. And it was his chance to show he's the greatest primark warrior.

I'm better than my brother's, I will kill them. Yeah. And I actually don't know if he knew at this point that Folgram had killed Ferris Madness or not, but I can guarantee if he'd known he'd be even, more angry that he didn't get to kill a prime market. Oh, yeah. Luckily, Lourgar is about to get involved.

All right. So, Lorgar and Angron. This one's fun. Lurgar and his word bears were assigned by Horace to go and disrupt the ultramarines. And by disrupt, we mean keep them the hell over there. I was about to say, this is a great plan because I have to give it to Lurgar on this, because this is his plan, make him coming. because they had Angron join,

not because he thought he'd be super effective at doing anything to the Ultramarines, he just knew that their rage, hatred, basically their corn powers would draw the warp power over there. And what they wanted to do was make this no travel zone for anybody that wasn't chaos

and they achieved the shit out of it. And that was, what this really was, Lorgar wasn't going over there to defeat the Ultramarines, so there's no way he could have. Even if Lurgar was a better prime mark, the Ultramarines were the largest legion,

there was no chance. What they were going to do was create a warp storm centralized in Ultramar to just shut Ultramar down. I think they actually, they damaged the sun there. But while they're traveling out there, Lorgar realizes something. He realizes that the butcher nails inside of Angron's head are killing him much faster than anyone thought. Like, effectively, on the trip out to Ultramar, Lorgar realizes Angron's got like weeks left at most. And then he's... Yeah, he's going into effectively what are c-jointed.

because he's just completely losing control of himself. Yeah. Like he just finds himself other places. He's raging out, but sometimes he's doing nothing. He's just gone because the butcher's nails are murdering it. And he's losing a track of his sanity. And Lorgar says something to Angron that is a theme among chaos. He says, the nails are killing you.

You are going to die. However, I have a way to make it so you don't die. Not I'll cure you. I have a way to make it so you don't. die. And Angron actually is receptive to this. And he tells him, just, we're going to, just come with me and we're going to do this. So the first thing he does is to complete is this ritual that he's going to perform, which to Brad's exact point wasn't that much about helping Angron. It was just having Angron's warp presence nearby while he created the warp storm. It completes the warped storm.

They turns to Angron and says, the way we're going to cure you is we need to go back to Nusaria. Now, Angron, in all of this time since then, has not returned to Nusaria. which again is because I don't think it's a real place, and I don't think he knows how to get there, unless it's the webway or some part of the warp, and Lorgar knows how to get there. My theory, but whatever. Lorgar and Angron go back to Nusaria,

and what he's telling him on the trip out there is we're going to find the rulers of Nusaria, and we're going to force them to explain to us the secrets of these butcher's nails, and with that knowledge in the Aida of Dark Mechanicum, we'll be able to fix you effectively. But don't worry. But he also says, don't worry.

But he also says, don't worry. As soon as we get the information, you can kill all of them. So Angron's like, all right, I mean, this plan I'm in on, mostly for the second part. The first part's cute, but I get to kill them all. Yeah. The arrival on Nusaria does not go great. It does go great, actually. It goes exactly the plan for Lorgar, if I'm being honest.

Oh, it's 100% for Lorgar. Perfect for Lorgar. So they land, and they land right at the site where Angron was teleported out of. Oh, wait? Yeah, we got quantum leaped. He's for his. him his biggest failure. Yeah.

And what he discovers is that the bodies of all of his soldiers, brothers, whatever you want to call them, had just been left out in the mountainside. No one had been buried, nothing. They're just to bleach in the sun. And that's the death that's reserved on this area for a failure. And so they marked effectively everyone around him as a failure. So he gathers up, by the way, some of the corpses and makes a bandalier of skulls that he starts wearing around of his former brothers.

whatever. And then he entered. I just love the whatever. Whatever. It's fine. It's got to come up a lot later. It's why I didn't bring that up. Angron then goes down to the local city and effectively asks what the hell, tells them what

happened. Who's in charge? Tell me what happened here. And in the city, they'd give him the story. And the story is that there was an uprising out of the capital. They went and hidden in the mountain like cowards. And the rulers of Nusaria showed up. And the leader of the rebels ran away.

And then as a result, these guys luckily, and then Nusir was able to murder, was able to kill them all. Angron doesn't like this version of the story. No. Not well. So Angron collects his entire Legion and informs them to scour the entire planet. Everything on the planet dies now, starting right, meow.

As soon as this begins, though, Gilliman shows up and the Ultramarines because Angron and Lorgar had just left really messing up McCrack. And Gilliman's a big fan of McCrug. Doesn't like people messing up his McCrack. He and the Ultramarines arrive at Nusaria and begin the assault, at which point they immediately discover fighting world eaters totally sucks hand-to-hand. so they kind of back it up a little bit and start shooting them from orbit. This book is involved.

They end up crashing one of the main ships of the word bears. It's a whole big thing back and forth. It's well written. Go ahead and read it. The important thing is the Ultramids actually weren't here to go after the world leaders.

They were going to do it no matter what, but their real target was the word bears because the word bears were the ones who wrecked McCrick. Well, they wrecked the son. Yeah, fair enough. And so the issue is that when they came to fight the word bears,

it was actually the world eaters they had to get through first. The word bears, interestingly enough, are kind of part of the combat, but not really. They are super not really. Because the word bears are doing a lot of chanting

and not a lot of fighting because they are doing at this point in time, I think the largest ritual that at least the Imperium people had ever known. Yeah. They are,

full on. They're making themselves, they're putting on the ground. They themselves are making different shapes. They're doing circles. They have different archaic symbols. I will say, when you read the book, I know what they were trying to do.

They were in formations, like, doing these rituals. And all I could think of was, like, a halftime show at a college football. A band, yeah, 100%. A band just playing music. And then lower, and Lower Gard dotted the eye.

It's Ohio, baby. Yeah, exactly. They formed an arrow and they shot the arrow. It's just, that's where my brain went on it. It's, again, I always feel bad when someone's writing something really serious and I just, my brain goes, no, I'm going to be silly now. I mean, as much as he sucks at everything, he is an excellent schemer and kind of a ritual magic user, to be honest with you.

If you give him enough time, he will get some shenanigans done. So with that being said, G-man figures out kind of what's going on. And he runs to where Lorgar is. Yeah. They go up to that mountainside where he's doing the final completion. And he does have a wild ritual circle at the top of this. Yeah. Can Lorgar fight?

No. Can Gilliman? Yeah. Bobby G. Just starts beating the boots off him. Oh, this is brutal. Bobby G. Just starts wrecking him.

And as he's about to kill Lorgar, a very loud noise erupts from behind him. And he just psycho. blood-raged Angron leaps at Gilliman. And they begin fighting. And the good news is, Gilliman, again, can fight. And he's able to fend off this just psychotic rage coming out of Angron.

And now, because Angron's viewpoint is, I didn't get to kill Corex. I'm killing Gilliman. And Gilliman's on team. No, you're not killing me. But I'm going to kill you, and then I'm going to kill Lorgar. While they're fighting, apparently,

neither of them noticed that while, Angron and Gilman are fighting. Lorgar is off to the side chanting. Not helping, by the way. And not helping any way shape or form. Well, he's about to be hurting quite a bit. Helping at hurting at the same time. That's a good point.

One, one of the skulls falls off Angron's bandolier of skulls. It's a glancing blow. So while Gilliman's trying to hit him with a sword, it breaks the bandalier of skulls and it falls down. And then, I mean, I like it because the way they write it the novel is, and then Gilliman takes a step back and he crushes the skull to dust under his boot. Yeah, man, it's a three meter tall 300 kilogram being wearing power armor, stepping on a skull. I feel like it's not going to hold up.

And Angron took offense to that. It's not a Lego, you know. So he spinal tapped it. He just went into a berser rage. Yeah. And was just overwhelming Bobby G. But Lorgar was about to reach the end of his ritual. And the sky parts, the sky started raining blood.

Literally. All of a sudden, yeah. Well, all of a sudden, Angrod's locked in place. Yeah. And he's just, he's so also just, he lets out this pharaoh scream, which I love, because he feels like he's just about to kill Bobby G. And then he can't move. And he's parallel, but not only can he not move, every sinew in his body catches fire.

Yeah, exactly, it's on fire. Not literally, but that's his feeling. And at the same time, all the librarians of the world leaders feel something. And they feel the scream and agony of their prime mark. They know something is basically trying to pull his soul away from them. And they immediately begin chanting and using their warp powers together to kind of channel in to save him. And what ends up occurring is Angron's soul is now in the immaterial being pulled between two directions. The materium and corn, for lack of a better phrase.

And the tug of war is all of the librarians of the world eaters versus Lorgar. Problem is in the warp, Lorgar is insanely powerful. And as this one goes back and forth, Lorgar is eventually able to shift Ingron's soul to corn. which is interesting because I don't think Angron ever officially gives himself over to Corn Wars because Mortarian does, Magnus does, everyone else gives themselves to Corn. Angron is given to corn, unless I read it wrong. No, but it's also, that's how Corn works. He's taken by corn and a show of force, not insidiously, not in a deal, any of the ways

that the other Primax fell to them. He is forced, taken by power. Corn is more powerful than me. he has now taken my possession of me. Yeah. And in this moment, this is where we get modern Angron. Angron's whole body, that he was frozen in place, his body just starts to twist and turn and shift. Wings pop out of the back.

He deformed and he becomes this like red dragon-esque demon bloodthirst or whatever. He's a combo of a lot of things. He just becomes that standing there in front of Gilliman, I might add. which is actually super good for Gillivan because probably no one, Demon Primers didn't exist. He was already. Yeah, this is the first one.

Yeah. He's also getting the better of him before that happened. Yeah. So all of this happens. Angron has just went through his soul being ripped out of his body. Also, his entire body being in dunked in molten lava.

And, well, Angron was now going to live from the butcher's nail. but also he no longer is super mad. Well, yes, he is super mad at Bobby G. But he decides that he doesn't need to kill Bobby G. He's got a new target because while his own psychers were trying to save him, and I'm doing air quotes because they did a bad job of it, they had been ripping his soul apart in a tug of war,

which I'm assuming probably sucks a lot. I haven't had a lot of soul damage done. So I can't tell you the effects of how that feel. But it doesn't sound pleasant. So he decides, everybody that was making me a tug of war doll on my soul needs to die right now. So he goes...

It's also important here to point out that Angron wants to go kill all the librarians. This is something corn also does. And so it becomes... So this is why... It's an odd story. We think about he's standing in front of Gilliman. Now two or three times the size he used to be,

fully infused with corn. He doesn't even take one move at Gilliam. He basically spins around and flies off. He'll kill the librarians because, and I, again, John theory, I think it's because the librarians are still a threat to him at this point. I think that even though he'd been given over the librarians could have, he hasn't fully engaged, whatever term you want to have. So Gilliman is a later problem.

My own librarians are a now problem. And he goes off and purges the librarians, which is why world leaders can't have librarians. when you play world leaders. Nope. Because he killed all of them and he will continue to kill all of them. Bobby G. does take the hand and says,

yeah, this, that's messed up. I'm going to go ahead and get out of here. I need to go, yeah, I got to go think about what he is a planner. And you know what a planner does when they first ever encounter a demon? They leave and go make a plan because that's not ideal.

I went through the roll of decks of things that I was able to fight against. And I went, hey, this isn't anything. thing in here? Yeah. I'm going to go ask Dad what to do about this. For sure. But my favorite part of this whole thing is Angron, by the way, slaughters all the librarians, doesn't say a word anyone. And his whole Legion goes back up to his ship. He hasn't said a word. His Legion assembles. There is a demon primark, winged a demon in front of all of them. And he looks up. He looks up just heaving, like just monstrous being and turns to Carn and says,

go down to the hold of our ship where they had slaves. Don't know why. They never explain where they came from, by the way, or what they were doing. There's no backstory on these slaves, just that there are slaves in the midship. And he says, go down there, kill all of them and build me a throne out of their skulls. To which Karn goes, high five, yeah, let's do this. And heads off. Man, I was thinking about doing that anyways.

Yes, best idea ever. Seriously, these two, these guys are peanut butter and jelly. or whatever people eat in other parts of the world. These two, I got yelled at for that already, so we keep doing it. It's funny. These two are the best buds now. And from there. Nobs and fish.

Yeah, yeah, there are knobs and fish. What happens now is Angron and his Legion are going to get to work, but not necessarily in the way everyone else wants them to. This is where we're going to break for next week. Nobody wants them to. Yeah. Next week, we're going to do this, what I'm going to call the side quests that the world eaters go on. But the difference is usually when you think of a side quest,

you're playing the game and you could do this optional side quest. This is more, I don't feel like playing the game anymore. I'm just going to do side quests. That's what Angron and team do. They go and do their own thing. And that's something that they're going to keep doing up to modern 40K. And we're going to cover a good amount of that. We're not going to go all the way to modern 40K,

but we'll cover a good amount of that, especially Karn, post-invasion, post-sege of Terra. Yeah. I think you meant to say, the betrayer? Not yet. It's when he, we're going to cover Karn.

We're going to cover Karn earning the monocum of the betrayer. We're going to cover kind of Angron's appearance, disappearance, the legion. Just overall, how we got Angron back into the game, a little bit of that too,

about how he did disappear for a while. He appeared for a little bit and disappeared. But a lot of it, the next one's going to be about Karn. We're going to spend a lot, for those who are who are World Dealer fans. What about Karn? Literally, this is,

he hasn't done that much up to this point. He's been a, he's a side character up till this point. And much like with Aramon, Typhus, and a lot of them, Abadon, their glow-up happens post-sege of terror. Where they basically, they take either a leadership role, which the rest of them did, or in Carn, they take on a plot directing role, is how I would describe it. So. Plot directing. That's great. That's what it. I do like it. I like it. Plot device is the better term, but I like plot direct.

That's what he is. He drives this story hard. So yeah, until then, this has been John Barsati and Brad Chester. See you guys next week.