A Geek History of Time - Episode 229 - Primarch Sources Part I

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

I'm saying that we were getting to the movies. Yeah, and I'm only going to get into a few of them. Because there were way too many for me to really be interested in telling you this clone version or this clone version in the early studio system. It's a good metric to know in a story art. Where should I be? Or there's beast. I should step over here.

Uh, yeah. At some point, at some point, I'm going to have to sit down with you like and force you, like pump you full of coffee and be like, no, okay, look. And are swiftly and brutally put down by the minute men who use bayonets to get their point across. Well done there. I'm good, Aimean. And I'm also glad that I got your name right this time. I apologize for that one TikTok video.

Men of this generation wound up serving a whole lot of them as a percentage of the population because of the war, because of a whole lot of other stuff. Oh yeah. And actually in his case, it was pre-war but you know. I was joking. Did he seriously join the American Navy? He did.

Fuck it. Hahaha. This is a Geek History of Time. Where we connect Nurgere to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history and English teacher here in Northern California, teaching at the middle school level. And earlier this evening, I got to spend, I don't know, about an hour and a half in one of my happy places. And it's one of those moments where I hadn't really realized it was my happy place until

I was doing it earlier this evening. I made dinner for my family, man, my wife, and my son. And it was a meal. I knew my wife was going to like and that we were not going to have to fight too hard to get my son to eat. He's an indifferent eater. He actually really likes this particular meal, but he's just not interested in eating because he's five and everything else in the world is much more interesting. It was carnitas and guacamole. And I was in the kitchen and my wife was out on the back patio with our son and some of our neighbors. And I had 80s tunes playing and I was dancing along being a complete dork. And in the middle of all of it, I realized, you know what? I never realized how happy this made me. And this is pretty awesome.

Nice. So, you know, yeah, it was, it was, it was a, it was a really great is a really great Moment doesn't quite apply because it was longer than a moment, but it by yeah I got to linger in my happy place and 80s students playing in the background certainly helped I have the tiger Makes every situation nearly every situation better So yeah, so that's what I got going on who are you and what have you had going on? makes every situation nearly every situation better.

So yeah, so that's what I got going on. Who are you and what have you had going on? Well, I'm Damien Harmington. I'm a US history teacher up here in Northern California at the high school level. And today my daughter comes up to me and she said, I'm writing a story using mouse guard, which I'm like, all right, cool, back to that. And she said, so I'm thinking about like this making an old fur, who is out of shape

and overweight and used to have red fur and now has gray fur, and who has unexplicable agility and strength and tends to know a lot of things. And I was like, oh, that sounds like a fun character. She's like, do you mind me writing about you? I said, there it was. Yeah, I was like, wait a minute. Okay.

What's it called when Tolkien made Treebeard? Um, because this is that but this is this is total is totally that It would be it's not it's it's not a self-insert, but it's a it's a real person insert. Yeah, it's a loved one insert Yeah, yeah So yeah, that was that that was flattering and painfully accurate. But it's fine. She very, very often will just be like, I don't get it. Like, again, we go back to the, you know, me running down the street thing.

And I don't, I don't get how you keep being better than me physically. And I was like, yeah, well, before I covered everything in layers and layers and layers of insulation, I was a person of some athletic capability. And those things are still deep, deep in there. It's just, you know, but you just have to go, you know, dig it around with it, with it probe to find them. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's what I got going on, which is, cool. It's flattering. It's very flattering. So I'll take it as such. So yeah. Yeah. I got nothing for us tonight. I hope you got something. I, you know, I do, actually. Um, and, and it's only fair that I do because you, you did an awful lot. Uh, in our, I did an awful, uh, in our last series. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean what you did what you did was was,

you know, good good solid work, but there was a terrifying awful lot in awful. Yeah, yeah, there was a terrifying amount of it. Yes, the part that's awful was the vastness of what you produced. But I wanted to start talking about Warhammer 40K, and specifically about the primarks in Warhammer 40K. Because, and I kind of had this idea bouncing around on my head for a while. I've spent way too much time in the galaxy of Warhammer 40,000 in the 41st millennium. But we haven't talked about it very much on the show. Not since. It's been forever. I've mentioned stuff about characters here and there and it's come up, but like I haven't done any episodes on it since then.

And it is, it is, it is a niche of fandom that, like I said, I'm very attached to and deserves attention and discussion. Sure. But the other thing is that we just spent several episodes, I'm not gonna say how many, in the world of wrestling entertainment, parentheses, TM, close prints, and a couple of things occurred to me.

Like as we were talking about all of that, I went, okay, now I need to talk about the Primarchs because the Horus Heresy, which I'm going to explain with that means, is a very long running wrestling storyline that's spanned across two generations of promoters now. Oh, because Horus Hogan was the nephew of Hulk Hogan. And he started off with Ravens flock. And then when that you are DDP B Raven when that essentially went on to the end of

the U.O. Hollywood, which was kind of the lower tier between end of the Wolfpack and Hollywood when Sting decided to go red faced and be like a tomato. And then Horace Hogan kind of just got lost in the mix. But then whole cooking came back with taking care of Baleia and he used Horace for a little bit of that. And then we just kind of, yeah, no, I'm with you. I'm with you. And here's the thing, you're being arched as you are want to do, but you are so close to spiritually right.

Like, I know what you're saying is that whole Kogin and his nephew's storyline stole from Warhammer 40K in the 1990s. Maybe. Or was prophetic. I work kind of both because everything, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again to jump into another fandom. But the Horus Heresy series, there's now a series of novels that's like overall on the shelves behind you there in your office. How many paperback novels do you have set in the Star Wars universe? Roughly. Paul Puyin. Okay. So you're not counting comic books? Okay.

So you're not counting comic books? We're not counting, not counting comics. Graphic novels or no? No, uh, print novels, paperback, paperback. Okay. I assume if I got a hard back on a deal that would still count those. That is still. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

150. Okay. Yeah. The Horus Heresy series itself, which is the biggest series of novels published by Games Workshop in the universe of Warhammer 40,000 is I want to say at last count, there were 62 novels in that series. Okay. See, the Yhan Vong series in Star Wars is the longest running. Yeah. Because you'll have the the throng trilogy,

you'll have the throng trilogy. And this is all led. The Han Solo Chronicles are led. Yeah, the Han Solo trilogy. Yeah, okay. Okay. And there was an octology, but the longest running one.

And there was like the Jedi temple trilogy like for a little while trilogy For a thing and then there were standalone. Yeah, the longest one they have is 19 books long. It's the Ron Vaughn series The the series of novels that chronicles the events within the Warhammer 40,000 universe known as the Horus Heresy is is Over 60 volumes in length. That's worthy of the name Horus, I suppose. Yeah. And the drama involved in that story is about a bunch of hyper physical, hyper physical, gigantic men, each of whom has a gimmick, who are involved in really intense interpersonal drama. So like, there's that, thematically.

And additionally, as I was doing the research for this, I realized that the Warhammer 40K universe is chronicle the online essentially as K-fabe, which makes trying to do any analysis of the history of its development almost as hard as pinning down the real life of Terry Balea. Like, it's as much legend as it is myth as it is fact. Yeah. And there was evidence of Cyprus trees in this area. Yeah. There was evidence of large bulls in this area. But the bull of Humbaba and Gilgamesh actually wrestling is very unlikely.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. In this case, though, we're dealing with a universe that is like, we can all agree upon the fact that the universe of 40K is entirely fictional. And so the problem that I run into is I want to try to do a historiography of it. And like, talk about, okay, this is how this set of stories developed. Right? Yeah. And the problem with that is all of the sources that I find online are

written in universe. Okay. So, so, so, so like right now, is there a done in school of the horse? There is see, we're like, you know, it's really the courage of the Horatians that we need to focus on. And the primarks, they had more tyrannids coming in on the transports every month. And yeah, I don't know what people that didn't have sex. I know. Okay. But my days of virtual world actually.

Okay. But, like, you know, so they have 50,000 tyrannids coming off the transports every month. But my days of virtual world actually. Oh, okay. All right. But, you know, so they have 50,000 tear nids coming off the transports every month. So of course, they could replace. But, you know, we space marines, there were only a few of us. And we had carry on our daddy's legacy. Okay. All right.

So, is there a Dunning School in this? No. No. No. There is a daughter of the the the dwarven Confederacy or some You know what I I would I would genuinely I would genuinely like somebody to write to the black library Publishing company, which is games workshops fiction arm Gently like somebody to go. Okay. No look look, look, I understand, I understand, we've spent

all this time, you know, telling all these stories. I really desperately want to do the lost cause, you know, interpretation of the Horace Heresy, which would essentially be just essentially any novel post-Horror's heresy from the point of view of chaos legions. Okay. Because they're all, you know, embittered. And, you know, they say for corn in country, you know, it just, wow, I'm going to have to do less. I, it's sounding like I'm going to have to do less, less, you know, paving of the underlayment here.

You know, you just don't need to. Okay, all right. Just there, the key words that paint. Okay. That's about it. Okay, so your understanding is a chance the gardener kind of level of grasping of what you talk. Okay, you know the right words to throw out,

but like you have no concept. Okay, or yeah, better yet, I don't know the right words. I just keep throwing them out. Okay. All right. There's my chance. And the wonderful thing about the Warhammer 40,000 universe is you can do that. And I'll listen to it going, oh, you know more of your shit than I thought. Okay. We should make him president. Yeah. Not going to go there. But so, so the not gonna go there, but so so

The like I said this this the the other the other the principal reason the first reason that I wanted to do this is because this is a fictional universe In which I've spent way too much of my time From the time that I was 14 Mm-hmm., it's younger than that. 12 or 13, until now, where Hammer 40,000 has been one of the fandoms that I have always had some level of involvement in. So let me ask you this. Yeah. When you got into it, did you know that it was satire? I, I got that sense like, yeah, I would, the argument I would make is that yes, I, I understood, I understood that it was, that it was like so over the top that it was, you know, not not to be taken 110% seriously. Like similar how I got into wrestling. Yeah. Like this is opera. This is operatic.

And I'm attracted to this and these broad strokes, but there's no way somebody would let someone just punch them 10 times. Yeah. Yeah. Like. Like, you know, my friends and I, the older, older friends of ours, acquaintances of ours who were three or four years older than us, would be playing 40K or talking about it or painting armies while we were playing D&D in the back room of the game store at Rigel Games and Books. Okay. And so we heard them talking about this and this universe was just so heavy metal and over the top and crazy pants like and and it was just everything was driven by rule of cool and it was just so fucking awesome. But it was also like as they were talking about it, they would be laughing because it was, you know, shit was so ridiculous.

And so we got kind of both ends of it. Like this is totally real cool. And yeah, this is, you know, Grim Dark and like, oh man, that's badass. But then like, oh yeah, and in this, you know, space fantasy universe, you know, the dwarves are bikers who ride these massive battle trikes. Right.

And it was that just like the demolition. I'm in the demolition. I'm not going to paint up my face and suck on watermelon now and later so my tongue's super red and where like SNM gear. But I like that they do and they pick fights with, you know, the strike force. Yeah, yeah, kind of yeah, essentially. And so, so that was that was kind of the attitude at that point. Sure. at that point. And so I have a deep and abiding love for this universe and for as many times as the game has changed for the game. And and mostly even when I was 12, 13, I was developing into a future history nerd. And the fact that as I was reading these articles in the Game Magazine,

and as I was listening to these older guys in the Game start talking about this stuff. The history of this universe was already built in to be vast and ancient and it was getting and I was watching it get more intricate in real time. You know Star Wars for me. Yeah, I got. Yeah, the one of the things I love you remember as fans of the show will know, I don't like fiction much. I really don got, I got, yeah, the one of the things I love, you remember, as fans of the show, we'll know, I don't like fiction much. I really don't. I don't read much. The only fiction I've I've reliably enjoyed reading has always been Star Wars books. It's a world that I'm already invested in. It's a world that like, oh, you've deepened it. Cool. I will keep reading deeper. Like,

I know plenty of stuff going like all the way back. you know and oh here they're recall you know and all this kind of stuff In a completely fictional universe, so I understand a lived in really enjoyable deep historical like Not only is like well it stretches back 20,000 years. It's like yes And in the year 18,000 here's what happened like shit shit matters. Yeah. So I totally understand and respect that. Like it makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

And so part of what I want to talk about is for a very long time, the state of the universe within this, the state of the galaxy, capital G, the galaxy, that's the only way the setting has ever been referred to. The state of the galaxy remained basically static from rogue trader, the very first edition of the game, up until through seven editions of the game,

basically nothing, nothing in the present in air quotes. And I'm going to get into that in a little bit of the game changed. And then when the eighth edition of the game was released, all of a sudden, they made this decision, we're going to advance the timeline into the 42nd millennium, and they brought a primark onto the game, a loyalist primark onto the game table. For the previous seven editions of the game, the primarchs had all been these legendary figures

that were important in the background and important in the history, but all of the loyalist primarchs were disappeared off on some quests, some place in the galaxy and nobody knows exactly what happened to him, but we've assumed after 10,000 years that they're dead. And the chaos primarks were either dead or had ascended to demonhood and were in the warp and not around to do anything.

Okay. And then they went and they brought back one of the demon primarks. They gave him a model and they gave him stats and they said, here he is. And then they went and they brought back one of the loyalist primarchs. And this was a huge change and they made these huge changes

to the present of the setting. Okay. And in the last episode in which we actually talked about, 40k, I talked about, this is around the same time that I kind of had to walk away from the hobby because of... That's because life gets in the way of life. Well, not just because life gets in the way,

there was an emotional component too, which we'll get back into, I described exactly what it was that was going on, within the hobby community and will and it and within the wider world and we'll touch on that. Yeah. And recently, like within the last couple of months, they now brought back another loyalist primark. And this time, now I've actually bought models and I'm going to be getting hold of the newest edition of the game because I'm like, well, okay, you found a way to get me like, okay, I have to do this now. But the hook for our podcast for this is, why was it at that

point in time that the creatives involved in the game decided, okay, no, you know, we're gonna advance the timeline and we're gonna bring back Golemann. What was it that led to, because as we have said from episode one, you know, the art and the media that we create are they drive things that happen in the Zit Guys and they are products of things that are happening in the Zit Guys. Absolutely. Yeah. They are a reflection of culture as well as drivers of it. And so I want to try to take a look at why is it that it was at that point in real world

that they decided to do this with this fictional world that I that I have invested so much of my time in energy in. And in the process of doing the research for this episode, I still haven't come up with a thesis yet, but I think we might be able to kind of figure one out. Okay. Yeah. So now, as we do this, I'm going to have to balance on a bit of a line because there is going to be lore that you and our non 40k playing audience are going to have to understand for the conversation to make any sense. Sure, and I assume that some of that lore will be based on 1970s sensibilities of Brits who are trying to land best. 70s, 70s and early 80s, yeah.

Yeah, so it's going to be, I assume it's going to step on some toes racially and perhaps gender and sexuality wise too. So like, I don't know if we could like ring a cowbell on the background going, you guys can know that this is the problem, or just say, I'm like, you know, my love of the ultimate warrior, I know it's problematic, but also shakes those ropes, you know? Like, yeah, okay.

Yeah, and well, that's gonna be part of the discussion, is as I go through that stuff, that's something we can definitely we will flag like when it comes up. But there's a huge danger of this turning into just another 40k Laura podcast and that's been done already by a whole lot of other people who look like us. You know bearded white guys. So I'm going to try as we go through to clearly label the parts of this that are meta, that are okay.

Now I'm talking about like publishing the game and all this. And then when stuff is lore, label that or which parts are actual real world history and which parts are K-Fabe game stuff. Okay. So, here we go. Warhammer 40,000, Rogue Trader, was released in 1987. Okay, and in episode three of the podcast, we talked in some detail about how it was a product of those times.

Yeah. The game introduced what we're gonna be focusing on a lot here is that the road trainer introduced the game's workshop concept of space marines, which borrowed very heavily from Starship Troopers, which we've talked about. And a 1984 novel by an often named John Steaky, armor, which borrows a lot of the ideas from Starship Troopers and then looks at them through a new wave science fiction lens. Okay.

It takes the ideas of Starship Troopers, which which which Highline wrote as a kind of a political polemic about citizens and their duty to the state and then goes no no no no, I'm whatever fuck that. I'm not interested in that. I want to talk about the psychology of violence. I want to talk about the psychology of survival. Okay. And the upshot to way oversimplify the main character of the book has been through life experiences that essentially give him a death wish. Like he is going out into battle, trying to die. Like he knows that his survival chances are almost nil. But he keeps going out and he keeps surviving because there is a part of his psyche that he refers to as the machine that will not allow him to die, that it shows up, stuffs all of his humanity down into a hole, some place in the back of his head, and does what it has to do in order to survive.

Okay. Okay. Yep. And so now in... Do you see a wear of that takeover? Yes. And afterwards, he's like, God damn it. Kind of, yeah. Okay. So he doesn't accept that part of himself takeover. Yes. And then afterwards he's like, damn it. Kind of. Yeah. Okay. He doesn't accept that part of himself. Yeah. Yeah. No.

The novel, the novel is written in the first person and he explicitly talks about that, that part that's almost dissociative part of his, of his psyche. Okay. And so in Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader, the very first edition of the game, there is no significant mention of Primarchs. There are names that show up that later wind up being the names of Primarchs. The commander and Primarch of the Space Wolves, Lehman Russ has there's a quotation in the book, but he is described as having been an imperial commander who was then honored by being given the augmentations

to become a space marine and then becoming the founder of this chapter of Space Marines. Okay. Which one we actually talk about, what primarcs become in the lore later on, this is a canon conflict. Okay, and he's also mentioned as being the Imperial Governor of the planet, Luke and,

which doesn't show up in later editions when you talk about space wolves, they're their homeworld now. In canonically, their homeworld is the world of Fenry. Well, that's decidedly north sounding. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Space wolves think sea wolves. Think wolves of the north. Yeah. Space wolves think, think sea wolves.

Think wolves of the north. Yeah. Yeah. And so, but that's, Primark is treated like a command title. It's not, it doesn't have any, any overtones. Okay. And in the book, details of space marine physiology are not detailed. They're not described. We get told that the space marines, the imperial space marines, are toughened by biochem. There is mention of the implanted black carapace that a subcutaneous implant that allows them

to interface directly with their armor so that it moves like a part of their bodies. But in rogue trader, that's it. We don't hear about any other, we don't get any details about, okay, you know, they are post human, they have these, these, you know, they have some implants, they've got some biochem, but there's no exhaustive detail about what exactly are these implants, what exactly is the stuff do. We just know that they are the elite of the imperial armed forces. We know that they are taken from the harshest environments, and they are trained within each of their lives and given hip-note conditioning and all kinds of, you know, very, very heavy training and conditioning, which I'm going to come back to here in a minute.

Sure. Now, in the road trader version of the universe, when the game first comes out, what we know about. version of the universe when the game first comes out. What we know about yeah, this is not a visual medium that we're giving this information on. Right. Traytor or Trader. And the title of the first edition of the game is Rogue Trader, T-R-A-D-E-R. Thank you. Just making sure.

Yeah, no, totally. So in this initial, I want to say first draft, but obviously there had been multiple drafts before it was published, but in this first edition of the universe, what we know about the state of the universe is the emperor, capital E, may or may not be alive. Oh, yeah, yeah, you told I remember that from episode three, like, yeah, it's possible he's been dead for like 10,000 years or 1,000 years. Yes, 10, yeah, he has sat atop the golden throne for 10,000 years.

Yeah, so it's entirely possible that it's just his corpse. Yeah, psychics referred to in the game as psychers, right, are fed to him to power the interstellar beacon he emits that allows for faster than light travel through the warp. Right. Okay. His bodyguards, the Adeptus custodies are even more badass than the space marines, but they never leave his side. Sure, Praetorian guard. Yeah. Put a pin in that. Yeah. Put a pin in that and hold on to it for a while. Okay. Okay. First edition of the game. And for a very long time after this, his bodyguards never leave the Imperial Palace. They're on Terra. Okay. There are 1000 chapters of

space marines across the galaxy. Each chapter chapter space marines has a thousand marines Okay, so a thousand that's a million. Yeah, now when they say there are a thousand chapters We don't know whether a one thousand is literally no no There are specifically one thousand chapters in any given time or if they're saying there are a thousand chapters if it's like you know Metaphorical thousand like and this thousand or an actual like oh sorry can't can't get a new one no not one thousand one no no yeah and and that we don't know if they're

being poetic or we don't know if they're being literal that fuzziness is intentional Okay, on on the part of the writers and it's it's a built-in part of the subtext of the setting sure A lot of people in in the process of losing sight of the satire That was involved in the game's tone, I think one of the saddest things about that is the lack of understanding of the cleverness

of the way it was all done in the beginning. When you lose sight of the satire, you lose sight of the intentional fuzziness. You lose sight of the, okay, you know, the, the, the, trying to think how to, how to phrase what it is I'm trying to say, but the, the amount of thought that goes into the way it's all written gets lost when you when you don't remember that it's that it's intended to be satirical and at least half tongue in cheek. Okay. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah. And then we learn in the Rogue Terator Rule book, in the background section, we learned that the Imperium fights a constant and eternal war for the survival of the human race. Okay.

Oh, okay. And there are sections on, okay, look, if you want to play as orcs Here's the rules for you know orcs and here's a little bit background on you know how orcs with a K work in this setting They talk very briefly about L.D.R. Pirates And you kind of quickly figure out that okay L.D.R. space elves all right And they talk about and you know know, elder or noob. We're going to see halflings and dwarves. Yep. Yeah. Squats, squats are in the book. And and and halflings, both squats and halflings. Trying to remember what they refer to, oh, ratlings. So there's squats and ratlings who are effectively dwarfs and halflings who have slightly modified stats from a normal human.

And, you know, have specialties within the imperial. They are imperial. within this setting dwarves and halflings are the descendants of humans who went to non-earth-like worlds in one way or another and over generations have adapted to those conditions. So the squats wound up on colony worlds close to the galactic core where there's very, very high radiation and they're on these planets with higher gravity. And so they've because of the high radiation, they've all had to live underground. And because of the high gravity, they have very dense, very compact bones, and they are more compact. Ratlings have wound up surviving in jungle and other environments where being smaller and more dexterous and more nimble have allowed them to survive over millennia trying to get away from, you know, giant predators. Sure. Essentially. So, you know,

they have the semi-science fictional science fantasy kind of explanation for how these groups exist. Tyrannids appear in the basic rule book. There are only a couple of tyrannid creatures. They are very clearly inspired by Starship Troopers and Alien. Okay. They're kind of an unholy ad mixture of the two. So now are they like corrupted LDR like we've seen in other texts or are these? We talk about tyrannids.

Yeah. No, tyrannids are an entirely separate the. So they're not orcs, they're not trolls. No, no, no, no, space works over well in in the first edition of the game all we know about space works is that they are they're orcs in space they're they're brutal and primitive and they like loud noises and vehicles that make a lot of loud noise and go fast. Okay. And, and they're a little monstrous and carnivorous and not just carnivorous, but cannibalistic. They will, they will eat other sentience like, you know, so yeah.

And so right off the bat, Rick Priestley, who is, who has given the author's credit for the bat, Rick Priestley, who is given the author's credit for the game. He is the one name on the cover of the book. And he is the father of Warhammer 40,000. He is directly borrowing very clearly from Dune and Foundation because we have this impossibly far future setting. Sure. We have this interstellar empire, we have a God emperor. The space marines are very clearly something like the Sardakar or the Fremen. Okay. You know, they're, you know, fanatical, you know, hypnotrained religious, religiously motivated super-sultures.

He's also clearly borrowing from Starship Troopers, but there's another source that doesn't get mentioned as much. And he's very clearly also borrowing, to be generous, from Michael Morkock. I'm trying to remember what he's doing. Stormbringer. I've mentioned the name a few times in other episodes. And at some point, I need to just do an episode on the eternal champion.

Yeah, we need more cock episode. Multi universe. Should have seen it. What can I? Yeah, well, should have should have twigged to that. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, we can also do a day's Ravenmore head series. I think that that would be pretty well.

I mean, yeah, I mean, obviously we'd have to. Yeah, I mean, he just goes with that obviously we'd have to. Yeah, I mean, it just goes with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I could see us not wanting to blow past that quite honestly. And yeah, no, I'm looking forward to working hard on that. So anyway, sorry you about that. Um, All right, so I'd like to I'd like to get off that subject. Okay, so the Richard Fitzwell series. Nice, nice. So so Michael Warcock, the the British new wave fantasy author, because the thing is his documentary, and who does porn parodies of like, instead of bowling for Columbine, it's like

falling for Columbine. No, okay. Roger in me, not just Roger in me. Roger in me. Not just me. Roger in me. No. No. Not damn it. No. Um, then, and then he got behind me.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, you're, you're Michael Warren personations actually eerily, eerily on the money. Yeah. There's some voices I can do. Yeah. But Michael Morkock is most well known for authoring the whole series of books, all surrounding the central conceit of the eternal champion,

which is where Dr. Otto Octavius goes to fight Orson. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's Michael Mork, Ock. It's right. Yeah. Yeah. And Dobber has a small cameo in it. Yeah.

So the, the, the eternal champion series is a multiiversal thing, and his protagonist of each of the kind of sub-series of these novels are the reincarnation or the rebirth of this champion figure throughout multiple timelines in multiple universes. So in one universe we have Elric, the Elbino Prince of the Melna-Benaeans, who is bonded to the Demon Sword Stormbringer. In another universe, and the one that I'm talking about most right now is called the rune staff series. In that universe, the protagonist is Dorian Hawkmoon. The part of that series that's important for talking about 40K is that in that universe, magic and high tech exists side by side, the empire of Grand Britann is trying to conquer a long post-apocalypse Europe, and it's the emperor of Grand Britann

Emperor of Gran Britan is is stuck inside a watery sphere that is his throne and the question of how alive really is the emperor is very clearly taken from this is is or at least inspired by or like you know it's clear this this was there. You know in in in the water in which priestly was swimming while he was writing Warhammer 40,000. Now, Morcox writing style is similarly bombastic to the language that gets used in the description of the Imperium. Like I said, we'll have to do an episode or two on Stormbringer at the very least. Sure. And the thing is, Morcox work is scathingly satirical.

Morcox was more or less motivated to write fantasy in the first place because he read the Lord of the Rings. He was like, oh my god, this is so fucking twee. Like this is such bullshit, this is trickle. Like, oh no, just, I now I have to write something because this offense me by how naive this is, right? And I'm being a little bit bombastic in my description of it, but when you read interviews of him, it's really clear that he's like, you know, Tolkien was a Victorian jackass.

Like, no. That's not the way the real universe works, and you know, it's a fairy tale, and nothing ever ends that nicely. And so all of the eternal champion books, generally, like there's these overtones of doom, like fate is this huge recurring theme. And you know, you can struggle against the entropy of the universe as much as you want to, but chaos is always going to wind up winning in the end. And we're going to come back around to that, so put a pin in that set of ideas. And so Morecox writing is satire of fantasy and post-war British society written in a really meta-enough way that it can also be taken deeply seriously within its own universe. So like you can, you can get sucked into

L. Ricks story and and be carried along in the drama of L. Ricks story. And it's only after you close the book, put the book down and think about it like a day later and you're like, oh my God, that I just, I just completely got hoodwinked. That's a complete satire like holy shit, right? You know, it's one of those kind of things. And that's that's 100% the tone and the kind of theme that keeps coming up within the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Okay. And so Warcox influence,

we're gonna come back around back to this. So now in the Warhammer 40,000 rogue trader, first edition book, all of this is described in the present tense. All of the description that we get is this is the state of the galaxy. Deemperor sits on his golden throne. He has been on the golden throne for 10,000 years. We live, we are living in an age of superstition, where the laser gun has to be blessed by the spirits of war. And, you know, technology and magic and technology are intertwined to the point that you can't tell where one ends, the other one begins. The Imperium is run by the priesthood of Terra, and it is a religious

state with the God Emperor as the Godhead. Again, it's all present tense. And there is mention of the Dark Age of Technology and the human diaspora to the stars, but there's no detailed explanation as to how the galaxy got this way. We just know, okay, there's orcs over here, and this is how they are in L.D.R. like pirates and you're going to find worlds where humanity has a like, you know, modern level of technology and worlds where humanity is falling completely into barbarism. Sure. And here are some of the alien critters that you can use in games that are going to be on planet. It's the universe is presented as a blank slate for you to drop your plastic toy soldiers

into. Right. Okay. It's the universe is presented as a blank slate for you to drop your plastic toy soldiers into right, okay? It's the day. This is the fiction backing up the miniatures game. Yeah, yeah Just just like the setting for when we talked about battle tech ages ago It was here here are here are the the houses of the inner sphere and you know Your buddy can paint his stuff red, and you can paint your stuff green, and here's how you throw your robots against each other. It's the same kind of thing. And the theme within the book is humanity versus aliens, most pointedly space orcs. versus aliens, most pointedly space orcs. The scenario that's included in the rule book is space marines versus orcs. And space marines are literally that I have a copy of the

first edition road trade rulebook. And if you look, and I showed it to you back in episode three, but if you look at the image on there, space marines are literally the poster boys. They are the ones on the front cover of the book. And it has remained that way basically ever since the space marines are the poster poster boys for Warhammer 40K. So now the original rule book includes a two-page color spread. There's there's several places the book is mostly black and white, but they were able to afford a few they could put color pages in a few places. Sure.

And it's always big splashy, very, very evocative, moody kind of artwork. And one of those two page spreads is one of my absolute favorite artifact of 80s geek culture. And it is where the color schemes of a multitude of space marine chapters are shown in their grim dark heavy metal meets medieval glory. It's so 80s, it hurts. The Marines have these beaked helmets that intentionally echo the Hound Skull helmets of the high middle ages that pointed kind of visor. And there are banners and there's archaic kind of semi-nightly kind of heraldry that's involved in their aesthetic, but at the same time, this artwork shows them with graffiti on their armor that they've clearly written on it, saying things like pray for death and kill, kill, kill. And the lore at this point emphasizes that marine chapters usually recruit from primitive worlds or from violent gangs living in the underlevels of massive high worlds.

And that their training is intended to make them quote discipline killers or at least controllable ones. Okay. And now, Rick Priestley, the game's original author, was interviewed in 2015 by Unplugged Games. And in that interview, he said something that's critically important to me. Quote, the fact that the space marines were lauded as heroes within game's workshop always amused me because they're brutal, but they're also completely self-deceiving. The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don't know whether he's alive or dead.

The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. There's no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to correct spacecraft. It's got some parallels with religious beliefs and principles and I think a lot of that got missed and overwritten. Okay. So now we have of course said any number of times authorial intent means means nothing. Right. But I want to throw that out there at this point in the conversation. So we know where this started. Okay. Yeah. It's a very common claim by British commentators that American,

by British commentators on American culture that we don't get irony. Right. I think that's an oversimplification. I think we're catching up to it. But yeah, well, there's a kernel. There's a kernel headlong into. Yeah, we're running. Yeah, there's a kernel of truth to it. And I want to put a pin in that idea for right now. Okay.

So that's four pins you put down. So yeah, I know. I know. And we're going to be coming back. I. And we're going to be coming back. I promise you we're going to be coming back to. So now at the state of the birth of the game, that's it. That's that's everything that's in the world in terms of lore. That's everything about the Imperium and about the Space Marines. That's in the initial rule book. There's a diagram of the fortress monastery of the Space Wolves to drive home.

Hey, they're like warrior monks. Okay, they have this monastic aspect to them. There are all kinds of illustrations of soldiers and fighting battles and all that kind of stuff. But like we don't get any kind of explanation of how this universe came to be. We don't get anything about any of that. Right. We're dropped in the middle of episode four.

Yeah. Right. Now, this lore vacuum didn't last long because the guys working at GW in mid 80s were massive nerds, basically they're working for a game company, and they had their own in-house magazine white dwarf that they needed to create content for. So what are we going to do? Well, you know, I got this really bitching idea about, you know, I got, you know, we can talk about my chapter of space marines, and I've got like, you know, 12 pages, you know, we can talk about my chapter of space

Marines and I've got like, you know, 12 pages I've written about their history. Cool! Put it like, right? Yeah, let's go. Okay, so right away we see articles in that magazine handing out details about space marine chapters. The dark get some detail in issue 96 December of 1987. Now White Dwarf had existed. Games Workshop, Citadel Miniatures had existed for higher to the publishing of Warhammer 40,000. They had been, Citadel had started out as a Miniatures company. And Games Workshop had grown out of Citadel. Okay. And they had started their own magazine in which a lot of role-playing stuff.

Like early issues of Games Workshop of WhiteWorf had Dungeons and Dragons modules in that people had written. They had stuff for Call of Cthulhu and a couple of issues. And so it started out as this role playing, this all across the board, kind of gaming magazine. And then where him or 40,000 comes out and it very quickly becomes their in-house generation tool or material for their own. Yeah. Yeah. And so in this article in issue 96 December of 1987, the Dark Angels founder, the founder of the chapter known as the Dark Angels is named. We get his name is is Alignel Jacobson or Johnson. Okay. And it's written as we don't know

which one it is. Okay. The chapter was founded. We find out, you know, they were the first, they were the first chapter of space marines. They're very proud of their heritage as the first and their founder was Lionel Jacobson or Johnson. Okay. Now, he goes on later as Canon develops, he becomes Lionel Johnson in later lore. Okay. He's not yet referred to as a primark. Okay, now I'm going to keep going back to that word primark because it becomes important later on.

The following month, the very first index Astartis article appears in issue 97 and it describes the important characters and organization of the Ultramarines. Marnius. Better than Space Marines, I assume. Well, yes, and they're bright blue. Oh, because ultra marine. Okay, you like off one marine. So ultra marine is is a shade of blue. Oh, and in the medieval period, ultra marine was the color period ultra marine was the color essentially traditionally that was the color that was used to paint the robes of the Virgin Mary. The pigment for that color involved the precious stone lapis lazuli

and so anyway, anyway, they're the ultra marines. They are ultra mar Marines and they're bright blue. So, so right off the bat, right off the bat, there's this meta pun going on, right? Okay. So, Marnius Calgar, the chapter master of the Ultramarines and the Lord Commander of Ultramar is described with his game stats. So like, hey, I'm playing Ultramarines and here's our commander. He's got, you know, five wounds and a toughness of six. So he's he's gonna be really hard for you to kill. He's a badass, right? Right. And the founder of the chapter is named, his name is Roboot Gulliman.

And His name is Robo Gulliman and there is debate within the fan of about how exactly you're supposed to pronounce that because it's weird pseudo sci-fi French looking and anyway. Okay. So he gets mentioned but again, he's not referred to as a primark. Okay. Now, a side note is important here on the weirdness and craziness of the ideas that are being tossed around. This is what month did I say this is this is this is this is January of 88. Okay. The game came out in summer of 97 or summer rather of 87 sorry Oh, okay um, and so the game has only been out less than a year and There is no canon yet really about anything like as stuff is being published in white dwarf. It is becoming canon

Right the setting is still really fluid. There's lots of ideas being thrown around in the article about the Ultramarines. They mention as one of the characters that they give stats for is the chapter's master of ships, who is not only a marine, he's also a navigator with a capital N within the universe of 40k, just like within the universe of Dune, navigators are human mutants. Right. They're, they're, they're psychically capable of folding time and space and, well, it is, they can, they can like navigate through pre-cognition, like knowing that this star is going

to collide into that star. So I have to avoid that and go around here and then do this. Yeah. Okay. And at this point in 40k, lore development, they are still very much, very, very similar to Dune navigators, but as time goes on, the way they operate is going to change. They are psychic, but their gift isn't so much pre-cognition as it is that they are able to open their perception in the warp and view the warp with their third eye in order to see what's going on and navigate safely. Okay, so yeah, but at this point, what's going on and navigate safely. Okay. So, yeah.

But at this point, like, there's a picture of the Ultramarines Master of Ships, and he's got one hand in the picture that you can see his bare hand, and it is webbed. So, it's like this is very clearly borrowing heavily from Dune, right? Okay. And then the chapter's master battle psychic, or the title is librarian, is half Eldar. His mother was human, but his father was an Eldar mercenary, and he was tested by the priests of the Adeptus Terra and show and space. Kind of, he's effectively like, well, he's a half-else.

It's less like, oh, big, important character. This is like a throwaway kind of saying, hey, we're showing you how a space-based marine chapter might be put together and for a little bit of like individuality. Oh, yeah, there had had librarian is part L. Later on in the lore that gets retconned into not being essentially possible. Right. Okay. But at this point, like you can you can throw anything out on the table you want to and there is no established canon, whatever, right? And then in issue 98 in February of 88, this is when we start seeing the details of what makes a marine a marine.

We learn for the first time, because it preciely decides to write it down. What are all the special organs that make a marine a marine? And they describe it in detail. The lore, the lore now changes. Originally, Marines were hard bitten, you know, hardened, desperate, you know, death worlders or whatever, who've been hypnotaut and, you know, toughened up. Now, they're augmented with a second heart,

super efficient blood reinforced bones. We find out they have the soul as free as a mountain bird. And our epic fist should be ready to resist a dictatorial word. Right, and I know you're referencing something, but I can't recognize it off the top of my head. Really? No. Blanket. His nose should pant and his lips should curl. His cheeks should flame and his brow should furl. his cheek should flame and his brow should furl. Oh my God, I should heave and his heart should glow and his fist be ever ready for a knockout blow.

Oh God, I can see it, but I can't think of the title. A British tar. Right, yeah, well, yeah, there you go. From HMS Pinnifor. Yeah, okay, there you go. Okay. Oh, well, yeah, there you go from HMS pinnacle. Yeah, okay. There you go. Okay. Oh dammit So so we learn about all these all these superhuman abilities that Marines have yeah, it's it's completely it's ridiculously over the top and There's still no mention of primarchs

And that's important because reasons. Okay. In 1988, Games Workshop releases the first of two books that detail the powers of chaos in Warhammer, both Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer fantasy. It's the realm of chaos books. The first one is realm of chaos slaves to darkness. And in that book, they describe the powers of chaos. And at this point, I need to, well, hold on. I have my notes written down in particular way. I'll stick to the way I've got my notes written down. In that book,

Canon gets set down for the first time that has remained remarkably consistent in the broadest strokes of it ever since. There were 20 space marine chapters created by the emperor in order to go out and conquer the universe in order conquer the galaxy in order to go out and conquer the universe in order, conquer the galaxy in order to unite humanity. So he created the first founding was 20 chapters. Two of those chapters, we don't know anything about at all. They were redacted and the writers did this in order to show us the Imperium's practice of Demnacio Memoria, to remind us that, no, no, this is a regime that will erase things out of history that are sufficiently embarrassing, right? Of the remaining chapters, half of them turned traitor under the command of Horus in what is now referred to as the Horus Heresy. Okay. So nine, nine remained loyal. Yeah. Yeah, nine remained loyal, nine turned. Okay. Here, Horus is not referred to as a primark. The rest of the founding primarks of the space marines get no mention. There's no mention at all.

The word primark does not show up yet. Okay, but there were 20 chapters. Two of them have been utterly erased from history and we know nothing about them. Nine of them are labeled as X-communicate tritaurus and of them are labeled as excommunicate tritaurus, and nine of them were remain loyal and are still extant in the present quote, present day of the setting. Now, Realm of Chaos was a two volume project. In 1990, they published the Lost and the Damned, and that basically compiled information that had been published originally in White Dwarf in the ensuing two years. Now, the concept of chaos and its use of an eight-pointed star as its symbol is another wholesale theft from Michael Warcock within the universe of the eternal champion. All of the multiverse are part of an eternal war between the forces of the law, which is symbolized by a single

directional arrow, you know, force moving in one direction law, and chaos, which is an eight pointed star representing everything moving in all directions at once. Right. And so this idea of chaos and the idea of gods of chaos is taken straight out of Morcox writing. In the Warhammer Meethos, which is both Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer fantasy, which I'm not even going to get into. There are four chaos gods. Corn, the god of warfare, rage and murder. Okay. Nurgle the god of disease and decay. Zeinch, the god of change and magic, and slanesh, the god of excess. Chaos armies on the tabletop can be dedicated to one of the

Chaos gods or else can represent chaos undivided and include elements from multiples at once whatever you want to do, right? And within Warhammer 40,000, there was from the beginning a distinction between original traitor chapters and renegades who were from chapters or forces that were founded later but then turned to chaos for their own reasons. Okay. Okay. And within the lore, the classic and most famous example of a renegade is the Red Corsairs chapter or Legion of Chaos Space Marines. Who rose and rebellion against the Imperium under the Legion.

Anyway, there's a hole, there's a hole I could go on forever about the bad ab war and it's its own it's its own subset of lore. That's why this setting is catnip to me because there's all this shit that you know. So there's so many a lot of different warrants to fall down. Yeah. Yeah. So now I could not find because all of the sources are written in universe and because of that all of them reflect current canon, right? And none of them, none of them spend any time talking about, okay, so like the first time that we see this character mentioned into published materials here, like I couldn't find off like my wife actually said earlier today. I was I was going out in the garage and I was finding I'm going to hold them up here so so you can see I was I was going into the garage to find my my rule books for the multiple for the multiple editions of the

game to try to to try to figure this stuff out. And and as I was coming back in from the garage with this, you know, a couple of festivals of books. My wife said, maybe, you know, I've never seen you work this hard on the podcast before. And and like on the one hand that lit my impostor syndrome off so hard. And like on the one hand that lit my impostor syndrome off so hard. But you know, and the smart ass part of me was like, well, you're not wrong. Um, but that's, but you know, partly I had to explain here. Well, part of that is because you're actually seeing me doing the work. And most of the time I'm doing it during my prep period or before or after school or I don't I don't usually do it at home

Right, right But but it is true that like I've I've had to spend a lot more effort trying to to pin down shit In the historiography of this than I've had had to do one other topic I've talked about. Because it's unreliable at best. Well, I mean, it's all it's like a canon for so long. Yeah, you know, and it's and it's KFA and the canon and because the first canon was fluid, and then the canon has changed. Right.

And then the canon has changed. Right. So, and everything that I find now is written in universe. So it reflects current canon, which is something that is also kind of meta because we know that the Imperium commits DEMNATIO Memorea, and it is stated like we as the readers of stuff, of official material, we are, we are let in on the fact that the Inquisition knows things that the average Imperial citizen doesn't have any concept of. The average imperial citizen does not understand that there are four gods of chaos

because the Inquisition makes sure that any mention of chaos gets quashed. Because it is mimetically dangerous. Thinking about the chaos gods invites their attention. So they need to make sure that, like, that doesn't get a toe hold anywhere, right? Right. So anyway, so I could not pin down for sure where the first mention of primarchs as the fathers of their Marines was. But by 1993, when the second edition of 40K was published, it has become codified. And it is an important part of the lore of the Adeptus Astartis after that. The Adeptus Astartis is the fancy pseudo-space Latin title for the space marines. The priesthood of Earth is the adeptus Terra, the priests who keep all the

machines running are the adeptus mechanicus of Mars. So everybody is an adeptus something, and the space marines are the adeptus as starties. Okay. So now the process of this codification starts as with basically everything else in the stage of the game's history in white dwarf. In 1992 issues 156 and 157 are the first places where I was able to find a reference to Lehman Russ, who is in the first rulebook, but now in 156 and 157 he gets referred to the story of him being the father of the Space Wolf's chapter and the fact that all of the Space Wolf's carry his genetic material is mentioned for the first time. As is the fact that the space wolves all have particular physical mutations that they derive from him being their gene father. Okay. Now I can't say for sure that this is the first time the concept came up, but this is the first mention of it that I could pin down.

In white dwarf 161. In White Dwarf 161, the final battle of the Horus Heresy, Siege of Terra, is described in a fiction piece by William King, who notably wrote a number of novels separately about the Space Wolfs chapter. In this story, three loyalist primarchs, Robaldorn, Sanguinius, and Jagate Khan stand with the emperor as he faces the traitor primarch Horus and the four chaos primarchs who have now, by this time in the parasy, dedicated themselves to each one of the chaos gods. Magnus the Red has at this point dedicated himself to Zinch, the god of magic and sorcery, and interestingly later descriptions of the Horus Heresy will say that he was not on Tara for the final battle, but in this story he's there.

More Terion of the Deathguard has dedicated himself and his troops to the cast god, Nurgle, disease and decay. Angeron has fallen to corn, God of murder, and the full grim leader of the Emperor's children, and his marines are all dedicated to... And so... And so they're all dedicated to who? Slanesh. Thank you. The God of Access.

Okay. And so, like I said, some of this is going to get retconned, but this is the first draft of Imperial history. Okay. And so like I said, some of this is going to get retconed, but this is the first draft in imperial history. Okay. Now in white dwarf 166, October of 1993 lists all 18 of the founding primarchs. Again, there are two of them who aren't named because of Darnacea Memorial. Right. Interestingly, even Trader Primarchs get mentioned, which has led to all kinds of crazy speculation

and like so much fanfic about what exactly it is that happened with those two chapters that's like so bad, like Horus tried to overthrow the Imperium and we know about the Luna Wolves who were later the sons of Horus. Like what had to happen with these two other chapters for them to be like scrubbed like you know and there's yeah like dude you know um now up to this point I've been describing everything as meta-fiction

up to this point, I've been describing everything as meta-fiction for any of the rest of this to come close to making any sense. I'm going to have to explain some lore and the easiest way to do that is k-fame. So I'm going to go into like in universe description of the history of humanity for a minute. So bear with me. In the 18th millennium, one assumes common era, though in the Imperium itself, nobody knows what they're measuring millennia from. Humanity discovered a way to utilize a parallel dimension called the warp to achieve faster than light travel. This led to a massive five millennia long period of expansion across the whole galaxy.

This period is known as the dark age of technology when mankind allowed machines to think for them and forgot the power and holiness of human will. machines to think for them and forgot the power and holiness of human will. Then humanity found itself in a long war against the artificial intelligences of its own creation. Well, that's some sort of bullshit. The Dark Age of Tech. Well, and it's butlerian jihad from Dune, like, yeah. The Dark Age of Technology ended in the 23rd millennium and became the Age of Strife. What technology remained afterward was a closely guarded secret by the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars, who have treated it since with superstitious reverence. The galaxy was beset by massive warp storms that isolated all of those colonies for another

7,000 years. On those colonies humanity descended into desperation and in many cases barbarism. On Holy Terra itself the world was racked by warfare and a similar descent into techno-barbarism. Out of the smokened ash of those wars, the most powerful psychic and human history moved to ensure the survival of humanity by uniting our race under his rulership. The Emperor momentary step out of K-Fabe, he's never named ever. He is always the Emperor and it's one of the only things in canon that has never shifted. Well, that's true.

He led Iron Sheik or the ultimate warrior as well. So thanks. Yeah, or the mountain. No, that's not true. Mounty was Rick Rugeau or Raymond. OK. OK. OK.

But yeah, the big boss man though. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Or the undertaker. Although technically, the undertaker came out first as Kane, the undertaker after his debut. C.A.I.N. That's a good point.

Interesting because his brother then later on comes out as Cain, K.A.N.E. So. Oh, all right. All right. So the Emperor led armies to conquer Terra and at the end of that century long conflict, the warp storms dissipated and he launched the great crusade to unite the human race under his banner with the space marines as the point of his spear. The templates from which the space marines were built were the twenty primarchs.

These jean-genreared beings were created to be perilous warriors, but more than that to be generals, legendary leaders of men, and to be superhuman in all endeavors. As a space marine is to a mortal man, a primark is to a marine. Each of the 21st founding chapters received the seeds of their augmented organs, literally called their gene seeds, from their prim, making the primarchs the fathers of their chapters and creating many of the differences in character and personality between the chapters. Before the primarchs were fully formed, however, as they were as they were as they were natal within their cocoons in the engineering lab, the 20 primarks were stolen by the chaos gods and flung across the galaxy. Each one landed on a different world, and in nearly every case, each one became their world's ruler thanks to their innate ambition and superlative talents.

That sounded awful lot like Egyptian and Japanese mythology of just ripping two mating pairs apart and then the spray is the stars. Yeah. Oh yeah. The great crusade took centuries. The Emperor and the Primarchs were gradually reunited. As the Emperor conquered the galaxy, he found his sons on these worlds. And each Primarch then took command of his own sons as he was brought into the fold. The first of the Primarchs to be found was Horus Luperccal. The primark of the sixteenth chapter known as the Luna Wolves. Okay, so just real quick. Luparcal is one of my favorite holidays in Rome. Little naked boys would run around with goat skins on their legs, a simple pan, right? And they would take thongs, and that is a strip of goat leather, dip them in blood and whip women on the ass

So is to make them fertile and the women were supposed to try to run away from it But also your value is in a in a patriarchy was to be fertile. So no, no, please don't that stick their ass out That was also the the ceremony that was used as cover to seize all the Sabine women after Romulus had gone very politely around to everybody and said, hey, do you have any women you could lend us? And they're like, well, they're like, oh, we're the Romans, we're just down the road. Where'd you come from? The earth, well, that makes sense. We've heard of that. And then, you know, yes, so can have your some of your women? And they're like, uh, you came from the earth, why don't you dig a little deeper and find your own equals? And he's like,

oh, oh, okay, you're gonna be rude. All right. So he invites them for a world's fair of the conscious games and shows off. Look at all these, these places that we built. Wouldn't it be awesome if we had women here? Um, And then because it's honoring Neptune, the God of cities, you don't wanna fuck with him. So then he does the signal and the looper cowboys come running out, grab the hot woman, women, and take them off. And he's like, well, you wanna start a fight

during the contest games? Come on, get out of here. And that starts the fight between saveins and the Romans. But I just love this. Which became, which was the first real holiday festival type thing of the year usually, and it happened in what is now known as February, like middle of February, the month before the year. That's true. The month before the equinox.

So it's Valentine's Day. The soul or the month before the equinox. So it's Valentine's Day. Yep. So okay. And all of the yeah, so anyway, yeah, Horus rose to become the emperor's most favorite son and warm master of the great crusade. and Warmaster of the Great Crusade. Through a complex series of events that each, yeah, complex series of events, don't leave it there. The four gods of chaos managed to corrupt Horus and ate of the other primarchs,

playing on their internal weaknesses and resentments to turn them against the Emperor. Horus succeeded as Warmaster in scattering the loyalist primarchs to prevent them uniting against him and ultimately came with an heirs breadth of conquering terror itself and killing his father, the Emperor. The near dead Emperor, mortally wounded after this fight with his most favored son, ordered, Rogal Dorn, the primark of the seventh chapter of the imperial fists, with his last living breaths to inter him on the golden throne from which he could still protect humanity by projecting his psychic will across the galaxy as the astronomer can,

the guiding light in the warp that allows for interstellar navigation and K-fabe. Now I needed to bring all of that up because that's important for you to know when we start talking about the importance of the primarcks as a part of this setting for the next, this is second edition. So for the next like six editions of the game and and close to and well over 20 more years. Like this is 93. And this, this, this story that I just told you remains basically canonical, some of the details change, but the lore of the game for over the next 20 years. Okay, and again, this is set to Melania after the original 40k game, right? Well, okay. So well, now we're in the 40 second where the 10th

edition of happened in the 40k. This stuff, this stuff is the 10,000 years before the present of the game. So this is the 30k. This is the yes, this is 30k. And actually actually there is now, modernly, there is a separate tabletop game that is focused on the Horace Heresy, that players of it refer to it as 30K rather than 40K. And there's also one where like really, really, you go back in further and they were just kind of creating like these movements where people would help each other. And it was around like the 5,000s. It was everybody was running their own 5k.

Nice. Thanks. Good job. Yeah, hold on. So now I'm leading out acres of detail. And because the backstory of the 18th. Like the backstory of the 18th. Standing up on the ruins of the planet and saying,

as my father is my witness witness I shall never go hungry again because Tara was destroyed. Wow deep got there. That one came that one came from a direction I was not anticipating. I'm not even mad about that one. You're quite welcome. Like I hate going with the wind enough that that I'm like, yes, yes. I'm there for that. Yeah. But every, every one of the 18 primarks has more than one novel at this point dedicated to his story. OK. novel at this point dedicated to his story. Okay. As time went on, each one of the first

founding chapters, which later become the first founding legions, but that's a development from later on, each one of the first founding legions and their prim primark get you know a detailed backstory. We find out that you know the blood angels all come from the planet ball and their their primark saved them all from radio essentially saves all of them in the process being turned into space brains. They're all suffering some level of radiation poisoning because ball is a radioactive wasteland. When they get turned into Marines, his genetic material fixes them, turns them into blonde, beautiful, perfect figures. Oh yeah, there's by the way, by the way, his gene material also gives them all the red thirst. And any war zone where the blood angels are assigned tends to have a higher than normal

number of personnel go missing from encampments near where the blood angels have their bases. Or they're fighting like the. Yeah, they're their vampires. Oh, okay, I thought it was all they're all vampires. I thought it was a good. They're all less thing. Okay. Yeah, no, they're all they're all they're all they're all the stat basically. But I mean, uh, they all turned blonde, aired luaid and then they get the red thirst. Oh, that's, that's unfortunate. That's okay. But yeah, the vampire. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, and then the space wolves are essentially they, they're cursed with with every, every so often one of them, uh, goes berserk in the middle of a battle and literally turns into a werewolf

and he may or may not be able to recover from that. You know, like all of these things get detailed and the story of Lehman Russ conquering, you know, becoming the king of Fenery and the story of Paraturabo becoming the ruler of whatever fucking planet Peratur, or almost fuck per se, or nobody's an asshole. Um, sorry, I'm, I'm interjecting there. Um, you know, Magnus the Red and, you know, the story of his whole planet being this wonderful, uh, uh, all right. I do recall you talking about them when we talked about villains who weren't and yeah, yeah. And so, so I mean, all of this gets developed over time. Sure. And I'm trying to treat this as a historiography. And so, so that is the state of the galaxy and galactic history as of the third edition of the game in 1993. Okay. And I think we're in a place here where it might be good to break off.

It's a good break off point. Yeah. So we got the K-Fave history. We got the we're up to the third edition. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think so far? It reminds me a lot actually of like the inner

workings of the Jedi order during the time of Darth Bane. And how like you get these characters that like are presented as though they are just, they've always been here. It's always been going on. And like these descriptions of it and stuff like that. And, and these histories that they do. And that's what I love about these kinds of things. It's a universe that you, it is a river that didn't start the second you stepped into it. It's a river that's been going on for thousands of years before you and will go on for thousands of years after you. There's always something cool to learn. There's always something that you're missing.

The thing that I appreciate about Star Wars was that there was a guy whose job was continuity. He's Leel and Chi. His job title was the keeper of the holocron. How awesome is that man? Right. Yeah. And as a result, like when they were writing their books, they had to agree with each other, like the books had to make sense. So there was one series of books where it was going to take place on DAC, which we would know as Mon Calamari. And in a previous book, because you could, you know, decide to write a story based on whatever time you want within a certain thing.

In a previous book that the year before that, not published the year before that, but it was set the year before that. The Empire had just blown it all to shit. So the author who was, you know, starting the story on DAC was like, oh, oh, man, I have to... Well, let's see what would have happened. There would be cleanup crews. There would be this and there are rebuilding and others. There's people's reactions to it and all that kind of stuff. And so it changed, it changed things like that. And I think the way that these authors sounds like they got around it was,

he scattered them to the four corners of the universe. And so I could just write about this planet and this guy. And I could just handle, you know, the 17th guy. And that guy over there is handling the third guy. We don't ever have to talk to each other. Like, and there is a good deal of latitude that that gives. And I like that.

The downside is that like, you know, it's, it's, at this point, are they all having to agree on Canon by third edition? Or is it, is it very much? This point is, um, okay, third edition, third edition was 98. Okay. So in second ed, were they having to agree on cannon? Was it just like well there? Your corner of the universe and I'm in mind. Somewhere between the two. Early on set pieces, they all had to you kind of. And you can can tell at this phase in the development, you can tell that there is kind of meta bleed over from the real world into what they're doing.

Sure. The world eaters chapter of space marines, the ones who are the chaos chapter dedicated to corn, their leader, Angron, according to apocrypha, he got his name because the game's workshop staff, there was a player who came into the Nottingham headquarters, you know, where it was a game shop in the studio. And he'd come in with his Marines, and he would lose his shit when games went bad for him. Like, just throw a fit.

And they started calling him angry Ron, which turned into Angron. Okay. And Angron became the leader of the berserker chapter of Chaos Marines dedicated to corn. There you go. You know, so like, you know,

it's still in this phase where that kind of stuff is going on. Yeah. And like if you look at the aesthetic of the Emperor's children, chaos marines, and just slonish in general at this phase of development, it's like really clear that the guys in the studio were listening to Judas Priest.

Like, you know, black leather and spikes and studs and all this kind of thing. And like, you know, this is when slunishing noise marines were born, they were, they were, you know, dedicated to the God of excess and they had blown their eardrums out with, with just subjecting themselves to ever more intense stimuli. And so, yeah, and so for them, for them to hear anything, it had to always be at absolutely ear splitting volume. Right. And their weapons were, you know, electric guitars.

Sure. That made Sonic attacks against the enemy army. This is the kind of stuff that's going on at that point. Right. And this is in a phase before all of that had been taken by another generation of players and taken at face value and seriously and like turned into a thing. Like no, no, they're death do their metal marines like right. And of course this has like, you know, masters of universe vibes to it where it's like, oh, it's clear they were using psychotropic drugs while they were designing this. And then the legend, the core of the legend, it was just a lot of beer, but yeah.

Yeah, but you know what I mean, like, when you look at all the human characters, you're like, oh, psychedelic. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, and then the next generation comes along and they're like, oh, well, this is an absolute thing. So this is the fan I like. Yeah, like the same way that when I was a kid, I watched the Adam West Batman show and was like, totally enraptured by it. And that's Batman. Yeah, that's Batman, right.

Right. This is the same kind of thing. Okay. And so they had a lot of latitude and they were still, the satire part of it was still very much there. Cool. Okay. But, but it's the by by second edition things are starting to get noted down as okay,

no, this is how this universe works. And these are some of the things that are going to be truth-skilling forward. It's crystallizing. Yeah. Taking form. Yeah. Um, this is also around the same time that, you know, the most classic set of rules for the L Dar get codified. Um, and we see the craft world L. Dar become a thing. They're no longer just L Dar pirates there. No, no, they are the craft world LDR. And this is how they all work. And that's happening with with a lot of the different forces for this we're focusing on spacebarings and the primaries. But you know, that's that's happening kind of across the board within the setting at this point. And they're publishing books about

armies that lay out some of this lore and drill some of this stuff down. So this is where things are becoming hard codified, things are becoming truly canonical. But there's still a lot of room in the universe for them to do stuff as that's happening. Okay, cool. So. Well, what are you gonna recommend for people to read? I am. And.

Taken. I'm. Oh, damn it. Now I can't think of the title of it. There is a really, really good series of animations that was originally done as a fan project, but games workshop eventually looked at it went This is really good and it's better than any of our own guys are doing You're hired

And now I'm trying to remember the title of it, darn it And now I'm trying to remember the title of it, aren't it? But I'll have to look it up and provide the title later. But there are fan animations across the board of Warhammer 40,000 stuff that I very highly recommend to go to YouTube, go to YouTube, look up space marine animation, and there is a lot of very, very good stuff there. And whether it's fan created or official, they've done a very good job. Everybody, like if it's a fan creation, it's a labor of love. And if it's something that's official from from games workshop, they know their setting and the tone very well. And so anything you're going to find there, I'm going to say is going to be a pretty good introduction to kind of what this universe feels like. So that's going to be my recommendation. How about you? to recommend Winston Churchill, his times, his crimes by Tarrick Ali or Tareek Ali. I haven't heard

the man interviewed and introduced. So, you know, the Latinist and me. But Tarrick Ali, Winston Churchill, his times and his crimes seems like since we're talking about Lehman Rust, Since we're talking about Lehman Rust, yeah, yeah, yeah, It seems like a good place to go. So that's all right recommend. Sounds good and at this point, I don't think either was want to be found online. I don't think so. So I think that's that's about where I'm gonna go. All right, so where can they find this fine podcast since they've already found it? Yeah, well since they've already found it. But if you want to go to a website, you can find us at woblewoblewobleboblebo.geekhistorytime.com.

We can be found on Twitter collectively if there's some detail in my K-Fabe history that I got wrong. Please feel free to hang around at me at Geek History time on Twitter. Let me know what I got wrong. And I will submit myself to a pain engine for having done so. And where can you be found outside of the realm of the internet? For now, actually just keep with this podcast. Okay. Yeah. Give those, give those reviews. You know, Ed earned it.

He looked through a bunch of books in his garage today. So that's, I've been in his garage and you, sir, are no John Kennedy. I don't, I had those quotes mixed in my head. Didn't. Okay. All right. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm in playlock. And until next time, innocence proves nothing.