Latest / The Bad Moon's Orbit / Episode 23: Soulblight Gravelords

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Episode 23: Soulblight Gravelords · The Bad Moon's Orbit

• 0:33
  Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of The Bad
• 0:36
  Moon's Orbit. I am, as always, your Vangorian
• 0:39
  Lord, Dalton Montgomery. And I'm Darien, smart, Princess
• 0:43
  of power. Oh, very fun one today.
• 0:46
  Bit of a contrast today because, dear listeners, as my title
• 0:51
  implied, and Darien's definitely didn't.
• 0:54
  Oh, I guess. Well, yeah, we'll get into it.
• 0:56
  We got a little bit of a nobility running theme today.
• 0:59
  Mine was a she raw. Reference.
• 1:00
  It's true. But today we're going to be
• 1:02
  talking about vampires. We're going to be talking about
• 1:07
  the Age of Sigmar, term for the faction in which all the
• 1:10
  vampires live is the Soul Blight Grave Lord.
• 1:16
  It's spooky season. It's spooky season.
• 1:18
  Probably yes. Yes, you said, you said
• 1:21
  September for this. Episode I was going to say I
• 1:23
  think we're getting into yeah, getting into September for this
• 1:25
  episode so that will. Be oh I see Dalton doesn't know
• 1:27
  when spooky season starts. Dalton spooky season starts the
• 1:30
  day after 4th of July. July the 5th is when spooky
• 1:33
  season starts. Ideally we would have autumnal
• 1:36
  weather, but we simply do not. For some folks it'll start in
• 1:39
  August, for some they will wait until September.
• 1:41
  But the it's like how summer does it technically start until
• 1:47
  June 21st, right? But you wouldn't look at someone
• 1:49
  who says summertime in May 24th and say.
• 1:52
  You're wrong. True.
• 1:53
  So it's spooky season. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:56
  We're well into spooky season, yes.
• 2:00
  And so in in celebration of spooky season, let's talk about
• 2:03
  some vampires. Let's.
• 2:05
  Talk about some vampires, one of our classic.
• 2:07
  Oh, we have to do the thing. Oh, we do have to do the thing.
• 2:09
  You have a good thing. I mean, it'll be completely out
• 2:12
  of sync by the time, but I don't think you talked about the thing
• 2:17
  you put on. Oh, I guess you.
• 2:19
  Don't have to do that if you had another one you just totally
• 2:22
  forgot so. No, I I was just trying to think
• 2:24
  of what you do. My brains a jumble all the time.
• 2:28
  Yeah, we actually ran. Or I ran with Darien's help.
• 2:31
  You contributed. Oh, sure, I provided some
• 2:33
  graphic design. Yeah, I was going.
• 2:35
  To say we ran a local tournament here, We're both Boise locals,
• 2:37
  you know, from this podcast and if you've listened to Darien's
• 2:40
  podcast, actually ran a little A tournament over here.
• 2:43
  When we're recording this, we have the Boise Cup coming up.
• 2:47
  That's our local qualifying tournament here in the Boise
• 2:50
  area for Age of Sigmar national competition.
• 2:54
  That's cool. Yeah.
• 2:55
  And so a couple weeks ago we ran a little one day tournament
• 2:59
  preparatory for the Boise Cup, the Pre Cup clash.
• 3:03
  It was a ton of fun. We got some good games in.
• 3:07
  Like I said, Darian made some nice trophies for Wise.
• 3:10
  I made some certificates that Dalton had printed and framed.
• 3:14
  Yeah, same thing. Yep, for wisest general raddest
• 3:19
  paints and best sports. Most sports.
• 3:21
  Excuse me, which is funnier? Most sports, yes, because I got
• 3:25
  it confused and then I decided that's funny.
• 3:27
  So it was most sports and Raddest Paints and Wisest
• 3:30
  General, Yeah. And that was a ton of fun.
• 3:33
  Had a good time. Hey, if any day where you can go
• 3:35
  out and get 3 games with your friends, like what a time to be
• 3:38
  alive. Yeah, that's my cool game thing
• 3:40
  for the week, Yeah. Excellent.
• 3:42
  Hey, I bought tarot cards. Oh, sorry.
• 3:44
  Yeah, that makes it sound like it's the first time I've done
• 3:45
  that. I have many, many tarot card
• 3:47
  decks. I got a new one that I.
• 3:49
  Wanted to talk about. And folks are like, well, that's
• 3:51
  not a game thing. Tarot started out, yes, as a set
• 3:56
  of playing cards, yes, in like the 15th century called
• 4:00
  Taraccini from Italy. So, like, it totally counts, but
• 4:05
  I got it's called Tarot for You and Me, a queer deck and
• 4:09
  guidebook. The text is by Gary DeAndre and
• 4:14
  illustrations by Jeff Vosteig. I don't know why I added so much
• 4:18
  mustard. On that last name.
• 4:20
  But yeah, I'm super excited. It's really neat.
• 4:23
  I have a lot of tarot decks. I didn't need another one, but
• 4:27
  this one spoke to me and I deeply appreciate the art style.
• 4:32
  I like the very thoughtful details that have been added for
• 4:38
  the approach to remove certain heteronormative aspects that are
• 4:44
  inherent to the tarot archetypes because they are from like the
• 4:49
  15th century and then recontextualized in the 18th
• 4:52
  century. So there's some old fashioned
• 4:55
  gender stuff that appears through there.
• 4:57
  And the, the creator just made a point to be like, but what if it
• 5:01
  didn't have to? And it's got like, and, and they
• 5:04
  change the, the concept of the suits to be like lanterns and
• 5:09
  chalices. Well, chalices, cups, but plants
• 5:13
  and, and oh, what was the other one?
• 5:16
  It was instead of wands they did flags and it's very good and I
• 5:22
  like it a lot. And also Mabel from Gravity
• 5:24
  Falls is just here as the star. Like that's just Mabel from
• 5:30
  Gravity Falls. Listen, Disney wouldn't let
• 5:33
  those cops be gay, but Gravity Falls is a staple of queer
• 5:37
  culture. So I just wanted to tell
• 5:39
  everybody about my cool new tarot card deck.
• 5:41
  Yeah, it's super neat. Yeah, we love a tarot.
• 5:43
  I love tarot theming and imagery.
• 5:46
  And yeah, everything associated with it.
• 5:48
  And it's a nice bi weekly reminder that there's a LGBT
• 5:52
  Spaces LGBT podcast. Where?
• 5:55
  Inclusive and chill here. Yeah, if you have a problem with
• 5:58
  that, you can go find your free entertainment somewhere.
• 6:00
  Else right, not a 40K podcast. Not a 40K podcast.
• 6:04
  That's unfair. There are there are queer people
• 6:05
  in 40K spaces, probably kind of like there's a lot of queer fans
• 6:09
  of like, love, crafty and horror, including at least one
• 6:11
  of the people in this recording booth Speaking of things that
• 6:15
  are not bad things. Well, then, I mean, they're bad.
• 6:18
  They're vampires, but. Vampires are not good.
• 6:20
  No, but a narrative. But they're cool.
• 6:22
  Yeah, exactly. I mean, they appear in a
• 6:23
  narrative. I'm never mad.
• 6:24
  You got it. First off, when I say soul
• 6:27
  blight, Grave Lords, the hell is a soul blight?
• 6:29
  That's probably a good place to start, right?
• 6:31
  You know what I would have honestly been like?
• 6:33
  That's what the fish shelves have.
• 6:35
  They have. So Blights, Yeah.
• 6:36
  You're not wrong, but no for for whatever reason the Soul Blight
• 6:41
  curse is AO S's term for the condition that gives you
• 6:46
  vampirism. Because they needed to copyright
• 6:48
  it. Yeah, you couldn't copyright
• 6:49
  Vampire. Yeah, OK.
• 6:51
  Go on. So someone with the curse can be
• 6:54
  called soul blighted. They're often just still
• 6:57
  referred to as vampires. The terms are interchangeable in
• 6:59
  the universe, but the the thing that you have that makes you a
• 7:04
  vampire is the soul blight curse.
• 7:06
  There's not like all my Elder Scrolls fans in the audience.
• 7:08
  There's not like a vampiria Sanguinous, which is what the
• 7:11
  disease that gives you vampirism and Elder Scrolls is called.
• 7:14
  The Shadow 100 books is a demon curse.
• 7:16
  Oh, fun. But yeah, Silverlight Curse has
• 7:19
  been around for a long time. To be fair, we have a we have a
• 7:22
  a strict line of continuity. We know when vampirism started
• 7:27
  and like how it made because it started in the old world and we
• 7:30
  know how it made the jump to the new world.
• 7:32
  What is spread is spread reality.
• 7:35
  Yeah. Crazy.
• 7:37
  Go on. What do we have to talk about?
• 7:39
  Queen of the Damned. Whatever you want.
• 7:42
  Cool, I'll find it. I'll find it a time.
• 7:44
  So we have our original vampire. Vampire little stat.
• 7:46
  Go on. No.
• 7:47
  That's not the original vampire. No, I'm making a joke.
• 7:50
  Go on, I'll throw up the the old world klaxon that I don't know
• 7:54
  old world lore as well so I might miss details here, but our
• 7:58
  original vampire in the setting is a lady named Nephrata, which
• 8:02
  is a good name. It is the Queen of the Damned.
• 8:05
  I was. Going to say I figured that
• 8:06
  reference is going to get to come back quick.
• 8:10
  Akasha is the. Queen of the Damned, she.
• 8:12
  Was the first vampire in Anne? I keep saying Queen of the
• 8:16
  Damned and occurs to me maybe not everybody knows it's from
• 8:18
  Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. There was a couple movies.
• 8:22
  There was ATV series about it. The most recent one came out
• 8:25
  very recently and it was about the Vampire Lestat and Atlantis.
• 8:28
  I'm thinking about buying it for my mom as a gift.
• 8:31
  She won't get the irony. Oh no, Neferata.
• 8:35
  I'm getting Egyptian vibes. Yes.
• 8:37
  Neferata, just like Queen of the Damned.
• 8:39
  I was going to say Neferata is our original vampire listeners.
• 8:41
  If you remember it from our Shayish episode, we I talked
• 8:45
  about where Nagash came from. Right?
• 8:48
  Nagash was once a mortal man. He was the second son in line to
• 8:54
  inherit the throne. Or no, he was the first son.
• 8:56
  Because that's the thing that they did weird in Camry.
• 9:01
  Well, they like make him go work as a priest.
• 9:03
  Yes because he was the first son so it was the the higher honor
• 9:06
  to work in the Mortuary cult hypothetically, but it meant he
• 9:09
  would never have like contact with real power which Nagesh
• 9:13
  could not abide obviously. So he learned secrets of shadow
• 9:18
  magic from Marathi's like cult, and he mixed that with Shaishi
• 9:24
  and magic, the magic of death. And so Nagash invented
• 9:27
  necromancy. And then he immediately took on
• 9:30
  disciples, one of which was Nepharata.
• 9:34
  Yeah, so Neph goes way back. She's pulling some habshett so
• 9:38
  it moves right here wearing the pharaoh's like beard and.
• 9:42
  All of these things. I respect her.
• 9:44
  Yes, Kemri is very Egyptian coated in the old world, and
• 9:49
  that's why Nagash has like, the big hat.
• 9:51
  That's by Arkhan, who's another one of Nagash's disciples back
• 9:55
  from when he was alive. Has the big hat.
• 9:58
  Yeah. It's just kind of a staple of
• 10:00
  Camry and, like, nobility. So what is it?
• 10:04
  We're not going to talk about Arkhan in this episode, but he
• 10:07
  was Nagash's first disciple. He got extremely good at, like,
• 10:10
  necromancy and Nagash's something.
• 10:12
  But Arkhan basically, like tried to because they'd all figured
• 10:18
  out like, OK, we can raise skeletons, but they're still
• 10:20
  trying to work towards immortality.
• 10:22
  That was kind of, that's all. The end goal?
• 10:24
  For. Necromancers is actually we want
• 10:27
  immortality. So Arcon and Nagash eventually
• 10:31
  reach it by becoming big skeleton men.
• 10:33
  But Neferata is royalty like she, and she's used to enjoying
• 10:40
  like the finer things of life. She didn't.
• 10:42
  I was going to say she didn't want to become a skeleton lady.
• 10:45
  How would she like eat delicious food?
• 10:48
  You know, like, I feel that, Like, what do you mean?
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  I could be immortal, but I'd have to be a skeleton and I
• 10:54
  could never like, enjoy a boba again.
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  I don't think that's going to work for me.
• 10:59
  I will not take any mortality deal that does not include still
• 11:03
  getting to eat good food or take a nap.
• 11:06
  Vampirism is fucking off the table.
• 11:08
  Classic vampires were like oh we don't eat and we don't sleep.
• 11:12
  Two of my favorite things gone forever.
• 11:14
  Why would I want to be immortal? So, yeah, so like, Neff's not
• 11:18
  going to go the arcane, the Nagash route because she wants
• 11:22
  to. She doesn't want to be a
• 11:23
  skeleton. She's also a little bit vain.
• 11:25
  Like, she cares for her beauty and she likes to like, yeah, she
• 11:31
  likes to. And there's nothing wrong with
• 11:32
  that. Like, that's neat.
• 11:33
  And so she's like, OK, not going to become a skeleton.
• 11:35
  I need to figure out a different thing that lets me still enjoy
• 11:38
  all of these, like, pleasures of living.
• 11:40
  So she takes that same like, Shaishi and death magic and that
• 11:44
  shadow magic and like, mixes it in her own concoction.
• 11:47
  And then the the like, spark that eventually makes the whole
• 11:54
  thing come together. Is that she does this ritual
• 11:58
  meant to grant her immortality. And in the moment she's just
• 12:01
  thinking that like she's going to take like a part of what
• 12:05
  already worked from Nagash because he had at this point
• 12:07
  made himself immortal, but he his body was like dying.
• 12:10
  He was turning into skeleton man, but he was still around.
• 12:13
  And so as part of that ritual, Nephrata drank Nagash's blood.
• 12:19
  And so that's that's the there's a metaphysical magical through
• 12:23
  line for vampirism, right Is Nephrata unlocks the secret to
• 12:28
  immortality. She gets what she wants.
• 12:30
  Vampires still can feel touch and taste and like hot and cold,
• 12:36
  all of those like sensations that make living worth living.
• 12:39
  But the kicker is that like blood, blood is the thirst is
• 12:44
  what they call it. Vampires are harrowed by the
• 12:48
  thirst. They have to drink blood to
• 12:50
  satiate it. They always crave it.
• 12:53
  And yeah, standard stuff. They require untainted blood.
• 12:56
  So what does that mean? It just means no fellow
• 12:59
  vampires. Basically, yeah.
• 13:02
  Also pretty standard. Yeah, and different kinds of
• 13:05
  blood can like screw with them. Like vampires do not like
• 13:08
  drinking like very heavily chaos mutated people's blood fucks
• 13:13
  with their body. We're going to get into this
• 13:16
  during during the age of myth when vampires were playing nice
• 13:20
  as part of like being parts of the like cohorts of Nakash and
• 13:24
  like helping build cities and like directing the vampires.
• 13:27
  They're the most skilled necromancers in existence
• 13:30
  because their bodies are just filled with Shaishi and magic.
• 13:33
  And so like during the age of myth, we get a ton of stories of
• 13:35
  like I said this during the, the one of the like age of myth
• 13:39
  episodes. If you are just like a person
• 13:42
  living in a town in the age of myth and you want a new house,
• 13:46
  you might just go to your local vampire and ask for a new house
• 13:49
  and they're going to have skeletons put it together.
• 13:51
  And that's just like, it's everybody working together.
• 13:54
  It's the thing we were trying to do.
• 13:56
  And so during the age, but vampires still have the the
• 14:01
  hunger, they sell the thirst. And so during the age of myth
• 14:04
  that was mostly satiated either through donations of blood.
• 14:08
  Like I said in that example I just gave.
• 14:10
  Maybe that's the like I. Was going to say the payment is
• 14:12
  OK, yeah. Yeah, the people of the town
• 14:14
  just each give a little bit of blood every month.
• 14:18
  The vampire stays in their service if they want to stop
• 14:21
  paying blood. Blood letting just like Nick
• 14:23
  yourself and let it. Because they don't again or
• 14:26
  fantasy, they don't have like needles and shit.
• 14:29
  Yep. OK, Just cut yourself somewhere
• 14:32
  where it's not gonna, like, screw up Your like, don't cut
• 14:35
  your palms. I don't know why.
• 14:36
  Everywhere. Yeah, I don't know why fancy
• 14:38
  media always makes you cut your palms.
• 14:39
  So cool. It looks listen, that the drama
• 14:43
  cutting like the back of your No, you could do if you had your
• 14:46
  hand. I was gonna say it's doesn't
• 14:47
  look nearly as like cool, but no, if you just like had your
• 14:50
  hand as a fist and you just like made like dead eye, like direct
• 14:53
  eye contact, slow blade across like the back of your forearm.
• 14:56
  That's pretty tight. Yeah, that would be a fine spot,
• 15:00
  right, that that part of your skin doesn't?
• 15:01
  Really. I think, yeah, you get a little
• 15:03
  bit of a scar probably, but whatever.
• 15:05
  Yeah, exactly. And so that was faster than your
• 15:08
  palms that are constantly being. Moved, yes.
• 15:11
  And so that was one way that like vampires say to themselves.
• 15:14
  And also there's just an agreement between like members
• 15:17
  of the Pantheon and Gorka Morca that vampires would feed on orcs
• 15:21
  as well. Orcs are going to be fighting
• 15:24
  anyways. They just have to do that to
• 15:26
  survive. And so vampires just taking a
• 15:28
  field against orcs and like, drinking the blood of a couple
• 15:32
  of orcs, like no big deal. Like everybody's chill.
• 15:37
  Only caveat that vampires don't like drinking or blood because
• 15:42
  it wires them up it makes. Like a really fucking caffeine.
• 15:46
  Yeah, yeah, it fills them. Jittery as hell.
• 15:48
  Yeah, It fills them with that like destructive verve that orcs
• 15:52
  have. So it's a little bit of just
• 15:54
  like it. It basically gives them like a
• 15:58
  dear listener. I've never done a drug, but it's
• 16:00
  kind of like a, a meth adjacent. Like I like, they just kind of
• 16:04
  want to, yeah, yeah, they, they want to break stuff and they're
• 16:06
  a little bit like. But it's not fun for them, no.
• 16:09
  Absolutely. That I guess, Mason, for me, it
• 16:11
  was thinking of if you accidentally mess up your
• 16:16
  antidepressant dose, now you're just feeling kind of jittery and
• 16:19
  anxious and you're like, I don't like how I feel.
• 16:22
  And that's not it because it's like destruction, but like that
• 16:25
  whole like, I just don't feel right in my skin.
• 16:29
  And it's like, and nothing is wrong and I know everything is
• 16:32
  actually fine, but I guess that's what my brain associates
• 16:35
  with it when it's like, hey, I still like how I feel right now.
• 16:39
  I'll fuck. I messed up my or shit, I took,
• 16:41
  I had caffeine a little too late in the day.
• 16:43
  Yeah. I was a little bit wired and I'm
• 16:45
  hyper aware of everything and everything feels like it's
• 16:47
  supposed to go wrong. I'm fine.
• 16:49
  Yeah. Yeah, so we we get the we don't
• 16:52
  have like a ton of info on it, but we know that like different
• 16:55
  blood effects vampires differently, which.
• 16:58
  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So that is one of.
• 17:00
  My favorite things, Yeah. Can I say a tangent a bit?
• 17:03
  Oh, of course. I haven't done this in a while.
• 17:04
  There's been like, hey, here's another piece of media that's a
• 17:06
  cool thing I want to talk about. Shadow comes just for 1/2
• 17:07
  second. Yeah, you're good.
• 17:08
  There's a really cool short story about this New York
• 17:13
  vampire coven in like the 80s, I think, that just got a addicted
• 17:20
  to cocaine. Not the actual cocaine, the
• 17:24
  blood of people who were addicted to cocaine.
• 17:28
  And it was so bad and they had to literally lock themselves in
• 17:35
  this old abandoned hotel where they live in to forcibly like
• 17:38
  dry out because it was just so bad.
• 17:41
  And it was going to get worse. And they were starting to be
• 17:43
  reckless and get noticed by humans, which meant the
• 17:46
  Shadowhunters were going to come and kill all of them.
• 17:50
  It's a great story. Obviously, like, don't do
• 17:53
  cocaine. That's not the point of the
• 17:56
  story. But whenever I think about
• 18:00
  letting, like letting specific kind of bloods influence
• 18:02
  vampires, that is where my brain goes because I thought it was so
• 18:05
  fascinating. 100% we get like we know that like vampires can
• 18:11
  survive on animal blood but they don't like it.
• 18:13
  It doesn't like give them the same like in the same way that.
• 18:18
  Strong or fast maybe. Yeah, it doesn't make them.
• 18:21
  It doesn't like. Just turn their eyes gold.
• 18:24
  No, mostly it's just they don't like it.
• 18:29
  More like vampires enjoy drinking blood like it.
• 18:33
  It satisfies and fulfills them in a way that's very akin to
• 18:37
  like eating food. So like they can subsist off of
• 18:40
  like animal blood, but doing so would be the equivalent of like
• 18:45
  bread and water for a person that's.
• 18:47
  So interesting because it's like in a world where there is just
• 18:50
  like humans and that's like the one species and vampires are
• 18:54
  just a human variant, the preference for human blood makes
• 18:59
  sense. But in a world where there's a
• 19:01
  bunch of fantasy nonsense all over the place and you could eat
• 19:08
  probably a human or dwarf blood, or you mentioned orc, but it
• 19:15
  just makes me feel kind of jittery.
• 19:16
  Yeah. Or elf blood.
• 19:18
  Yeah. And that's all fine, but like,
• 19:20
  we're gonna draw a line at a cow.
• 19:23
  Yeah, yeah, it seems like because it, it seems to be
• 19:29
  because of souls is what it is. Also in SO we have decided
• 19:33
  definitively in Age of Sigmar in the Realms animals don't have
• 19:38
  souls, so all dogs do not go to heaven in the mortal realms.
• 19:43
  It it seems like the case is no or it might be like I don't
• 19:49
  actually know that definitively. It could just be a case of like
• 19:53
  non sentient souls don't do the the thing the vampires need.
• 19:57
  It's like, not a flavor. To Coke versus a Diet Coke.
• 20:00
  Yeah, or like I said, the the it's like a nice like.
• 20:05
  It's like a. Belgian season.
• 20:07
  Yeah, Cat versus an American Kit Cat.
• 20:09
  Not even that. Like vampires describe half
• 20:12
  being forced to subsist off of animal blood.
• 20:15
  It's more like a nice Belgian Kit Cat versus like oatmeal.
• 20:20
  It's like a Belt seasoned party versus an American spark.
• 20:24
  Yeah, just literally chalk. But yeah, so they can't assist
• 20:29
  on animal blood. They don't like it.
• 20:31
  They prefer sentient peoples. And humans are the pinnacle of
• 20:34
  that. Probably because it originated
• 20:38
  in a human. But we're not.
• 20:40
  Yeah, but we're not sure, like the exact details.
• 20:42
  It's also vampirism cannot be, to our knowledge, passed on to
• 20:46
  anyone who isn't a human. So.
• 20:49
  So all humans are vampires? All.
• 20:51
  Vampires. Were humans.
• 20:54
  Were are worse? Probably more, yeah, probably
• 20:57
  more accurate. Like you can't cure vampirism
• 20:59
  because it affects the soul. So.
• 21:00
  So you're. Going to tell me there's no
• 21:02
  vampire goblins. No.
• 21:04
  We just stood here and made the conscious decision not to let
• 21:08
  there be vampire goblins. It'd be great, but no.
• 21:13
  Vampire dinosaurs from the on the stars.
• 21:17
  That one extra would not work because they're just like immune
• 21:19
  to corruption, like their souls can't be fucked with but.
• 21:23
  OK, but what if on one of the hard drives where some of the
• 21:29
  souls were stored, the hard drive got corrupted?
• 21:33
  Corrupted, and now we have vampire dinosaurs from beyond
• 21:35
  the stars. Anything's possible.
• 21:37
  I mean, that is one of the cool things about Age of SIGBAR, is
• 21:38
  that anything's possible. The world is big, everything is
• 21:43
  Canon, but not everything is true.
• 21:45
  Is the official line, which I think is fun.
• 21:49
  Everything is candid, but not everything is true.
• 21:50
  Is solid as hell. Right.
• 21:52
  And so, yeah, like we could get vampiric Seraphon and even the
• 21:55
  the line in the book that talks about like all, all vampires are
• 21:58
  human includes like a some people say like rumors of like
• 22:03
  lost, like dwarven vampire tribes, but there's no like
• 22:07
  confirmation like they're leaving that door open.
• 22:09
  For you to. Do.
• 22:09
  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
• 22:11
  It's. Been it's been 10 years.
• 22:15
  How? I don't know.
• 22:16
  You have the self-control not to just hit every fun cool idea
• 22:20
  that you would ever have. Don't get it?
• 22:22
  Eventually that's. The age of Call it the age of
• 22:25
  night, and they're vampires. Honestly that's probably what
• 22:28
  we're going to. I'm sure we talked about before
• 22:30
  Age of Sigmar runs in cycles where first editions bad guy was
• 22:34
  chaos, the good guys always order, and then first editions
• 22:38
  bad guy was chaos, second editions was death, third
• 22:40
  editions was destruction. We're back to chaos right now.
• 22:42
  I feel like chaos is maybe underlining the whole time
• 22:45
  though. Oh yeah, chaos is always not
• 22:47
  main bad. Guy yeah, sometimes we have to
• 22:49
  focus on something else. Yeah, threats get bigger in
• 22:52
  certain times. So like as a?
• 22:53
  Pressing threat? Yeah, first edition was the
• 22:55
  Realm Gate Wars, so we're hitting all those chaos
• 22:57
  fortresses around the realm gates and stuff. 2nd edition is
• 23:00
  the Necro quick, which guess who did that?
• 23:06
  And then yeah, like third edition was the Era of the
• 23:08
  Beast. And so that empowered all of
• 23:10
  like Orca Marcus followers and stuff.
• 23:12
  That's cool. And so it was just more pressing
• 23:14
  than that right now. The Hour of Ruin.
• 23:17
  Hey, that's a fun name. Right.
• 23:20
  It's real bad. Things are real bad currently.
• 23:24
  When is when is the thing where they're going to do the thing to
• 23:26
  announce the thing? You know what I mean?
• 23:29
  Yeah, we're recording this before the you already know what
• 23:33
  they're. I'm going to do a magic trick
• 23:35
  because you already, you listening to this dear listener,
• 23:39
  already know what they announced on the 18th of July.
• 23:44
  But I'm going to pull magic trick because I also know, but
• 23:48
  not not through any like clandestine methods.
• 23:50
  It's just pretty easy to guess. We are going to get an
• 23:53
  announcement for a new army for HS Sigmar on the 18th and it is
• 23:56
  going to be chaos aligned dwarves.
• 23:59
  Whoa, why would they do? That we don't know the AOS
• 24:03
  reason yet. They were a thing in the old
• 24:05
  world and so there's probably going to be a through line
• 24:07
  there. They have their own like minor
• 24:09
  chaos God that they worship who's not one of the big 4 slash
• 24:13
  big 5. Yeah, like in the Old World the
• 24:16
  Cast Wars were sipped Hashut, who is the Chaos God of
• 24:20
  industry. That makes sense.
• 24:22
  Honestly, it makes sense that the capitalists would worship
• 24:24
  chaos. Yeah, and he was like basically
• 24:28
  level, maybe like a little bit below the Great Horned Rat in
• 24:31
  the Old World. And so then when the great
• 24:33
  Horned Rat pulled the gotcha and like elevated himself to full
• 24:36
  cast godhood, we haven't heard anything about hush hush it for
• 24:40
  a little bit. So we don't know if he stuck
• 24:43
  around or like what's going on with it.
• 24:45
  We don't know what the details of it are going to be, but we're
• 24:48
  almost certain it's Chaos Dwarfs on the 18th because, yeah,
• 24:53
  they've been rumored forever. And the in the like reveal
• 24:56
  stream they kept putting on increasingly elaborate hats,
• 24:59
  which is a thing that Old World cast dwarves are known for.
• 25:02
  Which is, yeah. That's very good.
• 25:04
  They've got a little bit of a like Byzantine like aesthetic to
• 25:08
  him with like the huge like illustrations of like the Epica
• 25:11
  Gilgamesh. And he's got the like tiered
• 25:12
  hat, like a rat hat. So they've got kind of that
• 25:15
  going on and like the very ornate beards.
• 25:18
  But anyway, it's not a cast dwarf episode.
• 25:21
  Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't be surprised.
• 25:22
  Anyways, all that to say, I wouldn't be surprised that when
• 25:24
  5th edition rolls around and his deaths turn to be like Ascendant
• 25:27
  again, we might get something vampire focused.
• 25:30
  We got a lot of vampires in the narrative recently, with good
• 25:33
  reason, because they're neat. Yay, How did vampirism end up in
• 25:38
  Mortal Realms? Yeah, So Neff is the first
• 25:40
  vampire. She spreads vampirism to her
• 25:43
  brother Ushoran. I've been saying his name wrong
• 25:46
  forever. I've been saying it.
• 25:48
  Shawan. I thought the R was earlier, but
• 25:50
  it's Shoran. I do that too.
• 25:51
  Yeah. Neff spreads it to her brother
• 25:54
  Ushoran on purpose. Yeah, generally the.
• 25:58
  I have a note here about this, notably for Warhammer in
• 26:02
  general. On Age of Sigmar specifically,
• 26:04
  we don't get a lot of the like oh vampirism has turned me into
• 26:07
  a cursed beast of the night and I am alienated from my society.
• 26:11
  Vampires fucking love being vampires.
• 26:13
  We have Lestat, not Louis. Yes, So Neff, Yeah, I have a
• 26:19
  quote here from like the most recent battle tome.
• 26:21
  Shout out to my buddy Daniel, who lent it to me because he
• 26:24
  plays vampires. I have a quote here from Like a
• 26:27
  Vampire who was asked about like the the soul like curse and what
• 26:31
  he thinks of it about being called a curse.
• 26:33
  He says, quote is it a curse to possess the strength of a dozen
• 26:36
  warriors? Is it some form of malediction
• 26:39
  to true no true immortality and hold innate command of amethyst
• 26:43
  magic at one's fingertips? No, I say the vampires humanity
• 26:47
  perfected refined by the great necromancer into something
• 26:51
  beyond the mundane limitations of nature.
• 26:56
  That's tenor, generally the yeah.
• 26:58
  So the calling it the soul Blight curse?
• 27:00
  That's someone else's marketing. This is not the vampire's own VR
• 27:04
  team. They got to get on.
• 27:05
  That yeah, they love being vampires, but like.
• 27:09
  OK, OK, what's the downside of being a vampire?
• 27:11
  The thirst is the big one. Right.
• 27:13
  But like feels like that can get solved pretty easy.
• 27:17
  But just having blood? Yeah.
• 27:19
  And in a world where you don't have to pretend to be secret,
• 27:21
  that seems way easier. Yeah, it depends.
• 27:25
  So vampirism, one of the reasons I like vampirism is like a
• 27:29
  fantasy storytelling devices that vampirism is never just
• 27:31
  vampirism, right? Yeah, it always represents
• 27:34
  something. Dracula is not an aristocrat by
• 27:38
  champs, right. Like, and so we, we'll see it a
• 27:42
  little bit when we talk about like the the nightmare
• 27:45
  aristocracy, which is the coolest name of anything.
• 27:49
  But in our case, vampirism is kind of being used as a
• 27:53
  commentary on like resource scarcity because during the age
• 27:57
  of myth, everything's pretty good.
• 27:59
  But once we start getting more vampires and once we start
• 28:02
  getting less like organized, like civil societies and
• 28:08
  vampires start competing with one another and like organizing
• 28:11
  themselves into higher. Are immortal there will just
• 28:13
  there's only ever going to be more vampires.
• 28:15
  Yes. That would be harder.
• 28:17
  Yes, and while it seems like vampires don't need like a ton
• 28:21
  of blood, they really like blood and they can just drink it
• 28:26
  forever like they don't hit a satiation point and so we're.
• 28:31
  Always just kind of want more blood.
• 28:32
  Yes. So we're not.
• 28:33
  Always go for more blood. We're not only going to see like
• 28:35
  a commentary on scarcity, we're also going to see a commentary
• 28:38
  of like high-ranking noble vampires will just drown
• 28:42
  themselves in blood and then literally like derive other
• 28:45
  vampires underneath their heel of blood as like a mains of
• 28:49
  control. That sucks.
• 28:51
  Yeah, hey, OK, let's just skip to the end.
• 28:56
  Do they have to work for Nagash? No, actually, yeah, we're going.
• 29:00
  We're going to talk about at least one who doesn't can.
• 29:02
  They go in the sun. Yeah, doesn't seem to be a thing
• 29:05
  for AOS vampires. They can go in the sun, some of
• 29:08
  them can transform into bats and stuff, but it seems to be
• 29:12
  somewhat inconsistent, like not all of them possess that
• 29:15
  ability. It largely bases is based on who
• 29:19
  turned to seems to be the yes, we're going to talk about the
• 29:23
  I'd mentioned the nightmare aristocracy.
• 29:25
  The most interesting thing about vampires in my opinion is that
• 29:28
  they are organized into these bloodlines of like who turned
• 29:34
  you and that influences your strain of the soul blight curse
• 29:39
  interesting and gives you different powers and stuff which
• 29:41
  I think is interesting. So who called it the Soul Blight
• 29:44
  curse? Do we know?
• 29:45
  We don't know, it just came up. It's probably like an Azurian
• 29:48
  term. I would expect 'cause that's
• 29:50
  where. We get a bad translation of an
• 29:52
  Azurian term could be too. That would be very funny if it's
• 29:56
  like doesn't actually, if curse is not the proper translation,
• 29:59
  but like someone, it's like when you read translations of the
• 30:03
  Odyssey that make very specific choices about how they're
• 30:06
  depicting certain characters towards the end of this epic
• 30:09
  poem. And you're like, I feel like you
• 30:11
  had certain opinions about women and maybe someone who was doing
• 30:15
  the translation had certain opinions about vampirism.
• 30:18
  So this word didn't really mean curse and I just picked curse.
• 30:22
  I mean other people don't like vampirism as well, like the
• 30:26
  vampires are chill with them. But yeah, like it could just be
• 30:30
  that's the nature of it from. Yeah, they're like stronger,
• 30:32
  faster, more powerful than you and they need, they want to
• 30:34
  drink your blood. Yeah, I can see other people not
• 30:36
  being super cool with that. And then the the big downside of
• 30:41
  the thirst is that not only does a vampire like crave blood and
• 30:45
  is driven by their like need to consume blood, failing to
• 30:49
  consume blood does not just like make a vampire wither.
• 30:53
  It doesn't just make him like starve stay with me now fate
• 30:57
  worse than death. A vampire who does not consume
• 31:00
  blood for too long loses their willpower, loses their.
• 31:06
  There it is. There's the big drawback.
• 31:08
  So if you, and this is often done because it's hard to like,
• 31:14
  kill a fellow vampire, and it's a little bit like indignified to
• 31:18
  kill a fellow vampire. Vampires are very generally very
• 31:21
  concerned with the, like, optics and formality of, like, what
• 31:26
  they're. Yeah, a little bit of the, like
• 31:28
  etiquette of like interacting with fellow vampires.
• 31:31
  We are all like a better class of existence.
• 31:33
  So we have rules for how we deal with each other.
• 31:37
  And so it's a little, yeah, it's a little bit indignified.
• 31:39
  It's a little bit like I would never stoop to kill another
• 31:42
  vampire. What if there are vampires who
• 31:45
  make me upset or mad? Maybe I chained them in a
• 31:48
  dungeon for a month and then once the thirst gets so bad that
• 31:52
  what they are has wilted away and they are just mindless
• 31:57
  vampiric beasts now, then I'll let them back out.
• 32:02
  Fuck the optics on that one I guess is different.
• 32:06
  So we have a type of vampire called Vargeists.
• 32:10
  Vargas are just vampires who have gone too long without
• 32:13
  blood. Yeah, they're big in like,
• 32:16
  beastial. They have wings.
• 32:19
  Yeah, that grow off their forelimbs.
• 32:21
  At the. Pre cup.
• 32:23
  Oh yeah, yeah, those are Vargas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 32:25
  I didn't put them in. I was kicking myself for not
• 32:27
  putting them in the visual reference.
• 32:29
  But yeah, you've seen some. Yes Yep.
• 32:30
  They've got wings growing out of their forelimbs.
• 32:32
  They just become more like bat like.
• 32:34
  Yeah. Yeah, but they they completely
• 32:37
  lose their like, inner sense of self that just turned into
• 32:39
  mindless monsters, No. Too easy for.
• 32:42
  That to happen, I was going to say bad, It's very bad.
• 32:45
  But like I said, it doesn't seem to take like a ton of blood to
• 32:47
  sustain a vampire. We have a vampire we're going to
• 32:51
  talk a little bit about in a little bit, whose name is Cato.
• 32:55
  I'm not even going to attempt his last name because it's
• 32:58
  difficult, but he is like a good vampire.
• 33:01
  He's the protagonist of a novel. He would probably disagree with
• 33:03
  you on that, but that's part of why he's a good vampire.
• 33:06
  And we we get a sense throughout the novel that like he's always
• 33:08
  carrying like a like an alchemist satchel full of like
• 33:12
  blood vials basically. And he only has like a couple
• 33:16
  and he's not like worried basically at all throughout the
• 33:19
  book about needing to like get more blood.
• 33:21
  He's. Got a little bit of blood, yeah,
• 33:23
  he's got. A.
• 33:24
  Bloodshot. He'll be fine, yeah.
• 33:25
  He's got enough to sustain him. It's like doing just like a
• 33:27
  wheat grass shot. First thing in the morning.
• 33:32
  So let's talk about. I mentioned it before.
• 33:34
  I want to talk about the thing that I think makes AOS vampires
• 33:38
  really fascinating is this concept of like vampiric
• 33:42
  dynasty. Vampiric dynasty is these are
• 33:45
  often defined by who turned you or who turned the person who
• 33:48
  turned you. Generally a vampire's dynasty is
• 33:53
  treated as like the most important part of their
• 33:56
  identity. Like when you take the soul
• 33:59
  blight curse, when you accept the blood kiss is what they call
• 34:02
  it, you forgo your previous, like, familiar relations.
• 34:07
  You are not of humanity anymore. And now we are instead part of
• 34:11
  this big, like, family of fellow vampires.
• 34:15
  And like any kind of family that can meet a lot of different
• 34:18
  things. Like sometimes that's a family,
• 34:20
  like, hey, we're all family getting together, like hanging
• 34:24
  out, doing stuff. Yeah.
• 34:26
  And sometimes that's like a mafia family.
• 34:29
  That's a hey, I brought you in, so now you do.
• 34:33
  Yeah, I brought you in, so now you do things for me.
• 34:36
  And if you don't, you're going to have consequences, right?
• 34:40
  Obligation, yes. You can be sleeping with the
• 34:44
  fish elves. Vampires do not have to, like,
• 34:49
  stick with their dynasties, but it's so taboo and weird that it
• 34:54
  is, like, assumed that a vampire is part of their dynasty, even
• 34:58
  when that that's not like, an obvious thing.
• 35:00
  Like, I'll call back to Cato again.
• 35:02
  Cato is part of one of our dynasties.
• 35:04
  He's Nalamian, which is Nepharata's dynasty.
• 35:08
  Yeah, he was turned. He was turned by Nepharata.
• 35:12
  Very bougie. Yes, but he hasn't like done
• 35:17
  vampire stuff in seemingly decades by the time we see him
• 35:20
  in like his novel. And yet he runs into another
• 35:23
  like Nagasha lined character and that character like what the
• 35:28
  first time he sees Cato doing something he doesn't like
• 35:30
  straight up threatens to like tell Neferata about, he just
• 35:34
  assumes that Cato cares about and is invested in that like
• 35:37
  vampiric hierarchy to the where like going and telling teacher
• 35:41
  is a thing you can threatening threaten him with.
• 35:43
  Yeah. So it's very weird for a vampire
• 35:46
  to like, stray from dynasty, not the least of which because like
• 35:50
  outside of these vampiric dynasties, vampires aren't
• 35:54
  trusted. They're not like they're a
• 35:56
  threat in like human settlements and stuff.
• 35:59
  It's a very compelling case to stick close to your dynasty,
• 36:02
  because vampires who try and go alone and like hunt in human
• 36:06
  cities without that kind of protection don't.
• 36:08
  Fare well. No, certainly not.
• 36:12
  So let's talk about these dynasties.
• 36:14
  So overall, the whole collective of vampire society is called the
• 36:19
  Midnight aristocracy. So that's all of the dynasties,
• 36:23
  that's all the vampires. And within the midnight
• 36:26
  aristocracy we have a couple of dynasties who are the big names.
• 36:29
  These are the ones that everybody knows.
• 36:31
  We have lesser dynasties often vying for power, but they can
• 36:35
  get like subsumed into other dynasties.
• 36:37
  They usually offshoots of these big dynasties, some mutation in
• 36:40
  there like specific curse, allowing them to like branch off
• 36:43
  and be their own thing. But let's start with the biggest
• 36:46
  one, the first one, the Nalamian dynasty.
• 36:51
  This is the personal dynasty of Nephrata, obviously first of the
• 36:56
  blood. And I have a very nice quote
• 36:59
  from her provided here. I am no one's servant.
• 37:06
  I am Neferata, the mother of vampires, the more tark of
• 37:09
  blood. My lesser kin might delude
• 37:12
  themselves that we are rivals in some ever fluctuating contest,
• 37:16
  but we are not even playing the same rules.
• 37:21
  Neff is the oldest vampire by degrees, obviously like she was
• 37:24
  the first. It's hard to be older than that.
• 37:26
  But even then, like most of the other Old World vampires are
• 37:29
  dead. They died of the Old World.
• 37:32
  She didn't. No.
• 37:34
  Well, kind of. I never answered how the curse
• 37:36
  got here. So when the old, old World
• 37:40
  exploded, Right. Nick Ash, Wait.
• 37:42
  Did it explode? It it collapsed in on itself
• 37:45
  like time and yeah time and space and everything stopped
• 37:48
  meaning anything right 'cause chaos cause.
• 37:50
  I've been in picturing that that active like very much.
• 37:53
  More an. Employee folding in on itself.
• 37:55
  So when you said exploded up, that's why I was like, hold,
• 37:58
  hold, hold on, I gotta wait. This is important imploded for
• 38:04
  sure. Nagash's Nagash had ascended to
• 38:07
  godhood. He like shot out into the cosmos
• 38:11
  like same as everybody else, eventually woke up in the the
• 38:13
  moral realms in the like end of the end times.
• 38:18
  Nagash had anointed what he called his Mortarks, Mortas and
• 38:23
  Death Arkas and power just literally his like most
• 38:27
  impressive and important generals to like lead his
• 38:29
  command of his forces during the end time.
• 38:31
  Did you say arc means power? Yes.
• 38:35
  Like Archangel is just power Angel.
• 38:37
  Yeah. What?
• 38:37
  Or or Democracy Demo from person, Yeah.
• 38:43
  Power from the people. Autocracy.
• 38:46
  Power from self, Yeah. That's fine.
• 38:51
  Please go on. I'm sorry for interrupting.
• 38:54
  You asked so genuinely. Maybe a second guess, but yeah,
• 38:56
  yeah. I didn't.
• 38:57
  I never thought about it. Arc Magi.
• 39:00
  Yeah, Just the whole yeah. It was also, well, mostly first
• 39:04
  my brain was like more tark sounds so stupid for having such
• 39:07
  good strong words that make it, and then I started thinking
• 39:11
  about arc and then I was like whole place.
• 39:15
  So some of some of Nagash is more Turks died during the end
• 39:19
  times and their soul got taken by chaos.
• 39:21
  They're just dead dead. But some of them, especially the
• 39:24
  ones who are already undead, got like their souls basically clung
• 39:29
  to Nagash when the world died and rode like his divine essence
• 39:35
  into the new world and then? A lot of people made it from the
• 39:41
  old, and I'm starting to think this isn't a new reality but
• 39:44
  just an adjacent solar system. I'm being perfectly honest, way,
• 39:48
  way too many people survive the utter destruction of a reality
• 39:53
  at the hands of the chaos gods and popped into the next one.
• 39:59
  When also, though that apparently didn't happen at all
• 40:02
  before, which makes me think we just went to the next street
• 40:06
  over, right? It's complicated.
• 40:09
  No one's certain for sure, but we know that the moral realms
• 40:13
  didn't exist beforehand because they're made out of the magic of
• 40:16
  the old world. But.
• 40:18
  Interesting. Yeah.
• 40:19
  What was the old world made out of?
• 40:21
  Rocks. It's just a planet.
• 40:24
  Yeah, OK, this isn't what the episode is about.
• 40:27
  Talk more about vampires. Yeah, you're good.
• 40:30
  Basically a Long story short, Neferata was one of Nagash's
• 40:33
  more tarks in the old world. Her soul clung to Nagash when he
• 40:37
  arrived in the moral realms. Soul blight is a curse that
• 40:41
  affects the soul and so Neph brought.
• 40:43
  Neph is the mother of vampires in the old world and the new.
• 40:47
  Real quick, I do want to specify that I do I understand why so
• 40:50
  many things from the old world ended up in the Mortal Realms.
• 40:53
  It's because the marketing and the game and the figures like I,
• 40:56
  I wanted to be clear, I do understand the meta reason for
• 41:00
  why this happened. So of course I'm just saying
• 41:03
  that like in universe, it happened a lot more than I like
• 41:10
  that I think. And Sigma was the only one
• 41:14
  leftover there anyway. And that that's you spoke to the
• 41:22
  like the marketing reasons and stuff.
• 41:23
  Part of why we have Neferata and Arkin the black and another
• 41:28
  vampire we're going to talk about in a minute, Manfred von
• 41:30
  Karstein, right, is because during the end times, they got
• 41:35
  shiny new models and Games Workshop want to be like,
• 41:38
  welcome to Age of Sigmar. We don't want to.
• 41:40
  You'd have to throw out those models that you bought fresh for
• 41:42
  the world. Good.
• 41:43
  Models that you like so much. No, no, we're cool.
• 41:45
  We're cool. Hey, we already know you're mad,
• 41:47
  but you can keep it. You can keep, you can keep the
• 41:49
  cool model. You can still use it.
• 41:51
  It's fine. So yeah, Neff Neff shows up
• 41:55
  here, as does Manfred von Karstein, also a vampire, and
• 42:00
  Neff's brother, Ushoran. Ushoran.
• 42:05
  Ushoran Camryans don't have last names, so that's why we have
• 42:10
  Arcane the Black and Nagash and Parada and Usheran.
• 42:15
  Usheran. Yep, Yep.
• 42:16
  Got him. Got.
• 42:17
  Everyone. Yeah, Neff is the unquestioned
• 42:19
  pinnacle of vampire kind, she said herself.
• 42:22
  Even when Nalamians aren't on top of the, like, power
• 42:25
  hierarchy in like an obvious sense, they are always like,
• 42:29
  setting the pace for all the other vampire clans.
• 42:32
  If someone else momentarily steals the spotlight, they know
• 42:35
  that it's only a matter of time before Nalamia is like, back in
• 42:38
  the driver's seat. Vampires may squabble for today,
• 42:43
  but Nephrata has already claimed forever.
• 42:47
  Nefrata considers no one but Nagash her equal in her mind.
• 42:52
  Like she was one of Nagash's first disciples.
• 42:55
  Nagash is the God of death and as far as she's concerned she's
• 42:58
  the goddess of vampires. Like she doesn't contain actual
• 43:02
  divinity. Like she doesn't have the the
• 43:03
  special sauce that makes you a God in AOS but like.
• 43:06
  She hasn't done the thing that Marathi did.
• 43:08
  Yeah, exactly. But close enough.
• 43:10
  Like, she's immensely powerful, she's ancient, she's forgotten
• 43:13
  more than most people will ever know, right?
• 43:17
  But even with that, like she considers no one but Nagash her
• 43:20
  equal, she does nurse an above average hatred for Manfred, who
• 43:25
  we're going to talk about in a minute.
• 43:27
  One of our other vampires. Part of that is that Manfred is
• 43:31
  the only other like, proper vampire who shares her position.
• 43:37
  So in the new world, Nagash went about anointing new moatarks to
• 43:41
  help him run his empire of death.
• 43:43
  Nephrata is still the Moatark of blood, Manfred is the Mortarc of
• 43:47
  night, and so she's mad that she shares like a position like
• 43:53
  level with this much younger, much less refined vampire in.
• 43:57
  Her. And her brother is Mortarc as
• 44:01
  well, but he's crazy and he spent the last like 1000 years
• 44:06
  locked in a box so. Oh shit, he's not doing well.
• 44:08
  No, he's doing very bad. He's the Mortarc of delusion.
• 44:12
  So yeah, he's not doing great. He's pretty tight.
• 44:17
  Why would nigesh? Because despite being like
• 44:23
  crazy, he does command quite a bit.
• 44:25
  So this they're not what the episode's about.
• 44:27
  And I know if I let myself go on like a crazy tangent, but I am
• 44:30
  going to briefly mention Usheran and his like the people under
• 44:35
  his like control. Usheran is ensnared in the Grand
• 44:39
  delusion. It seems to be something that
• 44:41
  happened to him after his arrival in the Mortal realms.
• 44:45
  And basically despite himself being like he's pretty close to
• 44:52
  like a beast like in the old world, his like bloodline made
• 44:55
  him a little bit more monstrous. He was like kind of a big
• 44:58
  ghoulish like creature even back then.
• 45:02
  But despite still being that in the moral realms, his mind is
• 45:09
  wholly ensnared in this delusion that he is like a noble questing
• 45:15
  king. Like he pictures himself as a
• 45:18
  King Arthur type, nobly overseeing his like verdant
• 45:22
  kingdoms even as he is like sitting upon a ruined throne in
• 45:25
  the realm of death. That's really sad.
• 45:27
  It's. Very sad, and the saddest part
• 45:29
  is that his delusion is so strong and so intense that it
• 45:34
  radiates out from him. That's pretty.
• 45:38
  Good. Yes, vampires that he turns
• 45:41
  share in his delusion and they radiate it to the people around
• 45:45
  them as well. In game faction are called the
• 45:50
  Flesh Eater Courts and they are vampires and humans all trapped
• 45:57
  within the Grand Delusion, living in their own squalor and
• 46:00
  like ruined cathedrals and castles, fully certain that they
• 46:05
  are like the pinnacle of nobility, like nobly heading out
• 46:09
  into the realms to quest and save them from the horrors that
• 46:12
  lurk at Bay. Why Consequence of the delusion?
• 46:17
  We don't know why I. Guess why is this?
• 46:19
  His delusion is why is my why? We don't really know.
• 46:24
  There's some stuff to point towards.
• 46:26
  In the old world there was a human Kingdom called Britonia,
• 46:30
  which was very like Arthurian legend.
• 46:32
  Like even as like the old world moved into like the time of like
• 46:35
  steam power and like guns. Britonia clunked so powerfully
• 46:40
  to their like Arthurian like nobility that they had like
• 46:44
  prayers and blessings they put upon their armor to make them
• 46:47
  bulletproof so they could keep being Knights in a world with
• 46:50
  like steam engines. It's way more fun.
• 46:52
  To be a knight. And Urshan or Ushorin lived
• 46:56
  close to Britonia during his time there.
• 46:59
  And so maybe something with like the death of the world and like
• 47:02
  souls getting mixed in. So he wasn't like this before.
• 47:04
  No, he wasn't like this before. OK.
• 47:07
  OK. Yeah.
• 47:08
  No death of the world and souls. There we go.
• 47:11
  That's was the thing. I was like, why would this be
• 47:13
  the thing that a fantasy ancient Egyptian Prince would have?
• 47:18
  That. OK, Thank you.
• 47:20
  Yeah, there it is. Yep, yeah, during the older
• 47:23
  world, he was he was the the head of the Strigoi dynasty.
• 47:26
  That's what that kind of more beastial bloodline was called.
• 47:29
  And he just kind of was a vampire.
• 47:31
  Like he he lurked in the mountains outside of Sylvania,
• 47:35
  which was the like classic homeland of the later like
• 47:38
  dynasties of vampires. But yeah, ever since getting to
• 47:41
  the Mortal realms, he's been trapped in the delusion.
• 47:44
  He was such a problem for such a for a while than the gash like
• 47:48
  put him in his own like basically like nightmare prison
• 47:52
  inside Shahish rather than deal with him.
• 47:55
  But the delusion still spread through his like vampiric like
• 47:58
  lineage and the flesh eater courts were just out here doing
• 48:01
  their own thing. And so eventually Nagash got a
• 48:04
  Nagash idea and he let Ushoran out and like played into the
• 48:08
  delusion is like you might be Ushoran refers to himself as the
• 48:12
  summer King. He says you might be the summer
• 48:14
  King, but I am your like Liege Lord.
• 48:17
  So you have to like quest and do all these things in my name and
• 48:20
  the shore has fully bought it. And so now that's.
• 48:22
  Why? Obviously that's how you deal
• 48:24
  with that problem, Nagash. I was.
• 48:26
  Going to say, that's why Nagash keeps him around despite him
• 48:28
  being like completely off his rocker crazy is because he can
• 48:31
  use him and he can use his courts to do Nagash stuff.
• 48:36
  Yeah. That is so twisted.
• 48:40
  Right but so that leaves us with Nephrata, Manfred and Ushorin as
• 48:45
  the only vampires on the council.
• 48:47
  Neph does not see Ushorin as a threat because he's crazy and
• 48:51
  her brother, but she doesn't like Manfred because she sees
• 48:54
  him as a usurper, as a like upstart.
• 48:58
  I'm just mad that they share like a position, right?
• 49:00
  That's. So funny.
• 49:02
  Right. Nephrata has kind of
• 49:05
  internalized the existing order. Like that's an important thing.
• 49:08
  Like Megash is the God of death. She's basically the gods of
• 49:10
  vampires. The world is as it should be.
• 49:13
  She Lords over her like Kingdom in Shayish called Nalamia, which
• 49:22
  is where we get the Nalamian dynasty.
• 49:26
  And it is just like a regal like aristocratic court.
• 49:32
  Everything's about like image for Nephrata.
• 49:35
  Again, this is the woman who invented her own form of on
• 49:38
  death so she didn't have to be a skeleton.
• 49:40
  Like respect. Yeah.
• 49:41
  She. Is Mother?
• 49:42
  Yeah. From the from the outside, it's
• 49:44
  giving vampirism. She is, in fact, giving
• 49:49
  vampirism to everyone, yeah. And so like, from the outside,
• 49:53
  like a visitor to Nalamia could almost interpret it as just
• 49:57
  this, like, extremely prestigious and wealthy, like,
• 50:00
  nation, but that it becomes less and less like, yeah, the more
• 50:07
  time you spend there because it's a nation of vampires.
• 50:10
  Yeah. I don't think there are any
• 50:12
  vampire like carpenters. No, certainly not.
• 50:16
  They get humans to do that or undead.
• 50:20
  And that's the that's the weird. So I'm going to throw throw a
• 50:25
  cover off here. All of our dynasties, they,
• 50:28
  they've done a very clever thing with the writing.
• 50:30
  All of our dynasties are stand in our metaphorical stand in for
• 50:36
  types of power, the kind of power you can wield towards
• 50:41
  people. Basically Nefarada is that kind
• 50:46
  of like structural power. So Nalaman vampires are the most
• 50:52
  aristocratic, they're the most like about keeping up
• 50:57
  appearances and like that kind of thing.
• 51:00
  And similarly to that, Nalamia has a extent like human
• 51:04
  population. People who live in Nalamia have
• 51:09
  relatively decent lives with the understanding that at some point
• 51:14
  a vampire will take them. That is the like bargain that
• 51:18
  they are taking. Don't.
• 51:20
  Like that? One right now it's really bad
• 51:23
  and that can be like the people who work the crops for their own
• 51:26
  like sake because like the humans still have to eat that
• 51:30
  can be servants within like the palaces and whatnot.
• 51:34
  No one is immune to that, but you're always operating under
• 51:38
  the assumption that maybe it's not you it.
• 51:42
  Won't be me. Yes, until you benefit from
• 51:44
  these like structural things in the lamia with that like gamble
• 51:48
  attached to it. So that's that's Neffs thing
• 51:54
  kind of the structural like this is all a huge well oiled
• 51:58
  functional nation state. With.
• 52:01
  Evil under the hood, right? Neff is not the only vampire of
• 52:07
  Newt who is Nalamian. However, we already talked about
• 52:11
  Cato, so I'm going to mention him again.
• 52:12
  He's not really part of the club.
• 52:14
  Like it doesn't participate in like the Nalamian aristocracy.
• 52:17
  He's like a lone wanderer. I'm not going to talk about him
• 52:20
  like too much because he got a book that's really good.
• 52:22
  So I kind of want to save it for a the The Hollow King.
• 52:28
  Cato was king of his own like empire before he was turned to
• 52:32
  vampirism. And it's rough out here for
• 52:37
  Cato. He's in a bad way as I'm not
• 52:41
  going to get into him too much. If you like vampires or want to
• 52:44
  know more about the setting, it's a really good book about
• 52:47
  Cato on the hunt for like a Zinchian cult was instrumental
• 52:51
  in him like losing his Kingdom. And so he's just been like
• 52:54
  hunting Zinchian cultists ever since.
• 52:57
  Yeah. And it's really good and I
• 53:00
  highly recommend it. And we might do a bonus episode
• 53:02
  or something on it at some point because it's very good.
• 53:06
  But yeah, I'm mentioning him here just because he is
• 53:07
  technically part of the Nalamian dynasty.
• 53:10
  He was turned by a Nefarada. Going to mention Sikar.
• 53:15
  We don't know a ton about her. She is the Fang of Nalamia.
• 53:19
  Yeah. Fangs are Neff's personal spies
• 53:23
  and assassins. They're her Secret Service,
• 53:26
  basically operating always in the shadows.
• 53:28
  She never wants the, like, overt display of force because it's
• 53:31
  unbecoming. So she operates usually through
• 53:34
  spycraft and whatnot. So the car is the highest
• 53:36
  ranking. That's what makes her the Fang
• 53:39
  of Nalamia. Other people are Fangs.
• 53:41
  This one's chief chief. Thing.
• 53:45
  Pointy thing. Yeah, she's good at her job and
• 53:48
  she is, again, this is that like image thing she is partnered
• 53:52
  with like a big pet snake, except it's not a pet.
• 53:56
  It's name is Oroboroth, which is a good name, except it does kind
• 54:01
  of sound like you just saying Oroboros with a lisp.
• 54:04
  Yeah, Oroboroth. Oroboroth, yeah.
• 54:07
  Who is one of those gods of death that Nagash killed?
• 54:13
  Wait, what? Yep, so Oreborth as his name
• 54:18
  implies cannot be permanently killed.
• 54:20
  He's like the God of the eternal death.
• 54:23
  And so Nagash just stole all of his like divine power instead
• 54:28
  and left him D powered and then literally gave him to Nephrata
• 54:33
  as a pet and as like a sick like display of power.
• 54:38
  Neff doesn't even keep this like former D powered God like in her
• 54:43
  own personal employee. She then re gifted him to like
• 54:47
  one of her like servants basically just.
• 54:51
  That's crazy. Right.
• 54:52
  Just the statement of like, oh, we're so far above you in your
• 54:56
  former Divandy that you're not even like a second order gift.
• 55:01
  Like you're not even worth displaying.
• 55:03
  We're so much better than you. Yeah, damn crazy.
• 55:08
  Right. Right.
• 55:11
  Like I said, Nalami is the social political elite of
• 55:13
  vampirism. All vampires trace back to Neph.
• 55:17
  So to be Nalami and you have to be a first or second turn
• 55:19
  basically I said no army prides itself on a simulation of real
• 55:23
  nationhood. They want to be at the table
• 55:26
  with like real like political negotiations and stuff.
• 55:29
  They don't want to be, oh you're that like weird vampire enclave.
• 55:32
  They want to be taken seriously. Nilami is defined by its glamour
• 55:36
  and wealth. Finest silks, the freshest blood
• 55:40
  part from fountains at elaborate balls served by human mortal
• 55:45
  guests. Again, the points to sell to the
• 55:48
  world of vampires are elite and noble.
• 55:51
  Noble in the old sense of the word.
• 55:53
  A higher type of person. So we were talking about like I
• 55:58
  think the word aristocrats, aristocrat and like, oh, the
• 56:01
  fine nobility and stuff. I'm definitely picturing like
• 56:05
  Victorian England aesthetic but and it's probably the vibe.
• 56:10
  But did I occur to me why she was Egyptian?
• 56:15
  The rest of the, like vampiric aesthetic derives from the like
• 56:20
  later vampiric dynasty is like, fashion kind of moved forward a
• 56:22
  little bit, but then it paused again.
• 56:25
  Most vampires in the Old world tended to coalesce around
• 56:29
  Sylvania, and Sylvania is a well, there's a big magical Ley
• 56:33
  line there. Oh.
• 56:34
  So there's a reason. Yeah, cool.
• 56:36
  And then like Manfred, who we're going to talk about, he's a von
• 56:38
  Karstein. The von Karsteins ruled Sylvania
• 56:41
  before they were all vampires. And so when they got turned to
• 56:44
  vampires, they just kept ruling it.
• 56:47
  And Sylvania is part of the former empire.
• 56:51
  Sylvania is one of the founding provinces of Sigmar's Empire.
• 56:55
  Oh my God. Yeah, like, like the von
• 56:59
  Karstein's are one of the human tribes that Sigmar united to
• 57:03
  achieve his own godhood. And then a couple 100 years
• 57:06
  later, vampires rolled in and converted the von Karstein
• 57:09
  family to vampirism. And so like that is a very
• 57:13
  genuine, I don't know like a ton about the old world, but that
• 57:15
  has always been genuinely fascinating to me where it a
• 57:18
  little bit where we get with the same thing with like Nalamia,
• 57:20
  where they want to be taken seriously as a nation state.
• 57:22
  I know you would get these things in the old world with
• 57:25
  like the empire, where Sylvania is a card carrying province of
• 57:29
  the empire by all legal authority.
• 57:32
  They have the right to like show up to meetings and like elect
• 57:34
  account and like take part in like.
• 57:37
  Discussions of state they're part of the European Union.
• 57:40
  Yeah, but they're, but they're. Also.
• 57:42
  Vampires. So there's like this weird
• 57:44
  gridlock there of like, hey, what are we going to do about
• 57:48
  these vampires? Well, I don't know.
• 57:50
  They have a vote on the council. What?
• 57:52
  Yeah. And so that's where we get this.
• 57:56
  So like, yeah, we get up more of the kind of what we
• 57:59
  traditionally think of as like a Draculian aesthetic, the like,
• 58:02
  long nightgowns and like, yeah, big coats and stuff from
• 58:06
  Sylvania. I guess, yeah, that makes sense
• 58:08
  because that's just like a go to vampire aesthetic and that's why
• 58:11
  that's, I think obviously why my Bruno is playing that.
• 58:13
  I guess I just realized I was disappointed that it wasn't
• 58:15
  Egyptian. And there's definitely still
• 58:16
  some like Egyptian, like it's higher society and finery is the
• 58:21
  main. Like, yeah, that was like our
• 58:23
  baseline for building fancy vampire off of instead of like
• 58:29
  European fancy schmancy, it was ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and
• 58:36
  specifically like the Potomac dynasty and Alexandria, which
• 58:40
  was like Vegas but also Washington, DC, but also Athens.
• 58:51
  I was trying to, I can't think of an American example of a
• 58:53
  place that's all for higher learning, which says a lot about
• 58:56
  America, I think. Yeah, all rolled into one.
• 59:00
  Cambridge, I guess. I guess, yeah.
• 59:02
  So yeah, Mass, Massachusetts, yeah.
• 59:04
  Yeah, but So what? It was like vampires, but
• 59:07
  they're all running around looking like Cleopatra.
• 59:10
  I mean that RIP but that's why we have NEF I guess.
• 59:13
  Yeah, but I'm picturing that she doesn't look like Kelly L Patra
• 59:16
  anymore, but she's just wearing fancy ball.
• 59:18
  Gowns. Oh no, She keeps her, her.
• 59:19
  She's very proud to be Cameron, yes.
• 59:22
  Oh thank the gosh, I was so I can't even keep that joke.
• 59:25
  That wasn't funny. I have one more note about
• 59:29
  Nalamia. The military is very funny
• 59:32
  because the the main quirk of it is that like they have their
• 59:35
  they have their elite, like vampire cavalry, cavalry's the
• 59:39
  most noble form of warfare. Obviously the word night in many
• 59:44
  languages just means person on horse, right?
• 59:47
  So like vampires almost exclusively fight on horseback
• 59:50
  because it's like noble bat horses, horses, horses, horses.
• 59:55
  Sometimes they're undead, but a lot of time they're just very
• 59:58
  well trained horses. We get kind of a Binky
• 1:00:00
  situation. Via Death Discworld.
• 1:00:03
  Yeah, Yeah. Like, they tried the skeleton
• 1:00:05
  horses, and they're more effort than they're worth, so they just
• 1:00:07
  train really good horses. And also there's an element of
• 1:00:10
  pride there. Like I've put 500 years into the
• 1:00:14
  finest, like, war horses. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:00:18
  And then when you're a vampire and you can just do that, there
• 1:00:21
  isn't. I just, you know what I mean
• 1:00:23
  when I say bat horse, You know what I mean, right?
• 1:00:25
  Yeah, and this. Is a good aesthetic.
• 1:00:27
  Yeah, Urshawan, Scott. Good.
• 1:00:31
  His again his noble Knights riding out to protect the common
• 1:00:36
  people are riding big monstrous bad creatures and don't know it.
• 1:00:39
  Yeah, but yeah, one of the quirks for so foot troops among
• 1:00:42
  so yeah, foot troops among like soul blight are almost
• 1:00:45
  exclusively undead, like properly undead, because
• 1:00:49
  vampires are also undead. You know what I mean?
• 1:00:52
  Like low level undead. Yeah, but Melania specifically
• 1:00:56
  doesn't raise any zombies because they don't want the,
• 1:01:00
  like, stink it it's that appearance, this thing like,
• 1:01:04
  yeah. No, yeah, zombie smell awful.
• 1:01:07
  An Elami and cohort marching out is going to be all of like
• 1:01:10
  skeletons who have been like hand polished to a gleam in like
• 1:01:15
  nice like new armor, not like just whatever they were buried
• 1:01:19
  in, right? Like marching out in perfect
• 1:01:22
  like Rowan formation, right? OK, this is a good time for
• 1:01:25
  answer this. Ask this question if you're if a
• 1:01:27
  vampire is going to summon up some skeletons to build a house,
• 1:01:31
  who needs to have the carpentry experience?
• 1:01:34
  Vampire. The vampire, yes.
• 1:01:36
  So there should. There are vampire carpenters,
• 1:01:39
  yes. The skeletons are just their
• 1:01:40
  tools, yes. Okay, almost exclusively undead
• 1:01:45
  do not have higher function. They're puppets.
• 1:01:49
  Very rarely you'll, and we're actually going to talk about
• 1:01:51
  them later. Very rarely you'll get an undead
• 1:01:52
  who comes back with their facilities intact and they
• 1:01:55
  usually get like promoted. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:58
  They get to have their own like will and do stuff and whatnot,
• 1:02:03
  but they generally can't like perform their own necromancy.
• 1:02:07
  So it's a weird. We'll talk about them a little
• 1:02:09
  bit later. I think they're really
• 1:02:10
  interesting. But yeah, if if a vampire is
• 1:02:12
  raising somebody, those are tools.
• 1:02:15
  Like lore wise, it doesn't quite work like this in game because
• 1:02:17
  it'd be bad. But lore wise, like if you shoot
• 1:02:20
  a vampire in the head and he dies, all the skeletons he's
• 1:02:24
  animated just like stop moving and eventually crumble the desk.
• 1:02:27
  Exactly. Yeah.
• 1:02:28
  OK, let's talk about our next dynasty, the Von Karsty.
• 1:02:34
  Yes. Good name really carrying the
• 1:02:37
  yeah like Dracula vampiric tradition.
• 1:02:43
  Manfred von Karstein is wild. So we we see why Neff doesn't
• 1:02:51
  like him right off the jump. Because if Neff is the like
• 1:02:55
  finery and nobility and we are a better class of like person than
• 1:03:01
  you. Here's a quote from Manfred.
• 1:03:05
  Honor, dignity, Nobility. Too many of my kind cling to
• 1:03:11
  these weakling ideals as if such concepts were worth anything.
• 1:03:16
  All that matters is power, who wields it, and to what purpose.
• 1:03:21
  All else is illusion. OK, damn.
• 1:03:25
  Yeah, you. Got a picture of him?
• 1:03:27
  Yes, yeah, he's next on the Yeah, So the visual I should be
• 1:03:30
  like just two generic vampires. Oh, we had pictures of a we have
• 1:03:35
  a Neff and then lady with the snake is Sikar.
• 1:03:39
  Oh. Hey.
• 1:03:40
  Yeah, she's got that snake. And then Cato should be the next
• 1:03:44
  picture after her. Yo.
• 1:03:46
  Yeah, he's cool. Yeah, this is great.
• 1:03:49
  This sword's so big. He's a Cloud Strife.
• 1:03:52
  Yeah. He's hanging out.
• 1:03:54
  OK, something more about him. And then, yeah, next one is
• 1:03:57
  Manfred. Well, this guy's Cape is turning
• 1:03:59
  into bats. Yeah.
• 1:04:01
  OK, now we're going to go to Manfred.
• 1:04:02
  Whoa, there he is. Wow, look at that guy.
• 1:04:04
  He's bald. Yeah, Manfred is the Martark of
• 1:04:08
  night. He is deceptive and duplicitous.
• 1:04:13
  He's our second oldest. Well, he's third oldest after
• 1:04:16
  Neff and Ushoren. I'll get it eventually.
• 1:04:21
  Tulsa No, you won't. And that's not a, that's not a
• 1:04:23
  mark on you. I think that's critique of the
• 1:04:24
  name. Yeah, he's the only other sane
• 1:04:26
  vampire from the Old World, and he couldn't be more different
• 1:04:29
  from Neferata. He and Nefer both in the like,
• 1:04:34
  vampires are the best camp, right?
• 1:04:35
  Obviously they both love being vampires, but wow.
• 1:04:39
  And Nephrata almost kind of like generally likes mortals and she
• 1:04:43
  likes them in the same way you like a pet.
• 1:04:44
  Like she's not going to think anything like about like that.
• 1:04:47
  She's not going to put them in positions of power, God forbid,
• 1:04:50
  but she's generally like, she likes watching their little
• 1:04:53
  silly things that they do, like Yearn and.
• 1:04:57
  She finds them endearing. Yeah, Manfred hates mortals,
• 1:05:03
  despises mortals, which is a hard position to hold when you
• 1:05:08
  need mortals to, like, exist. Yeah, it's a bit of a he's got a
• 1:05:14
  weird compulsion basically, where he just does not like
• 1:05:19
  humanity and he doesn't like mortals like existing.
• 1:05:23
  He he kind of shares Nagash's vision of a world of death, an
• 1:05:27
  empire of the dead, all in service, except that he thinks
• 1:05:32
  that it should be all in service to him.
• 1:05:34
  That's fascinating. I can't believe Nagash hasn't
• 1:05:37
  killed this guy. Yet right he's useful if
• 1:05:40
  Nephrada is a schemer within the systems that be content to
• 1:05:42
  reinforce them and keep playing the game, confident she'll
• 1:05:45
  always be above the board. Manfred is always looking at the
• 1:05:48
  actual pieces, like how easy would be to pick him up and
• 1:05:51
  throw him into the next room. Like he doesn't want to play the
• 1:05:55
  game, he doesn't want to do the politicking or the like,
• 1:05:58
  jostling for favor. He is trying to build up a force
• 1:06:01
  big enough to challenge and destroy Nagash so that.
• 1:06:04
  He can take over. Yeah, I.
• 1:06:06
  Can't believe Nagash hasn't killed this guy yet.
• 1:06:10
  Like I said, in the meantime, he does that by destroying Nagash's
• 1:06:13
  enemies. Like it's very much, it's
• 1:06:15
  unclear how much is Manfred getting played and how much it's
• 1:06:20
  like we see a little bit of what like a lot of chaos worshippers
• 1:06:23
  have where the smarter end of chaos worshippers will go.
• 1:06:28
  Aha. I will use the tools of chaos
• 1:06:30
  and I will not fall to chaos and I will, I will outsmart them and
• 1:06:34
  then they wake up and they're fully fall into chaos because
• 1:06:37
  that's what it does. I'm so we don't know if that's
• 1:06:39
  like the Manfred relationship where he's like, haha, I used
• 1:06:42
  Nagash's resources to build power against him and I just
• 1:06:46
  keep doing things Nagash wants me to do and I'll definitely
• 1:06:49
  turn on him eventually. Or if Nick Ash is just like
• 1:06:53
  oblivious to it because that's definitely within his like
• 1:06:57
  personality to not realize that anyone could challenge him.
• 1:07:01
  He's very proud, yeah. Ultimate goal is to turn on
• 1:07:04
  Nagash, unseat him as the God of death, and then use that power
• 1:07:07
  to kill all of the other gods until only he remains.
• 1:07:11
  OK, sure man. Yeah, again, not a noble pursuit
• 1:07:14
  man, for von Karsen is specifically mad that he is
• 1:07:17
  subject to the whims of the power.
• 1:07:20
  What are you going to do about the Chaos Demons?
• 1:07:23
  It's a later problem. I have another fun quote from
• 1:07:26
  him. My fate is to win whatever the
• 1:07:29
  cost. OK man.
• 1:07:31
  Right. So contrast with Nef.
• 1:07:38
  The von Karsten dynasty is based in the fortress city of
• 1:07:42
  Sternestein, Sterneste, capital of Karstenia.
• 1:07:48
  And it is a like is the most militarily successful dynasty.
• 1:07:54
  Of course they are. They pride themselves on their
• 1:07:59
  military capability. Their holdings are vast and
• 1:08:01
  populous. But it is the von Karsten nature
• 1:08:04
  to want more like. He has not developed his lands.
• 1:08:08
  He is not like. He just wants more lands.
• 1:08:10
  Yes, he just wants to be the biggest and the best and the
• 1:08:13
  most powerful. Even though there are like a ton
• 1:08:16
  of immortals who like live within lands that are
• 1:08:19
  technically claimed by the von Karsten dynasty, the Von
• 1:08:23
  Karsten's have developed kind of a weird compunction where it is
• 1:08:26
  seen as almost like shameful to feed within von Karsten lands.
• 1:08:33
  They are a military dynasty. You feed a field, you go out and
• 1:08:37
  conquer more, and then you inflict that upon the enemy.
• 1:08:41
  OK. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:42
  I mean, OK, yeah. Sure, they're they're a little
• 1:08:45
  bit like Spartan, or like fictional Spartan, like the way
• 1:08:49
  we tend to talk about Spartans. It's not how they actually were.
• 1:08:51
  If Nalami, I have in my notes. If Nalami wants to be adored,
• 1:08:54
  the von Karstens want to be dreaded.
• 1:08:57
  Dreaded. I thought feared but dreaded is
• 1:09:00
  so specific. Yes.
• 1:09:02
  It's not just fear, a thing that comes upon you in the moment.
• 1:09:05
  It is the. Knowledge, yes.
• 1:09:07
  Dread haunts you. You can't escape from dread.
• 1:09:12
  That's that feeling of when you fucked up your antidepressant.
• 1:09:15
  Now he was a little bitter all the time and he was like, I
• 1:09:17
  don't like this. Feeling they are the other side
• 1:09:19
  of that power dynamic. They are the knowledge that
• 1:09:22
  while systems may be powerful and the ways that they influence
• 1:09:24
  you may be powerful. If you are strong enough, you
• 1:09:28
  can just break them. And that's, that's the power
• 1:09:32
  that the von Karstens represent is that the someone who is
• 1:09:36
  powerful enough doesn't have to play by the rules unless they
• 1:09:39
  want to, and they can still use them against you and.
• 1:09:43
  Then they, I mean probably literally by just taking the
• 1:09:45
  rules and hitting you with them physically.
• 1:09:47
  Yep. Just bashing you over the head
• 1:09:49
  with the rule book. Yes, the von Karsten tactics
• 1:09:52
  range the whole gamut of awfulness.
• 1:09:54
  They will like kill people and drink their blood and then
• 1:09:57
  potentially give them like very infectious diseases and then
• 1:10:00
  like return them as zombies to the settlements from which they
• 1:10:03
  came from. Awful, awful, awful, awful.
• 1:10:07
  They'll like I said, they'll revive people in the field with
• 1:10:09
  death magic, not even as effective fighters, but just so
• 1:10:12
  that you're fighting against the corpses of like people you were
• 1:10:14
  just fighting alongside. Again, the point is not what
• 1:10:20
  happens. The point is who wins.
• 1:10:22
  And the von Karstens always want it to be them.
• 1:10:24
  And it's. Their fate to win?
• 1:10:26
  Yep. Exactly, despite all the their
• 1:10:29
  history, the von Karstens are pretty straightforward.
• 1:10:30
  So that's that's what we have for them.
• 1:10:33
  So let's talk about the cast alive, another one of our
• 1:10:36
  dynasties. We have our next picture in the
• 1:10:40
  the visual aid. OK.
• 1:10:45
  The castle. Yeah, he's right.
• 1:10:48
  Now we have 2 pictures of the same guy.
• 1:10:51
  One's art, but it doesn't show him very well.
• 1:10:52
  So the other is his new model. That is Prince Vordry, the
• 1:10:57
  patriarch of the Castelli dynasty.
• 1:11:01
  What is this terrible awesome dragon he's on?
• 1:11:05
  We're going to talk about him. Prince Vordry, the Saint of
• 1:11:10
  Slaughter, the Blood Emperor. Vordry is the unquestioned
• 1:11:14
  greatest knight of vampire kind, a living legend even beyond the
• 1:11:18
  whisperings of the midnight aristocracy.
• 1:11:20
  Like he is, bar none, probably the vampire that most people
• 1:11:25
  know the most about because he has developed like, a legend and
• 1:11:28
  a reputation outside of even, like, vampirism.
• 1:11:31
  Yeah, right. He's got kind of a weird thing
• 1:11:35
  about him. So he's he's known as the Blood
• 1:11:37
  Emperor, but he's not the first Blood Emperor.
• 1:11:40
  He was mentored by a previous vampire referred to as the blood
• 1:11:43
  Emperor, who has since been erased from history.
• 1:11:48
  So all we know is that there was a previous Blood Emperor, but he
• 1:11:51
  took he took his title to honor him.
• 1:11:54
  Wait, wait, wait. He didn't erase him from
• 1:11:56
  history. No.
• 1:11:58
  I totally thought he was his mentor.
• 1:12:00
  Yeah. I totally thought he was the one
• 1:12:02
  that erased him as like a power movement.
• 1:12:04
  No. Whoa, I'll give you 3 guesses to
• 1:12:07
  erase. It was a.
• 1:12:09
  Guess you should maybe look at this other dude who's definitely
• 1:12:12
  one to step. Get rid of this mortar.
• 1:12:15
  Yeah, get rid of the mortar of night over there.
• 1:12:17
  He's shady as hell. Notably, Prince Ford Ryan not a
• 1:12:20
  mortar first first like yeah, vampire we're.
• 1:12:24
  Talking about. Vampire, yeah, but he is like a
• 1:12:28
  universal point of culture within vampirism.
• 1:12:31
  Basically Prince Vordrife founded the order of blood
• 1:12:36
  Knights. These are your like hyper elite
• 1:12:40
  vampire cavalry. Like all vampires who like go to
• 1:12:44
  war aspire to be a blood knight. That is like the peak of like I
• 1:12:48
  am known for being like the best at vampire warfare is being a
• 1:12:53
  blood knight, so much so that while Vor dry is the first blood
• 1:12:58
  night and he founded the order of blood nights and he overseas
• 1:13:00
  the training of all blood nights, blood nights will train
• 1:13:05
  into Vor dry and then they will go back to usually their own
• 1:13:07
  dynasty. So like that's what makes Vor
• 1:13:10
  dry it like powerful. That's what makes the Castelli
• 1:13:13
  dynasty like in consideration with these other like huge
• 1:13:16
  names. Is that like Neferata's military
• 1:13:20
  composed of a lot of blood nights, the Manfred's military
• 1:13:24
  composed of a lot of blood nights?
• 1:13:25
  Like if there was ever political strife between the cast a lie.
• 1:13:30
  And like these other dynasty, maybe a bunch of blood nights
• 1:13:34
  don't show up to the next battle like because hypothetically
• 1:13:38
  their loyalties lie first with the Nalamians and the Von
• 1:13:41
  Karstens, but they spent maybe multiple lifetimes learning how
• 1:13:48
  to be the perfect soldiers under Vordry's instruction.
• 1:13:52
  Yeah. Yeah, so interesting.
• 1:13:55
  Right. So basically every other
• 1:13:59
  vampiric dynasty has at least some blood nights in it.
• 1:14:01
  Again, there's considered like the pinnacle of vampiric warfare
• 1:14:04
  on both noble and effective, but there Vordry himself.
• 1:14:12
  So yeah, we hinted at with the like previous blood Emperor that
• 1:14:15
  Nagash like erased Vordry is not a willing servant of Nagash.
• 1:14:23
  Yeah, OK. He.
• 1:14:26
  Serves Nagash, but not because it was like his first choice.
• 1:14:31
  So during. So in the aftermath of Battle of
• 1:14:36
  Burning Skies, right, Nagash betray Sigmar.
• 1:14:39
  Sigmar goes to his ear, close the gates.
• 1:14:40
  Nagash brings all of his undead back to Shayish, tries to
• 1:14:43
  fortify it against Archaeon. Archaeon eventually gets in, He
• 1:14:47
  wins. He destroys Nagash's mortal
• 1:14:50
  form. Good.
• 1:14:52
  Right. I'm not on the side of chaos
• 1:14:55
  nice, but I'm certainly not. Right I'm.
• 1:14:58
  Certainly not on the side of Nagash.
• 1:15:00
  Nagash's followers collect like what's left of his immortal
• 1:15:03
  remains to like take him back to like Ley.
• 1:15:08
  Lines and shades. Yeah, it happens kind of
• 1:15:11
  frequently, but they're while they are transporting Nagash's
• 1:15:19
  remains during the Age of Chaos after his fight with Archaeon
• 1:15:23
  for Dry struck at the caravan, hoping to like destroy Nagash's
• 1:15:30
  mortal remains forever and now it's.
• 1:15:32
  Released. Yeah, release Shayish.
• 1:15:35
  We actually don't know for sure why he did it.
• 1:15:38
  My guess is because like the original Blood Emperor was
• 1:15:43
  someone Nagash destroyed during his like initial conquest of
• 1:15:47
  Shaish. Like the original blood emperor
• 1:15:49
  had this like order of Knights and stuff like and this his own
• 1:15:53
  little kind of like Kingdom that he ever saw.
• 1:15:56
  And as part of Nagashi's like I am death and everything has
• 1:15:59
  become me thing. His like conquest took him to a
• 1:16:03
  point where he had conflict with the blood Emperor destroyed him.
• 1:16:06
  Fort Drive was next in line. He said if you'll serve me then
• 1:16:09
  I won't destroy you too. Fort Dr. reluctantly agrees and
• 1:16:12
  then AG KS comes and Fort Drive is ambushing the gashes caravan
• 1:16:16
  to try and destroy his remains, probably in recompense for what
• 1:16:20
  he did his like for servitude. So specifically unsure if he
• 1:16:29
  could destroy like Nagash's remains what the means available
• 1:16:31
  to him. He tried to steal them and throw
• 1:16:34
  them into a realm gate to the realm of chaos and just like
• 1:16:37
  trap him there forever. That feels like the best move.
• 1:16:40
  You know the best move is to hit him with a hammer so hard he
• 1:16:42
  flies out of the Mortal Realms next to that.
• 1:16:47
  He only failed because Nagash's remains were being safeguarded
• 1:16:52
  by Arkhan. Yeah.
• 1:16:54
  Yeah. So Arkin the Black stopped him,
• 1:17:00
  and Nagash's spirit like manifested with the help of like
• 1:17:05
  the necromancers and vampires escorting the caravan, and
• 1:17:08
  Nagash bound for dry in chains of amethyst to carry out his
• 1:17:15
  will forever as punishment is the.
• 1:17:19
  Verb sucks a lot. Yes, sucks a lot.
• 1:17:24
  So Vor Dry spent a long time, just like in a sarcophagus,
• 1:17:27
  buried in the ground like Nagash gave him the the isolationist
• 1:17:31
  treatment to punish him for quite a bit.
• 1:17:33
  This looks like. His go to, but eventually as
• 1:17:37
  like part of his like continuing conquest and like training of
• 1:17:41
  blood Knights and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:17:42
  And Nagash brought him back out and to keep him on a tight
• 1:17:46
  leash, Vor Dry has like a couple of things going against him.
• 1:17:50
  So First off, Vor Dry is bound to his ancestral castle.
• 1:17:56
  So the place where he trained with the Blood Emperor, the
• 1:17:59
  place where he lived and grew up, that is where he is like
• 1:18:05
  strictly bound. He cannot be away from the
• 1:18:09
  castle. I have it in my notes here.
• 1:18:11
  It's like Dracula in the dirt. Yeah.
• 1:18:13
  Has he tried the dirt? He can try the dirt.
• 1:18:14
  Worked for Dracula. Backfired real hard but worked
• 1:18:17
  for Dracula. There's a complication with that
• 1:18:19
  that we'll get to, but the the Crimson Keep, he cannot be away
• 1:18:22
  from the Crimson Keep for more than 24 hours, or not even that.
• 1:18:26
  He'll die. It's just that he'll go back to
• 1:18:28
  the sarcophagus on the ground. Like, yeah, bound by those
• 1:18:32
  amethyst chains. They'll just pull him back.
• 1:18:34
  Nagash paired Vor dry with another, a seditious element,
• 1:18:40
  the undead dragon. Short Amayer.
• 1:18:44
  Yeah. So short amayer is sentient.
• 1:18:47
  Short Amayer has like, full intelligence, but he is undead.
• 1:18:51
  One of the things that happens, I think it's during the Age of
• 1:18:53
  Myth, is like early Age of Myth, before, like things started to
• 1:18:56
  get chill. There's a character that I hate
• 1:18:59
  named Cragness. This episode's not about him,
• 1:19:02
  and I don't know when we're going to talk about him because
• 1:19:03
  I hate him because he's stupid. But part part of his like
• 1:19:06
  history is that his people had a huge war with Dragons and the
• 1:19:13
  Dragons won initially, but then when the Age of Chaos broke, he
• 1:19:16
  came back and he like did a mass like retribution against dragon
• 1:19:21
  kind. He is part of why we mentioned
• 1:19:24
  the Storm cast episode. He's part of why Crondis and
• 1:19:27
  Kazurai were hiding out for like, a big chunk of the Age of
• 1:19:30
  Chaos because they were hiding from Cragnose.
• 1:19:32
  But Short Mayor died to Cragnose and then was like, resurrected
• 1:19:37
  into undeath and then tried to seek a compact within the Gash
• 1:19:43
  to bring his people back from death.
• 1:19:46
  Yeah. And initially it worked and the
• 1:19:50
  Gash started raising all of these Dragons, but short Amir
• 1:19:54
  quickly found out that as he was like giving Nagash the locations
• 1:19:58
  of these great like, dragon burials, Nagash wasn't like
• 1:20:02
  bringing them back with their facilities intact.
• 1:20:04
  He was bringing them back as weapons.
• 1:20:06
  Yeah. And so he also tried to turn
• 1:20:08
  Nagash didn't work. And so as a karmic like
• 1:20:12
  punishment, Nagash paired. Shore domain and VOR dry
• 1:20:15
  together so we could just like keep tabs on them at the same
• 1:20:18
  time Basically, are they? Friends.
• 1:20:19
  Yeah, they're pretty chill. I feel like they have a lot in
• 1:20:22
  common. Yeah, they're, they're chiller
• 1:20:24
  than most, but yeah, so that's why, that's why Dragon and Vor
• 1:20:27
  Dry and his dragon buddy hang out and they teach vampires to
• 1:20:31
  be blood nights. That's pretty tight.
• 1:20:34
  Neither Yeah vor vor dry nor short American leave the Crimson
• 1:20:39
  Keep for more than 24 hours. But there's a quirk to that.
• 1:20:43
  So the Kalisti or Casteli are like, they're not actually like
• 1:20:49
  a bloodline, right? Because blood Knights can come
• 1:20:52
  from anywhere. Like the Nalamians of the von
• 1:20:55
  Karstens will send vampires to train to be blood Knights and
• 1:20:57
  then they'll usually go back. So they're a dynasty, but
• 1:21:00
  they're not united by sharing the same, like, variant of the
• 1:21:03
  soul blight curse, which is interesting.
• 1:21:06
  So yeah. So the Castle I are neat in that
• 1:21:09
  way. Like, it's a bunch of different
• 1:21:10
  bloodlines coming together to all learn.
• 1:21:12
  There's a bunch of different vampires all coming together to
• 1:21:14
  learn how to be a blood knight. Any vampire may swear themselves
• 1:21:17
  to the cast the castle eye and take the oath of the blood
• 1:21:22
  Knight, which is pretty strict, you might find.
• 1:21:25
  Yeah, part of what makes them elite warriors is that the
• 1:21:28
  Castle eye like swear to abide by this kind of like chivalric
• 1:21:33
  oath. So the castle I are the most
• 1:21:36
  repulsed by the bestial and monstrous nature of vampirism.
• 1:21:39
  They do not languish in like the feeding of blood.
• 1:21:43
  They don't like express that kind of like excessive like, I
• 1:21:51
  mean, they're choosing to take like a shovel Rick oath to like
• 1:21:54
  be great warriors. They're not enduring themselves
• 1:21:56
  in finery and doing like the grand balls and stuff.
• 1:22:00
  They've chosen a different path. And so they reject a lot of the
• 1:22:03
  trappings of kind of like the traditional vampiric thing in
• 1:22:07
  order to be more disciplined warriors, which is fascinating.
• 1:22:11
  So yeah. And if Neff enjoys the power in
• 1:22:13
  politicking, and Manny sees it as yet another tool, but the
• 1:22:17
  Castelli actively work to suppress it and limit its hold
• 1:22:20
  on their psyche, they feed only one strictly necessary.
• 1:22:23
  They don't allow themselves any of the wild fighting styles of
• 1:22:26
  many other vampires, like a lot of vampires in the field would,
• 1:22:28
  just like, fight with their bare hands, because they're extremely
• 1:22:30
  strong and they can just do that.
• 1:22:32
  They train only in the noble art of mounted warfare, and they
• 1:22:35
  maintain an image of control whenever possible.
• 1:22:38
  This doesn't always work. Interesting.
• 1:22:42
  Blood nights in the field are not blood nights, and they're
• 1:22:45
  nice quiet monastery, Yeah, and so things.
• 1:22:48
  In practice are different than things on paper.
• 1:22:50
  Yep. And so Blood Nights do also have
• 1:22:52
  a reputation, especially from the other side, people who face
• 1:22:55
  them in battle of blood Knights who have, like, pushed
• 1:23:00
  themselves nearly to the point of starvation from their, like,
• 1:23:03
  oaths to, like, only consume blood when absolutely necessary.
• 1:23:06
  Like hitting that initial cavalry charge and then just
• 1:23:10
  losing it, like leaping from their horses and tearing people
• 1:23:13
  in half with their bare hands. Like, to get at their blood
• 1:23:19
  because. And then they get to have a nice
• 1:23:21
  little shame about it because. Yeah, because again, like
• 1:23:25
  monastic oath and like chivalrous oath and whatnot.
• 1:23:28
  I said the castle, I often go back to their own dynasty once
• 1:23:30
  they're trained or even the like standing force of castle.
• 1:23:33
  I will like a loan themselves to the dynasties when they're
• 1:23:35
  needed or like just in service to Negash in general.
• 1:23:38
  But many stay around the Crimson Keep to serve for dry
• 1:23:41
  specifically. The really interesting thing
• 1:23:44
  about the keep and what allows for dry and short Amer to like
• 1:23:47
  operate as like instruments of Negash is that the keep doesn't
• 1:23:53
  have a fixed location. Fascinating.
• 1:23:56
  Any any ruin anywhere on any realm of like a castle or a
• 1:24:04
  lordly estate or anything of like proper like import has a
• 1:24:09
  chance to manifest to the Crimson Keep.
• 1:24:13
  Oh, that's tired as hell. Yeah, so you're nestled into a
• 1:24:17
  little valley below the ruins of some ancient like Chaos
• 1:24:20
  fortress. Surprised.
• 1:24:22
  Today it's the Crimson Keep. Vordry and his blood nights are
• 1:24:26
  riding out from it to enact the Will of Nagash.
• 1:24:30
  Control where it shows. Up.
• 1:24:31
  No. Nagash might be able to, we're
• 1:24:34
  not sure, but Vordry certainly cannot.
• 1:24:37
  It just shows up somewhere and he assumes that that's what he's
• 1:24:40
  like, supposed to be doing. Basically, the Keep delivers him
• 1:24:44
  to any like places he's never, so that's how.
• 1:24:48
  So that's how Vordry plays out. Nagash's will, despite his curse
• 1:24:52
  that he can't like stay away from the keep, is that just
• 1:24:55
  delivers him places. He rides on to whatever the
• 1:24:57
  lands the keep delivers him to. And he's never able to employ
• 1:25:00
  any of his skills above a base mastery of violence, right?
• 1:25:03
  That's the other thing that Nagash has his like claws in him
• 1:25:07
  about is that Vordray is by all accounts, like he's a he's a
• 1:25:10
  chivalrous knight. He's good at statecraft and he's
• 1:25:13
  good at like poetry, right? Like he just embodies these
• 1:25:16
  other ideals that he never gets to employ because he just has to
• 1:25:20
  go out and do violence and say oh man, if Nalamia is power that
• 1:25:28
  systems hold over us and von Karstein is power for power it's
• 1:25:31
  own sake, then the Castelai are like subservient power not just
• 1:25:40
  to like a person but also to an ideal.
• 1:25:43
  Yeah, it feels especially they talk about like, oh, they stress
• 1:25:49
  themselves to the point of breaking so easily breaking, but
• 1:25:55
  like they need blood. That's the thing about them,
• 1:25:57
  that they don't let them have it.
• 1:25:58
  And then they break and fall basically quote, fall off the
• 1:26:02
  wagon so hard. And then they're ashamed of this
• 1:26:04
  thing that they are inherently supposed to do.
• 1:26:07
  It's also giving a lot of like religious suppression vibes.
• 1:26:11
  I was. Going to say it's a little bit
• 1:26:12
  of yeah, like I choose specifically to say like
• 1:26:16
  philosophical or like ideal based power because it is bigger
• 1:26:19
  than like just religious power, even though that is kind of how
• 1:26:22
  it's meant to be like red. But yeah, like that, that's the,
• 1:26:26
  that's what the castleier like represent, especially because no
• 1:26:29
  one, you're never forced to be castleier.
• 1:26:31
  It's the only dynasty that's not part of your like bloodline.
• 1:26:35
  Yeah. It's the thing you choose to be,
• 1:26:38
  and that's interesting in it of its own, yes.
• 1:26:42
  It's also the idea like just because you choose to subscribe
• 1:26:46
  to this power doesn't mean the harm it causes isn't still
• 1:26:50
  harmful. Yes, so that's the castle lie.
• 1:26:54
  We've got two more dynasties to talk about and they are, I like
• 1:26:58
  to think of them as the fun cousins.
• 1:27:03
  So we have our three kind of core like dynasties.
• 1:27:05
  These are like the pinnacles of vampiric society.
• 1:27:08
  And then we have kind of like the weird outliers.
• 1:27:09
  And so now we're going to talk about the weird outliers.
• 1:27:11
  Cool. Starting with the we have this
• 1:27:15
  one in our visual reference. We're going to talk about the
• 1:27:18
  Veerkos dynasty, which is neat. Yeah, this guys.
• 1:27:22
  So cool. What's?
• 1:27:24
  Going on here. That is our matriarch of the
• 1:27:28
  Veer Coast dynasty. This girl, so cool.
• 1:27:30
  Yeah, here Bella dama Volga. I like her.
• 1:27:35
  She's great. First thing we need to know
• 1:27:38
  about Bella Dama do not know. Like I do not know how this
• 1:27:41
  squares because literally in the same text like a less than a
• 1:27:44
  page apart we get the statement like all vampires are descended
• 1:27:48
  from Nephrata and then the first line in Volga's like biography
• 1:27:53
  is that she was not turned by a fellow vampire.
• 1:27:57
  So OK. Who wrote the biography?
• 1:28:00
  It's a word of God like. It's not in in universe like.
• 1:28:03
  Biography. Yeah, so this is true.
• 1:28:05
  So we have these two like Word of God, like all things come
• 1:28:09
  from Nephrada or all vampires come from Nephrada.
• 1:28:11
  But Belodama Volga is a vampire who was not turned by another
• 1:28:15
  vampire. So like.
• 1:28:20
  OK, but they don't elaborate on how.
• 1:28:22
  No, Well we know how she became a vampire.
• 1:28:25
  So Belodama was turned into a vampire by a God beast.
• 1:28:29
  One of those like ancient like our Vulcatrix or Dracothian's a
• 1:28:36
  God beast. There is an ancient God beast
• 1:28:39
  named Hrunspul. All the vircos have a very like
• 1:28:43
  Viking thing going on. So Hrunspul is the great Cairn
• 1:28:49
  wolf and he blessed Belladama with the soul blight curse but
• 1:28:56
  his like specific strain of the soul blight curse.
• 1:28:59
  OK. Yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:29:00
  Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
• 1:29:00
  OK. Yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:29:02
  OK, Yeah. It it just it's weird because it
• 1:29:04
  doesn't square with like all vampires who are descended from
• 1:29:06
  Neferata. Except for this one right here.
• 1:29:08
  Yes, and anyone she would turn. Yeah, yeah, because yeah,
• 1:29:12
  because Belladamma will also give her blood curse.
• 1:29:15
  Yeah. And it has the same like weird
• 1:29:17
  quirks to it. OK, so I don't know if you've
• 1:29:19
  noticed yet, but if you take another look at Belladamma, her
• 1:29:23
  her. She's got.
• 1:29:24
  Beastly legs? Yep, her legs are wolf Wolf.
• 1:29:27
  Legs and and. She's riding a big wolf.
• 1:29:30
  And like Raven wings, Yes, and also arms.
• 1:29:33
  I think the wings are just like part of her cloak.
• 1:29:35
  Where are they? I thought she had wolf legs and
• 1:29:38
  wings. OK, no, she's still cool.
• 1:29:42
  I just thought there was like a lot of like animal chimera stuff
• 1:29:44
  going on here. Mostly wolf.
• 1:29:46
  And mostly wolf well, that's that's fine.
• 1:29:48
  You said the Gobbies was a wolf that.
• 1:29:50
  That makes. Sense.
• 1:29:51
  OK, go on. We don't know why Bella Dama
• 1:29:54
  went to her in school. She did it when she was pretty
• 1:29:56
  young. We know which does also give the
• 1:29:59
  implication that she like still ages with her vampire curse
• 1:30:01
  which. Is not a thing like she looks
• 1:30:04
  like a Baba Yaga, Yeah. Yes, that's the intent for sure.
• 1:30:07
  Some say that Belodama just sought it for power.
• 1:30:10
  Others say that she was sought by Hunspol to carry its legacy.
• 1:30:17
  My favorite, and the one that I think has the most textual
• 1:30:19
  evidence, is that Belodama went looking for a way to enact
• 1:30:22
  retribution on a lover who jolted her.
• 1:30:26
  Good for you, babe. Especially because in multiple
• 1:30:28
  places it states that that big wolf that she rides is her
• 1:30:32
  ex-husband who she turned into a wolf beladama.
• 1:30:39
  I'll just RIP the Band-Aid off right now.
• 1:30:40
  The varicose are about like familial power.
• 1:30:44
  Like that's the kind of like vaguely mafia.
• 1:30:46
  So like you're doing this because it's important to the
• 1:30:50
  family. You have been bound together by
• 1:30:52
  this thing that you couldn't have chosen Like and that is
• 1:30:56
  important in a way that is like super borderline supernatural.
• 1:31:01
  Like you don't do this because you are being ordered.
• 1:31:04
  You do this because it would make Belladama upset if it
• 1:31:07
  didn't happen. Like that kind of vibe.
• 1:31:12
  Belladama is the unquestioned ruler of all vircos.
• 1:31:15
  Like she's the godfather Belladama has developed in
• 1:31:20
  whole. Like Belladama is a little bit
• 1:31:23
  like Halloween monster. Like she we don't know how much
• 1:31:26
  she's cultivated intentionally, but people know about Belladama
• 1:31:30
  outside of like vampire stuff as like a story for children.
• 1:31:36
  Spooky story for. Children, the the Baba Yaga
• 1:31:39
  comparison kind of kind of flies like there we get an example, an
• 1:31:45
  in universe story about Belladamma Volga that you might
• 1:31:50
  tell to someone about just like about this like vampire lady who
• 1:31:55
  lives in the hills. Belladamma came across a young
• 1:31:59
  girl in the woods. Desperate for food.
• 1:32:00
  Belladamma offered her broth to soothe her stomach, but the girl
• 1:32:03
  asked for more food to save her starving family.
• 1:32:06
  Twice Volga refused, but on the third time, she transformed the
• 1:32:10
  girl's family into wolves, who then haunted their fellow
• 1:32:13
  villagers to Bella Dama's cackling laughter.
• 1:32:18
  And you can yeah, that that has the shape of a like moral lesson
• 1:32:24
  to. It right?
• 1:32:25
  Is don't don't ask more of strangers than they're willing
• 1:32:28
  to offer you almost a little like again, a very kind of like.
• 1:32:31
  It's like, it's because it's not the fact that she asked that she
• 1:32:35
  was punished, it's that she asked three times.
• 1:32:38
  Yes, exactly. Because Belladonna gave her
• 1:32:41
  something. She offered her a gift, even a
• 1:32:43
  gift to like, soothe her like aches and Wiles.
• 1:32:46
  But the fact that she kept insisting.
• 1:32:48
  So I think asking is not the bad thing.
• 1:32:52
  Ask for the things you need is not the bad thing, but to again
• 1:32:56
  and again the pressure. Also I love that it's three
• 1:32:58
  because that's another very like folk tale fairy tale element.
• 1:33:01
  Is it on the third time? It's like the the real life Baba
• 1:33:06
  Yaga story, right? One of her like foundational
• 1:33:09
  stories of the the girl who like falls down a hole and she finds
• 1:33:12
  Baba Yaga and Baba Yaga tells her to do her chores and the
• 1:33:15
  girl is very dutiful and she tells all of her chores very
• 1:33:17
  well. And so Baba Yaga gives her, I
• 1:33:20
  can't remember what she gives her, but our it's every time she
• 1:33:22
  speaks, like a little piece of gold falls out of her mouth and
• 1:33:26
  she goes back home and she shows her a like mean and cruel, like
• 1:33:30
  sister and her sister. Yes, goes.
• 1:33:33
  And she gets bugs that come out of.
• 1:33:36
  Her mouth, yes 'cause she half asses all of the chores.
• 1:33:39
  So again, there's a shape of like a weird moral lesson to the
• 1:33:42
  story. Like is interesting.
• 1:33:44
  Can I talk real quick about a retelling of this that I.
• 1:33:46
  Own. Oh, it's so good.
• 1:33:47
  It's that exact thing. So it's not a Baba Yaga one.
• 1:33:50
  It's a variant where they it's like this fairy who gives like
• 1:33:53
  the the nice twin. She speaks in jewels fall from
• 1:33:56
  her mouth because she gave this old lady like something to drink
• 1:34:00
  from the well and she was so kind.
• 1:34:01
  And the mean sister runs through the same thing and then she gets
• 1:34:03
  bugs, but they're the bug thing turns out to be great for the
• 1:34:09
  mean sister because everyone hates that.
• 1:34:13
  So she just is like, hey, give me what I want or I'm going to
• 1:34:17
  talk at you. And they're like, oh God, OK,
• 1:34:18
  you can have whatever you want. And then the sister, she the
• 1:34:22
  jewel sister, the Prince sees her and is like, Oh my gosh, I
• 1:34:25
  love you. I ought to marry you.
• 1:34:26
  And she's like, I guess a little bit of castle now, but like no
• 1:34:29
  one listens to her because they every time she speaks, they just
• 1:34:32
  dive at her and take all the jewels and stuff like that and
• 1:34:35
  RIP her like she's getting married.
• 1:34:37
  She's got these beautiful dresses and she keeps
• 1:34:39
  accidentally dropping jewels on them in the hand means tear them
• 1:34:41
  all apart and stuff. And then eventually the fairy
• 1:34:46
  switches them, not their powers, but like makes the bug sister go
• 1:34:50
  help. I mean like.
• 1:34:51
  And when I get angry I speak in bugs.
• 1:34:53
  So you better not make me talk unless I want to.
• 1:34:55
  You better listen when I say things.
• 1:34:57
  It's really cute. I like that.
• 1:34:59
  Yeah, I. Like that my Aunt Mary gave
• 1:35:02
  this, like, storybook collection to me.
• 1:35:04
  It's got that story in it, and it's got a Sleeping Beauty
• 1:35:07
  retelling and it's got one more because it definitely comes in
• 1:35:10
  threes, but I'm not drawing on the third one at this time.
• 1:35:13
  But I got this one. I was in 4th grade and I still
• 1:35:16
  have it. I think it's maybe second oldest
• 1:35:19
  book that I've continuously owned my whole life.
• 1:35:22
  Hell yeah, we love a folklore. Folklore is so under
• 1:35:26
  appreciated. Like it's really cool.
• 1:35:28
  I'm a big fan and that sounds like a yeah particularly fun
• 1:35:31
  retelling. Yeah, I really, really like that
• 1:35:34
  one. Hell yeah.
• 1:35:36
  One of Belodama's powers that has also, like, reached the,
• 1:35:39
  like, folklore, like, consensus is that she turns people into
• 1:35:43
  wolves. Like, that is one of her most
• 1:35:44
  consistent powers. She can do it in game.
• 1:35:47
  Yeah, she's a spell. She cast that if it kills any
• 1:35:50
  enemy models she just gets to add wolves to her retinue which
• 1:35:54
  is very fun and she in lore is always surrounded by like a big
• 1:35:59
  Wolf Pack. That are people that
• 1:36:01
  disappointed her that she. Turned into, Wolf pointed her.
• 1:36:05
  Not even foes. Yeah, not.
• 1:36:07
  Like Cross, just, I'm really disappointed.
• 1:36:10
  I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.
• 1:36:11
  I can tell I'm walking on all fours now.
• 1:36:13
  You don't have to tell me you're disappointed.
• 1:36:15
  I know. And then the big one is that
• 1:36:19
  again, it's it's said around campfires and in like around
• 1:36:25
  hearths and whatnot in the places where like Volga is known
• 1:36:28
  to like tread that you have to be careful if you, if you speak
• 1:36:35
  I'll of a spouse, especially like an unfaithful spouse,
• 1:36:40
  because if you call out too hard for someone to avenge you, your
• 1:36:45
  unfaithful spouse Belodama might answer again, she has a she
• 1:36:50
  seems to have a particular fixation with like
• 1:36:53
  unfaithfulness. And, well, I wonder why.
• 1:36:55
  That's very good. I like that a lot.
• 1:36:58
  This one's really fun. Right.
• 1:37:00
  Belodama's great, but unfortunately we don't have like
• 1:37:02
  a ton more about her. Honestly, she's a little bit
• 1:37:04
  new, but I'm sure we're going to get more about her.
• 1:37:07
  She's just kind of like a a folkloric witch.
• 1:37:09
  Yeah, yeah. I like that a lot, But we do
• 1:37:13
  have like a bunch of other varicose for whatever reason.
• 1:37:18
  It's just a quirk of the varicose dynasty that they have
• 1:37:20
  like a ton of like famous faces. You might have noticed this
• 1:37:23
  episode, we're not going to have like a proper famous faces
• 1:37:26
  section because the whole thing is famous faces.
• 1:37:28
  We just have like a lot of named vampires and the varicose are
• 1:37:31
  like almost half of them by themselves, which is crazy.
• 1:37:35
  Yeah, Especially because it's like brand new.
• 1:37:37
  Like varicose came out at the end of like second edition.
• 1:37:40
  So they've only been around for like a couple of years as.
• 1:37:42
  Opposed to someone's had a lot of like I just.
• 1:37:44
  Gonna say yeah. So let's talk about other
• 1:37:47
  notable varicose. The the next slide should be
• 1:37:50
  Radicar, yeah. That side as hell.
• 1:37:54
  Yeah. So we'll start with little
• 1:37:55
  Radicar. OK, Yeah.
• 1:37:57
  So in life Radicar was a Viking Raider who as he was confident
• 1:38:02
  in his power. He loved being this like big
• 1:38:04
  strong like Raider who took what he wanted.
• 1:38:07
  But has age started to catch up to him?
• 1:38:10
  Yep, he went seeking the vircos to like offer himself his
• 1:38:15
  services. Basically like turn me and I
• 1:38:17
  will be like a servant of your family and like we both win.
• 1:38:22
  Basically I get to keep doing my Viking Raider, express my
• 1:38:24
  willpower and you get me as an ally.
• 1:38:27
  He was his like initiation rite was he was tasked with
• 1:38:30
  plundering the tomb of an ancient vampire and slaying the
• 1:38:34
  two headed wolf that the world within.
• 1:38:36
  So you can see he's got a 2 headed.
• 1:38:38
  Wolf. So I think he was successful.
• 1:38:40
  There Yep his like reward. After he did that, he was given
• 1:38:43
  the the blood kiss of the Vircos.
• 1:38:44
  It was turned into a Vircos vampire.
• 1:38:46
  And then he took and held the city of Mournhold as his vassal
• 1:38:53
  and tell the Necroquick, which was a big shit that Nick Ash
• 1:38:59
  pulled and we'll talk about it another time.
• 1:39:01
  But when the Necker cake rolled, quake rolled through, he
• 1:39:04
  basically decided to stop pretending and took direct power
• 1:39:08
  of the city. Like before he was just like
• 1:39:10
  this is Ratakar. He lives here and he drinks all
• 1:39:12
  of our wine and then like we pay him taxes.
• 1:39:16
  And then when the Necker quake, he was like, OK, and he just
• 1:39:19
  killed everybody in power and took control of the city
• 1:39:21
  directly. Yeah.
• 1:39:23
  He renamed it Olfenkarn, the Cursed City, and then he got
• 1:39:27
  beat up in a board game. What the fuck?
• 1:39:32
  So Warhammer occasionally does outside of their core games,
• 1:39:35
  they'll do like smaller board games that are meant to be like
• 1:39:38
  both their own, like contained narrative things.
• 1:39:41
  So like this is this is the weirdness of it is that, Yeah,
• 1:39:44
  like Radicar got introduced to us through this board game.
• 1:39:49
  It's called Curse City. It uses like Warhammer
• 1:39:51
  miniatures. I mean, you can take those
• 1:39:53
  matures and then put them in like the full game of Age of
• 1:39:55
  Sigmar. So you get kind of a dual thing
• 1:39:57
  going on there, which is neat. Yeah.
• 1:39:59
  A lot of the like, it's like a. It's like the game I found at
• 1:40:02
  the thrift store and you're like, hey, you got those minis
• 1:40:05
  are included. Those have been really cool.
• 1:40:06
  Yep. Is it?
• 1:40:08
  Yeah, the board game is pretty neat.
• 1:40:09
  It's like a, it's a little bit of a like, pandemic adjacent
• 1:40:12
  thing where everybody works on the same, like everyone's on the
• 1:40:15
  same team trying to beat Radokar.
• 1:40:18
  And then there's like a deck of cards that determines, like,
• 1:40:20
  what the bad guys are doing. Yeah, it's neat.
• 1:40:22
  It's a little asynchronous, like Co-op, like board game.
• 1:40:25
  That sounds fun. Yeah.
• 1:40:28
  But he was done in by a host of plucky adventurers and he
• 1:40:37
  succumbed to his vircose curse. So Vyrko's vampires can be
• 1:40:42
  anywhere on the like spectrum of less wolfie to more wolfie.
• 1:40:46
  And in his defeat, Radicar transformed into Big Radicar.
• 1:40:51
  I was wondering how we get this guy that's the same guy.
• 1:40:54
  Yes, in narrative, he's very much played it up as like, oh,
• 1:40:58
  he's he's this like terrifying, like monstrous beast now that
• 1:41:02
  stalks in the night. And if you see him coming, you
• 1:41:04
  better run. But we have a lot to indicate
• 1:41:06
  that, like, probably not like his.
• 1:41:09
  His mind's probably fine in there.
• 1:41:11
  He's just really playing it up. He was a coastal Raider for most
• 1:41:15
  of his life. He kept control of this like,
• 1:41:17
  city through like, intimidation. He's probably trying to build
• 1:41:21
  his own like, reputation as this like, horrifying, unkillable
• 1:41:24
  beast while still being clever enough to like, know what fights
• 1:41:28
  to pick and whatnot. Which is cool.
• 1:41:30
  We haven't heard a lot about him since Olfenkarn fell, but I'm
• 1:41:35
  sure he'll be around a little bit more.
• 1:41:37
  And then we have a couple of people who we know basically
• 1:41:39
  nothing about. We just got all one lines things
• 1:41:42
  and you can tell because most of them don't have artwork.
• 1:41:44
  They just have their miniatures, as you say.
• 1:41:47
  First we have Lady Anika. Yeah, she is Ratakar's master of
• 1:41:53
  ceremonies, so she served alongside him in Olfukarn.
• 1:41:56
  That's why we don't have a ton about her because she was
• 1:41:58
  another one of the managers that came in that box.
• 1:42:00
  That you put on. Put on the board to play the
• 1:42:02
  board game. Yep, she is.
• 1:42:05
  Her main like defining thing is that she is ravenous even by
• 1:42:07
  vampire standards. She almost got kicked out of
• 1:42:11
  Radicar's trope before the like city fell because she was just
• 1:42:14
  going through all of their blood.
• 1:42:16
  She takes like a performance enhancing drug that's implied to
• 1:42:19
  be like a kind of a cocaine equivalent.
• 1:42:21
  Cocaine. Blood.
• 1:42:22
  What did I say? Yeah, which probably contributes
• 1:42:25
  to her appetite. So she's just always like
• 1:42:27
  whacked out and like hungry. But that's like all we know
• 1:42:31
  about her. She's also in the cursedy.
• 1:42:34
  You beat her up maybe as part of the board game.
• 1:42:36
  The next one is not from the board game, which is why she has
• 1:42:38
  art. She's cool, hey.
• 1:42:40
  Yeah, that Ivia Volga, the granddaughter of Bella Dama.
• 1:42:47
  Her actual. Her actual biological
• 1:42:49
  granddaughter. Yeah, who's also turned into a
• 1:42:52
  vampire. She's the only person we know
• 1:42:54
  that's like, actually, Bella Dama's like, blood cans.
• 1:42:57
  The actual. Family.
• 1:42:59
  Yep. But she doesn't like the rest of
• 1:43:01
  the clan. She's a little bit of a rebel.
• 1:43:05
  She's an isolationist renegade. She doesn't play nice with the
• 1:43:07
  rest of the clan. She really likes hunting.
• 1:43:11
  She kind of, she kind of reminds me of all those, like, Wild Hunt
• 1:43:13
  stories where the, the person leading the Wild Hunt is just
• 1:43:16
  like a noble woman who liked hunting too much.
• 1:43:18
  Yeah. That's kind of her, like, deal.
• 1:43:21
  Yeah, she has magic bats that, like, can sense monsters and
• 1:43:24
  they, like, swarm around her and tell her where they are because
• 1:43:26
  she just really likes hunting big beasts.
• 1:43:29
  If you were a vampire, what are you going to?
• 1:43:30
  Hunt a stack. Exactly.
• 1:43:32
  And to make it more challenging for herself, she hunts them with
• 1:43:35
  that hunting. Yeah, you.
• 1:43:37
  Have to. Yeah.
• 1:43:38
  It's not sporting otherwise. Exactly.
• 1:43:40
  But that's basically all we have of her, a strained relationship
• 1:43:43
  with Beladama. She's like come back to the clan
• 1:43:47
  in recent years kind of to prove that she doesn't need them
• 1:43:50
  almost or she's like, I'm going to do things to help you
• 1:43:53
  specifically to show that I don't need you.
• 1:43:55
  Like I'm going to be the bigger. Person, I'll be a benefit to you
• 1:43:57
  so you recognize how valuable I am.
• 1:43:59
  But I don't need you. You need me?
• 1:44:00
  Yes, exactly. This is not a I'm estranged
• 1:44:03
  because you don't want me. This is a I'm estranged because
• 1:44:05
  I'm I'm making my own choices a little bit again.
• 1:44:08
  She's got a little bit of like rebellious teenager energy,
• 1:44:10
  which is wild for someone who's probably hundreds of years old.
• 1:44:15
  And then the last of our big name Veerkos we have.
• 1:44:19
  What a weird little guy. Yeah, he's a rat boy, but he
• 1:44:24
  wouldn't go far. He was a he was like human
• 1:44:31
  nobility in the city of Olkan Karn.
• 1:44:33
  Before Red, a car took power. Once Red a car did take power,
• 1:44:39
  he tried to like worm his way into Radicar's employ, and
• 1:44:42
  Radicar's not about that life. So he savaged him to within an
• 1:44:45
  inch of his life, inadvertently passed the Varcos curse onto
• 1:44:50
  him. It seems like did not intend to
• 1:44:51
  give him vampirism, but his body was literally just like tossed
• 1:44:55
  in the sewers as he was like clinging to life, the blood kiss
• 1:44:58
  probably keeping him alive just on a fringe.
• 1:45:01
  And he survived by using his vampiric powers to enthrall
• 1:45:05
  individual wraps and then like, pull them over to him and drink
• 1:45:09
  good blood. Absolutely, of course he did.
• 1:45:11
  A fucking course he did. Yep, so that close to death that
• 1:45:14
  soon after receiving the blood kiss and drinking the blood of a
• 1:45:16
  rat, a lot of rats it mutated his varicose curse to where he's
• 1:45:20
  not wolfie he's like rat like. That makes sense.
• 1:45:23
  Yeah, he looks very like Pointy. Yeah, you can see a bunch of rat
• 1:45:26
  tails under the back of his cloak.
• 1:45:28
  Oh, is that what those? Are yeah, I.
• 1:45:30
  Hate it? He can't transform into like a
• 1:45:33
  lot of your coast can transform into wolves to like run and
• 1:45:37
  whatnot. He can't.
• 1:45:38
  But he can turn into a swarm of rats.
• 1:45:41
  He cannot turn to an individual. Rat.
• 1:45:43
  He turns into a swarm of rats, which is very fun, but Veer
• 1:45:48
  Coast broadly. Like I said, they're the weird
• 1:45:50
  cousins of vampirism. They live in the woods, they
• 1:45:52
  don't partake partake in like the grand balls of the finery or
• 1:45:55
  any of that stuff. For Viricos it's booze and
• 1:45:59
  blood. No, they are technically in
• 1:46:03
  service to him, but it's a very distant thing.
• 1:46:06
  Mostly they're in service to Belladama and currently
• 1:46:08
  Belladama is fine working with Nick Ash.
• 1:46:11
  But if someday, Belladama said, we're not doing the Nick Ash
• 1:46:14
  thing anymore, all of the Viricos would be like, dope,
• 1:46:17
  cool, not. Doing the Nagash thing anymore?
• 1:46:19
  Did you hear we're not doing the Nagash thing anymore?
• 1:46:21
  Yeah, because Belladonna. Isn't why, Belladonna said.
• 1:46:24
  Oh, obviously. Yeah.
• 1:46:24
  Sorry that was two question. Booze, blood and clan games the
• 1:46:29
  varicose do participate in like Scottish style clan games
• 1:46:33
  augmented by vampirism. Like see how far you can toss a
• 1:46:35
  caber when you have vampire powers, which is rad.
• 1:46:40
  Listen, we give Stephanie Meyer a hard time for a lot of things
• 1:46:42
  in Twilight. Vampire baseball's fucking red
• 1:46:44
  as hell and you can all. Shut up.
• 1:46:46
  They're much more spread out than May Dynasties like the
• 1:46:49
  Nalamians, the Vankar Science, the Castelli all kind of center
• 1:46:52
  around a main city right? Whereas the varicose clans are
• 1:46:56
  spread wide and far. But they will always answer the
• 1:46:59
  call of Belladama, right? Is a very like the varicose are
• 1:47:03
  always a nuisance like wherever they are, but if Belladama calls
• 1:47:06
  them all together then they become a true like existential
• 1:47:10
  select. That's a hashtag problem right
• 1:47:12
  there. Yes, Viercos are kind of rare
• 1:47:15
  though. Like of the vampire clans,
• 1:47:18
  they're one of the least populous, partially because the
• 1:47:21
  Viercos like blood kiss is so intense that a lot of people who
• 1:47:24
  receive it just die. Damn.
• 1:47:26
  Yeah, OK. Yeah, so not everyone could take
• 1:47:29
  the kiss. That's part of why people have
• 1:47:30
  to prove themselves. Like that's why Radicar had to
• 1:47:32
  do the the thing to like prove that he had the like ferocity in
• 1:47:36
  him to like take the curse. Some of your coast just like
• 1:47:38
  mutate into like wolf monsters when they get the curse because
• 1:47:41
  they can't handle it it. Just kind of overpowers them
• 1:47:45
  rather than controlling it. Yeah, OK.
• 1:47:48
  But for the most part, like they've gotten pretty good at
• 1:47:50
  who they pass the curse along to.
• 1:47:51
  They operate as independent clans.
• 1:47:53
  Unless Belodama calls them together, they're just.
• 1:47:55
  Is that why we have Belodama's granddaughter, not her daughter?
• 1:47:59
  Probably that's kind of the implication that I I got or just
• 1:48:05
  her daughter didn't want to be a vampire.
• 1:48:07
  Could be that. Could also be that yeah, because
• 1:48:09
  a vampire can't have offspring. So Ivy would have had to happen
• 1:48:13
  when Belodama was mortal. So probably a quick turn around
• 1:48:19
  on that one, yeah. Or I guess Ivia wouldn't have
• 1:48:22
  had to happen when Belladonna was mortal, but Ivia's parent
• 1:48:25
  would have either Mom or Dad. Probably Mom, 'cause we're
• 1:48:28
  getting a matriarchal. Feels matriarchal, yeah.
• 1:48:30
  So probably her mom was, yeah, mortal.
• 1:48:35
  And we don't know if she took the blood kiss or just didn't or
• 1:48:40
  what happened with her. Fascinating.
• 1:48:41
  OK. But that's it for the varicose.
• 1:48:44
  We got one more dynasty to talk about and they're neat.
• 1:48:48
  They're one of my faves. The Avangori dynasty they got.
• 1:48:54
  A cool name. Yeah.
• 1:48:58
  What is happening? That's a great question.
• 1:49:01
  Oh my God. The leader of the Avangori
• 1:49:04
  dynasty is Laukavi, the mother of nightmares.
• 1:49:09
  Yes, she is. Yes, she is.
• 1:49:14
  So we'll talk about Lauka and we'll get into the Avangori
• 1:49:18
  because it's inextricable from Lauka.
• 1:49:21
  So Lauka was once the leader of a clan of vampires dedicated to
• 1:49:24
  mastering their curse through only feeding on great beasts.
• 1:49:28
  They they're almost doing the cat I.
• 1:49:31
  Heard Grape. Beasts in a second.
• 1:49:34
  And that was like, there were beasts of grape and I was like,
• 1:49:37
  well, backing up, but I was definitely prepared to be like
• 1:49:41
  raisins. They're with the they're with
• 1:49:43
  the skulls thrown. Oh no.
• 1:49:50
  So they're they were almost doing the the castle, I think
• 1:49:54
  where it's like we're just going to feed on like beasts,
• 1:49:58
  monsters. We're not going to let this like
• 1:49:59
  turn us into something that like preys on other people.
• 1:50:04
  And we're going to like exude a very strong sense of control for
• 1:50:09
  that. Like I said, they they both to
• 1:50:13
  like dodge having to feed on Santi and prey, a thing they
• 1:50:15
  didn't want to do and to train themselves to endure constant
• 1:50:18
  strife. But that all went skew when
• 1:50:22
  during a hunt. So the that original tribe
• 1:50:24
  existed on Gur realm of beasts. That's where all the good
• 1:50:27
  hunting is. Lauka, during a fight, made
• 1:50:32
  contact with a vein of pure Gurish magic.
• 1:50:38
  Oh. Shit.
• 1:50:38
  Yes, and it mutated her into what you see there, where she's
• 1:50:45
  like a bat monster dragon Centaur.
• 1:50:49
  Bat monster, dragon Centaur. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:50:52
  Kind of Wyvern esque because she's got the the big bat wing,
• 1:50:56
  4 limbs and the. Like those limbs definitely.
• 1:50:59
  Just also look at horse legs. A huge Centaur like Draconic
• 1:51:04
  from the waist down, Lauka returned to her clan only to be
• 1:51:08
  reviled. They saw her as another great
• 1:51:11
  beast. They thought that she succumbed
• 1:51:14
  to like the curse and they were trying to kill her.
• 1:51:19
  So she slew them and set out to prove that her new monstrousness
• 1:51:24
  made her no less of a vampire than her noble kin.
• 1:51:28
  Lauka is the voice of the imperfect.
• 1:51:31
  Oh. Good.
• 1:51:32
  For her, yeah. So continuing our our string of
• 1:51:36
  like what each of the great vampiric dynasties say about
• 1:51:39
  power, Lauka is like power denied.
• 1:51:44
  Lauka is the power that you do not get to wield anymore because
• 1:51:52
  of a thing you have been labeled as.
• 1:51:55
  Yeah. Fascinating.
• 1:51:56
  OK. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:51:56
  People like Lauka. I like Lauka.
• 1:51:59
  Yeah, so Lauka's not the only one of her kind.
• 1:52:03
  A vampire who mutates in such a way is called Vangorian.
• 1:52:07
  Oh, is. This the last picture.
• 1:52:09
  Yeah, not. More of the Vangorian.
• 1:52:13
  They mostly just look like Lauka.
• 1:52:15
  Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:52:18
  That's disappointing. Yeah, I think it's mostly a
• 1:52:20
  constraint of model. So this is the thing that
• 1:52:23
  happens a lot with Warhammer models.
• 1:52:25
  Where you will get here is our big important named characters
• 1:52:29
  model. And also if you already own that
• 1:52:31
  one, you can buy the same kit and put a different head on
• 1:52:35
  them. And now they're not that person
• 1:52:36
  anymore. They're the generic version of.
• 1:52:38
  That is what that's called. I see.
• 1:52:40
  OK. So cost effective.
• 1:52:42
  Yeah, it's so cool if they're all like so different of these
• 1:52:47
  like beast things. We have more different ones like
• 1:52:50
  in a lore perspective, but we just don't have like images of
• 1:52:53
  them and like model we just have.
• 1:52:57
  Vangorian. Fork over.
• 1:52:58
  Some cash for their artists to get crazy news of artists would
• 1:53:02
  love to design more of these. We're definitely going to get
• 1:53:05
  more, I think, because people really like Lauku.
• 1:53:08
  She has her own book. She's called Mother of
• 1:53:09
  Nightmares great. Book I know I said Neff was
• 1:53:12
  mother, but actually Laufa. Is mother.
• 1:53:15
  Obviously she is Mother. And like, it's not just mother
• 1:53:18
  in terms of like aesthetic, but I think mother in terms of like
• 1:53:20
  thematics. As well one of my Age of Sigmar
• 1:53:25
  youtubers I really like who does like strategy stuff did a
• 1:53:28
  rundown with the new edition of like How All the Armies Play and
• 1:53:32
  he included an outtake where he did accidentally call Lauka the
• 1:53:36
  mommy of nightmares. No way you.
• 1:53:37
  Can't see that on the. Internet, it just laughs it off.
• 1:53:42
  But like, yeah, again, she's yeah, she's popular in a flag
• 1:53:50
  carrying community. Hell will say that.
• 1:53:55
  But Lauka's ultimate ambition is to see her fellow like beastial
• 1:53:59
  mutated, like Van Gorian vampires who are still in
• 1:54:02
  control of their like facilities.
• 1:54:04
  They just look different, recognized and accepted amongst
• 1:54:07
  the great vampire dynasties like the Avan Gori aren't being
• 1:54:11
  invited to those like balls and banquets and like diplomatic
• 1:54:14
  meetings because they're monstrous like they.
• 1:54:18
  Would look so good in a goddamn suit.
• 1:54:19
  You know what? You're all just jealous because
• 1:54:21
  they look more fabulous. Neff doesn't want to look upon
• 1:54:25
  them. They're a corruption of her
• 1:54:26
  image of like the perfect nobility of vampirism, right?
• 1:54:30
  Like, And so that's the, that's the moral philosophy that Lauka
• 1:54:36
  brings to stuff. That goal has created a moral
• 1:54:39
  sense amongst her of like, why do we need to pretend to be high
• 1:54:44
  society aristocrats? We're vampires, yeah.
• 1:54:48
  I don't need to be play acting. Yeah, Like what?
• 1:54:52
  What does it serve us to emulate the power structures of, like,
• 1:54:57
  humans who look down on us and despise us?
• 1:55:00
  Like, what are we getting from that?
• 1:55:02
  We're monsters. And while you might hide from
• 1:55:06
  it, it's nobler to lavish in it. There's a great quote from her
• 1:55:11
  in the book. There is no honor in denying
• 1:55:14
  what thou art. Yeah, I can see why the flag
• 1:55:18
  community you like Latka? Yeah, she's.
• 1:55:21
  Cool, she's ours. She's great.
• 1:55:23
  And to that end, the Avan Gori are home to lots of monster
• 1:55:26
  sinks. So there's there's Latka in the
• 1:55:27
  Vangorians. Vangorians or Vangorian?
• 1:55:31
  Vangorian. Vangorian.
• 1:55:33
  OK. Root word.
• 1:55:34
  Sangorian felt too much on the notice.
• 1:55:36
  Root word of avangori, Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:55:40
  What does avangori mean I. Don't know.
• 1:55:42
  Cool man, it's made-up Word. It's Avangori and the
• 1:55:46
  Vangorians. Okay, okay.
• 1:55:48
  I was like so worried for a second.
• 1:55:50
  I was like, I think I just want you to OK, thank God.
• 1:55:54
  So like I said, Lauka and the Vangorians all like flock to the
• 1:55:59
  Avan Gori obviously, because that's where they're going to be
• 1:56:01
  most welcome. Like occasionally the other
• 1:56:02
  dynasties will like allow Vengorians in their midst
• 1:56:05
  because they're big bat monsters and that can be advantageous
• 1:56:09
  militarily, but not usually. I think the Veercoats are most
• 1:56:13
  likely to like chill with them because like, yeah, Vengorian
• 1:56:17
  shows up to the party and Danza keg like whatever.
• 1:56:19
  Like the Veercoats are here for it.
• 1:56:20
  Like they look. Like wolves?
• 1:56:22
  I was going to say yeah, they're.
• 1:56:23
  Not going to be like, kicked out by someone with like a giant bat
• 1:56:28
  Centaur. They're like, yeah, tight.
• 1:56:31
  Again, here these are you. Can turn into a swarm of bats,
• 1:56:34
  or just like a big bat, I can turn into a wolf.
• 1:56:37
  So. But as an extension of that,
• 1:56:41
  like moral philosophy, the Avan Gori also play at safeguarding
• 1:56:47
  Vargas, those vampires who are denied blood and they turn into
• 1:56:51
  like, bat monsters. Yeah.
• 1:56:53
  They just keep safeguard over them thinking like maybe they
• 1:56:57
  might be able to reverse it at some point to like or just like
• 1:57:00
  a place for kinship for even the lost.
• 1:57:03
  Yeah. Like, right.
• 1:57:04
  Like the and go around. Yeah, must be someplace in this
• 1:57:08
  hormonal cycle because I'm actively like tearing up right
• 1:57:11
  now, gang. Like Oh my God, that's so.
• 1:57:14
  Beautiful, right? It's good again, ward wardens of
• 1:57:17
  the lost the curse, the downtrodden lost the.
• 1:57:20
  Curse the dash, Rodden. This is for us.
• 1:57:24
  This is for the gates. And as an extension of that,
• 1:57:28
  they're also the most adept at keeping and caring for the
• 1:57:32
  various like vampiric monsters that sometimes exist amongst
• 1:57:35
  Vampiric Coast. This has gotten a little bit
• 1:57:37
  like sketchy with like lower stuff because vampire monsters
• 1:57:43
  have like some weird fluctuating lower stuff in the past.
• 1:57:47
  We have terror Geist, which are var Geist who like mutate
• 1:57:53
  further to where they become these like huge draconic monster
• 1:57:56
  things. Previously you could have like a
• 1:57:59
  a vampire writing of our guy or a terror Geist in like your
• 1:58:03
  vampire army. You can't anymore.
• 1:58:05
  And that's like a recent development, like the model just
• 1:58:07
  got put in. The model got put with Usher on
• 1:58:12
  and his buddies because you can put those strigoi like ghoul
• 1:58:16
  like vampires on one instead. Same thing with zombie Dragons.
• 1:58:21
  Zombie Dragons themselves got pushed over to Usheron and
• 1:58:26
  replaced thematically with our revenant Draculas.
• 1:58:29
  That's Shortamare and his like raised dragon buddy that Nagash
• 1:58:36
  brought back. Oh, that makes sense.
• 1:58:37
  Yeah. So we still do still get
• 1:58:39
  revenant Draculas with the Avan Gory, but that's all a little
• 1:58:42
  bit like shaky because like we don't really have terror Geist
• 1:58:45
  anymore, even though that's like what happens to Avar Geist if
• 1:58:48
  they're the condition gets worse.
• 1:58:50
  I mean the Avan gory would care for them as well, like find
• 1:58:53
  places to keep them and like make sure they were able to like
• 1:58:57
  stretch their wings and stuff. So we'd we don't know what the
• 1:59:02
  status of that is, but the Avangori are still
• 1:59:05
  philosophically, they're like we care for the things that aren't
• 1:59:09
  like you don't get to just like push us aside and like ignore us
• 1:59:13
  because we aren't don't fit your perfect like ideal of what a
• 1:59:16
  vampire is. Yeah, damn.
• 1:59:18
  I'm not. But if I wore it would just do a
• 1:59:21
  whole army of Avangori. But every figure's got like a
• 1:59:25
  pride theme on it for the. Different like types of flags.
• 1:59:28
  Like everyone. She's got a rad model her it.
• 1:59:32
  Just looks like pride fest off the kind of fucking board.
• 1:59:36
  But those are our big dynasties. Like we haven't heard much more
• 1:59:39
  from the Avon gory. I'm sure we will because they're
• 1:59:42
  very popular and Lauka's great. I like I said, she has her own
• 1:59:45
  book. There's like hints that, like,
• 1:59:50
  it's not as explicit as I was led to believe at one point, but
• 1:59:52
  there are hints that, like, Lauka and our best girl from
• 1:59:57
  Stormcast, Yindrasta and Lauka were probably mortal at the same
• 2:00:02
  time, and they might have known each other because they were
• 2:00:04
  both from GER. And that's like a weird
• 2:00:07
  dichotomy. Maybe it's kind of the
• 2:00:10
  implication that we've got in terms of materials, but it's not
• 2:00:13
  really clear. Make them girlfriends.
• 2:00:15
  Well, and then if they did that, we also have like a fun dramatic
• 2:00:19
  irony because now Yindrasta is Sigmar's great huntress.
• 2:00:24
  Like she is the hunter of beasts and monstrous things and Lauka
• 2:00:27
  is the defender of beasts and monstrous things.
• 2:00:30
  So we would get like a really interesting.
• 2:00:32
  I love a a good cursed yeah or Yuri, yeah, so that would be
• 2:00:37
  neat. But we don't, we don't have
• 2:00:38
  anything like. But do it, cowards.
• 2:00:41
  Yep, they're not cowards. We've got some, yeah, we've got
• 2:00:43
  a lot of stuff going. On no actually, well, games
• 2:00:45
  workshops got a lot of gifts. We we literally have some pride
• 2:00:47
  bonus episode all about it. Yeah, they're not cowards.
• 2:00:51
  On the death front, we've just had like a huge expansion to
• 2:00:54
  Usuran and all of his like stuff.
• 2:00:56
  Like he didn't have a model for a long time and that was
• 2:00:59
  justified by him being in a box in the ground and then he got
• 2:01:02
  let out of that box. Now he has an extremely cool
• 2:01:04
  model now because he's not a he's not a soul blight.
• 2:01:08
  He's leading the flesh eater chords.
• 2:01:10
  So he'll have his own episode. Put this down.
• 2:01:12
  Then yeah, him and his buddies will have actually, it's good
• 2:01:17
  for the recording. I'm going to pay all up you,
• 2:01:19
  Sharon, so you can see him. Yeah, wait, he's a vampire.
• 2:01:22
  Yes, but he's not part of the the soap like Grave Lords, so
• 2:01:27
  we'll do a whole episode on the Flesh Eater Courts in there like
• 2:01:29
  Grand Illusion and all. That Wait, wait, wait, wait,
• 2:01:31
  wait, wait. Hold on, hold on, hold on.
• 2:01:33
  There's more than one vampire thing.
• 2:01:34
  Yes. Told that you said this is a
• 2:01:36
  vampire episode. You didn't say that at the top
• 2:01:38
  you said they were also called the soul look like the soul
• 2:01:41
  blight cursed and I was like that's just another word for
• 2:01:43
  vampire. You didn't say there was other
• 2:01:46
  branching vampire. You even said this guy was
• 2:01:49
  turned by his sister who was the vampire queen.
• 2:01:52
  To be fair there's 2 vampire things and it's but the flesh
• 2:01:56
  eater courts have as much going on as the soul blight Which.
• 2:02:00
  Is just fair. That's why, yeah.
• 2:02:02
  And it's fair and you made the right call.
• 2:02:03
  I'm just saying at the top, two hours ago you did not specify
• 2:02:09
  that there were two episodes for vampire and I just got
• 2:02:14
  blindsided at the end of the vampire episode finding out.
• 2:02:17
  No, there's another vampire episode to come.
• 2:02:21
  Maybe not the. Next I was going to say it's not
• 2:02:23
  going to be the next one. I want to take a break from
• 2:02:25
  vampires. That's fair, it's been 2 hours.
• 2:02:27
  Yeah, but then we'll talk about Usheron and all of his fun,
• 2:02:31
  delusional friends. But I'll let you see the picture
• 2:02:34
  of him so we get there. Sorry, stick my grade a second
• 2:02:37
  to figure out what I'm looking at.
• 2:02:38
  Oh my God. Yeah, he's huge.
• 2:02:41
  He's got a crown of bone and marrow because he's crazy.
• 2:02:44
  It's got. Like a his back has got like a
• 2:02:46
  nest of bone. Yep, that is the Shroud cage.
• 2:02:51
  It's got his childhood blanket woven into it because it keeps
• 2:02:55
  him from losing it. He looks like he's actively
• 2:02:59
  losing it. He's.
• 2:03:00
  Right now, he's always losing. It.
• 2:03:05
  The delusion's so bad that even storm cast in proximity to it
• 2:03:09
  can fall under it. Yeah, it's bad.
• 2:03:13
  But yeah, last thing I want to talk about in this episode,
• 2:03:16
  because is like soul blight and they're like thing with like
• 2:03:19
  necromancy, and some of them are cool, like necromancy stuff.
• 2:03:23
  I'm going to mention them real briefly because we have a tiny
• 2:03:25
  amount of lower and it's unclear if they're even going to stick
• 2:03:27
  around because they're ancient models.
• 2:03:29
  But I'll mention the mortise engine, which is what happens
• 2:03:33
  when a really powerful necromancer dies.
• 2:03:35
  You put them in a box and you put that box on like a floating
• 2:03:38
  chair and then you wheel it around and use its necromancer
• 2:03:41
  entities to like revive zombies. It it's neat.
• 2:03:45
  It's got a kind of cool model, but it's old and so we don't
• 2:03:47
  know. And they like didn't get very
• 2:03:48
  much lower in this new book. And so that's kind of the
• 2:03:50
  signals of like this might not be part of the range for much
• 2:03:52
  longer. From that same kit, you can make
• 2:03:55
  a blood throne the same circumstance.
• 2:03:58
  That's a vampire palanquin. So you just have a bunch of
• 2:04:01
  vampires on it and they have a big bowl full of blood that they
• 2:04:05
  use to scry the future, and they're scooping that blood off
• 2:04:09
  of people that they fight. So of course.
• 2:04:11
  They're that's actually great. I think that's great.
• 2:04:13
  Right. And then the last, the like
• 2:04:16
  massed foot troops of the Soul blight are zombies and
• 2:04:20
  skeletons. Those are zombies and skeletons.
• 2:04:21
  There's nothing special to say there.
• 2:04:23
  There's zombies and skeletons you.
• 2:04:24
  Saw on one thing, you probably saw on another thing.
• 2:04:26
  Zombies and skeletons. Pretty standard edition.
• 2:04:28
  The interesting component are what we call Barrow Knights.
• 2:04:33
  So I mentioned way long ago that it would come back and it's
• 2:04:35
  finally is Occasionally when a person is raised as a nun dead,
• 2:04:39
  they keep their facilities in tact.
• 2:04:41
  That seems to be more common amongst people who held like
• 2:04:46
  political power or command in life.
• 2:04:49
  Like something about that makes it more likely that they're like
• 2:04:52
  consciousness will stick to them.
• 2:04:54
  And when that happens, they often maintain command of anyone
• 2:04:59
  that they were in command of in life.
• 2:05:02
  Oh, cool. Yeah, OK.
• 2:05:04
  So Barrow Knights and what are now known as Barrow Kingdoms are
• 2:05:09
  the rare moment when vampires have to acquiesce to non
• 2:05:13
  vampires. Because if you raise like a
• 2:05:18
  white king, which is usually the like highest echelon of that.
• 2:05:22
  If you raise a white king and all of their like soldiers and
• 2:05:26
  stuff come with them, which often includes like soldiers
• 2:05:30
  that they did not directly command, but the technically
• 2:05:32
  were under their command by virtue of like being part of
• 2:05:35
  their Kingdom. So we're talking maybe like
• 2:05:37
  hundreds of years of the dead all coming back at once and this
• 2:05:41
  one, like sentient undead having control of them.
• 2:05:45
  Now you have a situation where like, because the White King
• 2:05:48
  wants to stay conscious, so they're not going to like, turn
• 2:05:51
  off the vampire for no reason, but the vampire explicitly is
• 2:05:55
  not in command. And so they have to kind of play
• 2:05:58
  nice with this, like sentient undead that's just like skeleton
• 2:06:02
  man who is controlling this big legion of like, skeleton hordes
• 2:06:08
  and stuff. And that's neat.
• 2:06:11
  I like that a lot. I've been the last couple
• 2:06:14
  minutes, I've been turning over the idea of that.
• 2:06:16
  The ones that maintain their faculties are the ones that had
• 2:06:19
  like a bunch of like political leadership in life.
• 2:06:21
  And my brain was interested like, OK, is that are we, is
• 2:06:25
  that meant to suggest that they were inherently more special or
• 2:06:28
  more strong than they are able to hold on to themselves more?
• 2:06:32
  And that is kind of a bummer because it suggests that folks
• 2:06:34
  who did not obtain that level of like tangible hierarchical power
• 2:06:39
  are inherently less sure of themselves or less important as
• 2:06:44
  a, a human soul than others. And I think no.
• 2:06:49
  I think it also could be interpreted to mean they
• 2:06:54
  physically could not let go of the power they once had.
• 2:06:57
  I I've I've always thought of it as like pattern keeping almost
• 2:07:01
  like they're the idea that they are wielding power is already so
• 2:07:07
  like imprinted on their soul that once you fill those
• 2:07:10
  channels with like necromancy, it just still takes that shape.
• 2:07:14
  Is like how I. But the person's not there.
• 2:07:17
  No, like their soul doesn't return to their body.
• 2:07:20
  Just the undead. Is.
• 2:07:21
  Still, like, I thought it was like a part of their soul was
• 2:07:25
  OK, OK then. Completely different.
• 2:07:26
  Yeah, it's pattern. Recognition.
• 2:07:28
  It's close to what you said, where it's like they just
• 2:07:30
  couldn't let go of it. Like it's, it's so much that it
• 2:07:33
  imprinted upon their corpse that they needed to be like, clinging
• 2:07:36
  to power. Yeah.
• 2:07:37
  The track, right Nikesh isn't going to just let them take.
• 2:07:41
  Souls back? No, certainly not, but that's
• 2:07:45
  soul blight. That's all of our big cool
• 2:07:48
  dynasties. That's a little note about
• 2:07:50
  undead and whatnot, and that's great.
• 2:07:53
  I like, I like our vampires. I like all of our, like, spooky
• 2:07:57
  little dynasties and the big power games of the Von Karstens
• 2:08:01
  and the Dalamians and our cool little corner with the weird
• 2:08:05
  cousins and the Viricos and the Avon Gory.
• 2:08:08
  And it's neat. I like the.
• 2:08:10
  I like the vampires quite a bit. Yeah.
• 2:08:11
  Avon Gory are the best. We need more models for them.
• 2:08:14
  It's really. Yeah, because for the most part,
• 2:08:17
  if you actually like set out to play an Avangori army, right
• 2:08:19
  now, it that mostly just kind of looks like like you'll have
• 2:08:23
  Lauka and you'll have like an Avangorian Lord or two and maybe
• 2:08:28
  some like revenant Draculas. But then you'll just have like a
• 2:08:30
  bunch of skeletons and zombies like every other like vampire
• 2:08:33
  army. Yeah.
• 2:08:33
  And that feels so uninteresting, especially because it's a point
• 2:08:37
  of these characters is that they have been rejected because they
• 2:08:39
  look so distinctly different than other vampires.
• 2:08:42
  So their army should look distinctly different than the
• 2:08:45
  other vampire armies. We just need to fill in for
• 2:08:47
  their like normal troops basically, because like you can,
• 2:08:50
  you can tell a Veer Coast army on the table like immediately
• 2:08:54
  because they usually don't use very many like skeletons and
• 2:08:57
  zombies. They just have a shit load of
• 2:08:58
  wolves. Yeah.
• 2:09:00
  So we just need like a I guess we kind of have it with Vargeis,
• 2:09:03
  but Vargeis are already a little bit too like they're big and
• 2:09:06
  sturdy. We just need like lesser
• 2:09:09
  monstrous vampires. Give me like.
• 2:09:11
  Something just to fill the. Horse.
• 2:09:12
  Yeah, exactly. But hopefully soon.
• 2:09:17
  But that's our yeah, that's our Soul Blight Grave Alerts
• 2:09:18
  episode. I hope you all enjoyed listening
• 2:09:21
  to our viewers. I certainly enjoyed talking
• 2:09:23
  about it. This is.
• 2:09:25
  Like I like vampires. This is really.
• 2:09:26
  Fun. It was a hoot.
• 2:09:27
  It was a very good time. I'm not sure right now yet what
• 2:09:30
  the next episode is going to be. I'm still researching the cities
• 2:09:33
  episode. Hey, gang, turns out there's a
• 2:09:34
  lot to the cities of Sigma. Fascinating.
• 2:09:37
  Yeah. There's just a lot to talk about
• 2:09:39
  and cover and research. So that's probably going to be
• 2:09:40
  like a two or three parter episode just because there's too
• 2:09:43
  much. So it's probably also not going
• 2:09:44
  to be the next episode, but I'm not sure what the next episode
• 2:09:47
  is going to be. I kind of want to dip back into
• 2:09:49
  because we talked about destruction, we talked about
• 2:09:52
  order, we're talking about death.
• 2:09:53
  Now I kind of want to dip back into maybe talk about Chaos
• 2:09:58
  faction. Maybe we'll like see what we
• 2:10:01
  learn about Chaos Works. From that and.
• 2:10:03
  Try and strike while the iron's hot hot or we'll just head back
• 2:10:10
  to order. We'll do an episode on Selvanath
• 2:10:13
  or something that'll be fun. Figure it out.
• 2:10:14
  Don't worry about it, you'll get an episode.
• 2:10:16
  You'll find out when the episode goes up, Yeah, But in the
• 2:10:21
  meantime, I have been, as always, your Vangorian Lord,
• 2:10:25
  Dalton Montgomery. And I'm Darren Smart, and you
• 2:10:27
  should go carve a pumpkin. Have a wonderful evening.
• 2:10:32
  Happy spooky season.