Latest / The Bad Moon's Orbit / Episode 16: Stormcast and the Age of Sigmar

Transcript

Episode 16: Stormcast and the Age of Sigmar · The Bad Moon's Orbit

• 0:35
  Welcome, everybody, to another episode of The Bad Moon's Orbit.
• 0:39
  I am, as always, your Night Quest or Dolphin Montgomery.
• 0:43
  And I am Darian of the endless. And today I have been waiting to
• 0:49
  talk about this one for a little bit.
• 0:51
  We had seen the Battle of the Burning Skies.
• 0:55
  We saw it was so good. We saw Sigmar's defeat at the
• 1:01
  hands of Archaeon, right? So bummer fest we lost on.
• 1:05
  I was like, this makes me I'm actively sad.
• 1:09
  I've been actively. Sad.
• 1:11
  We moved from the generally everything going pretty well Age
• 1:17
  of Myth into the things going much worse, Age of Chaos.
• 1:23
  And that is where our story today is going to start.
• 1:28
  As we mentioned the last episode, the Age of Myth existed
• 1:32
  for a time. We don't have a strict timeline
• 1:35
  on the age of Myth. The.
• 1:36
  Same amount of time that the age of myths in Greek mythology with
• 1:40
  all that classical stuff. Yeah.
• 1:42
  They do the. Rise of Kronos to the time of
• 1:46
  Odysseus. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:48
  The age of chaos. We have a number on we.
• 1:50
  Have a number like a hard number.
• 1:52
  Yeah, OK. After Archaeon wins the Battle
• 1:56
  of the Burning Skies, Sigmar retreats to Wazir and seals the
• 2:00
  gates. Yeah, that is the event that
• 2:03
  signals the Age of Chaos. Humans left in the Realms tend
• 2:08
  to portray that as Sigmar's abandonment.
• 2:11
  He could have stayed in Font, but he in his mind, he made a
• 2:15
  tactical retreat to win the larger war.
• 2:18
  Lose this battle, win the war. Humans don't live that long.
• 2:22
  They didn't. They certainly didn't see it
• 2:23
  that way. Yeah, from the time Sigmar
• 2:28
  closed the gates to his ear is the start point of the Age of
• 2:31
  Chaos, and for 500 years a. Lot of.
• 2:35
  Hundreds. It's a lot of hundreds.
• 2:38
  Chaos just has its teeth in the realms, no real push back.
• 2:46
  Like whatever coalitions were formed to fight against them
• 2:49
  during the age of myth, it is now every person for themselves.
• 2:54
  Alario is retreated into her soul pod, right being protected
• 3:00
  by the Lady of Vines. It's very cool though.
• 3:02
  It's very cool Listen. Everything sucks.
• 3:05
  That's like. Really cool.
• 3:06
  It's very cool. We like the lady of Vines here.
• 3:09
  Grimner is dead, Grundy is in his ear, he is still seeing
• 3:14
  himself as repaying his debt to Sigmar.
• 3:17
  Yeah, right, Gorka. Morka is honestly kind of doing
• 3:20
  fine because he just likes fighting anyways.
• 3:23
  And yeah, he's gone from being a Monster Hunter to kicking chaos
• 3:27
  fortresses over like basically business as usual for Gorka
• 3:31
  Morca. And we don't super know what's
• 3:34
  going on with the Alvin gods during the Age of Chaos.
• 3:37
  We know what Malaria and Marathi are doing during the Age of
• 3:41
  Chaos. Kind of.
• 3:43
  They are waging like a guerrilla shadow or an Olga.
• 3:47
  Malaria and Marathi can both manipulate Olga at their whim.
• 3:50
  It is very easy for them to suddenly just like pull a path
• 3:54
  that a chaos army is walking down off of the path over here
• 3:58
  into the shadows and jump them basically.
• 4:02
  That's pretty great. Yeah, OLGU is basically the only
• 4:05
  realm outside of Azir that's like still that Chaos has access
• 4:10
  to that ends up doing basically fine.
• 4:13
  Like shit gets worse in OLGU for sure.
• 4:16
  Yeah, there's chaos demons everywhere.
• 4:18
  Yeah, but malaria Nimrathi's control over it means that does
• 4:21
  not suffer as bad as the other realms do.
• 4:23
  Interesting. Maybe I'm going to move there.
• 4:25
  Yeah, maybe I moved there. It's not so bad.
• 4:28
  Let's be honest, by this point I will have already just aligned
• 4:31
  myself with Morass. Yeah, and to be one of her.
• 4:34
  Hot scary lady spies. Yeah, that sounds pretty good.
• 4:37
  I've seen all of the options and if I don't want to live in a
• 4:41
  place where trees can run and eat you, so I guess I'm going to
• 4:44
  go there. It's not too bad, Not too bad.
• 4:46
  You can hang out with the fish elves on weekends because
• 4:48
  they're they're also an Olga. That's true as long as I don't
• 4:52
  try to steal my soul. Yep.
• 4:55
  But during that 500 years of the age of Chaos, Chaos, the the
• 5:00
  colloquialism is that Chaos conquers all the realms.
• 5:04
  Conquer is a maybe a bit of an overstatement in these terms.
• 5:08
  The forces of Chaos do not have like standing armies in every
• 5:12
  corner of the realm. They're not like fully occupied,
• 5:15
  no. But what they managed to do is
• 5:17
  that very insidious thing that Chaos generally is very good at
• 5:21
  doing. Where if the thing that allowed
• 5:24
  them to get in during the Age of Myth was corrupting those
• 5:28
  traditions, corrupting those ideas and twisting them towards
• 5:32
  Chaos. By the time the Age of Chaos has
• 5:35
  hit that like 500 year mark, there's nowhere in the realms
• 5:38
  that is safe from that. This is no longer like we have
• 5:42
  this cultural practice that a wise stranger told us we should
• 5:46
  modify. This is for six generations we
• 5:51
  have venerated the great brass bowl and that's corn and.
• 5:55
  That's corn. It was openly like everyone's
• 5:58
  aware that this is for chaos. Now, not necessarily.
• 6:01
  How are you not aware? There are.
• 6:05
  There are still people in the realms who are, who generally
• 6:09
  know it's for chaos, but they don't understand the scope of
• 6:12
  it. Like, like, to your point that
• 6:14
  there are cast demons everywhere.
• 6:15
  There are tribes that we know of, like an Axi who see the
• 6:19
  arrival of bloodthirsters, corns, demons as like a boon.
• 6:24
  Like when they go to war and they commit enough bloodshed,
• 6:27
  the Great Brass Bowl sends his emissaries to aid them.
• 6:32
  Right. They don't understand the larger
• 6:34
  context of it. Hey, Dalton.
• 6:36
  Yeah. I definitely misheard you the
• 6:38
  first time and I thought you said great brass bowl like like
• 6:42
  what you eat cereal out of so. Skulls for the skull, yeah.
• 6:51
  That's. The great brass bowl is also
• 6:55
  very good and I appreciate that my full.
• 6:58
  Of like full of the chaos. Yeah, it's here, Yeah.
• 7:04
  No bowl makes poor size. Please continue.
• 7:07
  My for the record, my favorite epitaph Canon epitaph for corn.
• 7:11
  Because all the chaos gods to know the true name of chaos God
• 7:15
  is rare. Only their most devoted
• 7:17
  followers get that privilege. So most people who worship chaos
• 7:22
  gods don't know them by their true name, they know them by an
• 7:25
  epitaph. My favorite canned epitaph for
• 7:28
  corn is the brass belladonna, which is from like a tribe of
• 7:32
  Amazonian like warrior women in guy ran who worship corns like
• 7:38
  violence and bloodshedding as like an act of performance.
• 7:42
  Yes, that's. Pretty good, right?
• 7:44
  That's. Pretty good.
• 7:44
  I like that quite a bit. Pretty good, right?
• 7:49
  But so the age of chaos, Bad. Bad for basically everybody, Not
• 7:55
  a good. Time.
• 7:55
  Yeah. 0 out of 10 would not recommend.
• 7:57
  No. So 500 years pass and all of the
• 8:03
  realms except Azir more or less get conquered by Chaos.
• 8:07
  Like I said, still airing yeah Yep.
• 8:10
  Who takes air gets out better than most, but for the most part
• 8:14
  the Age of Chaos is a time of strife and hardship for
• 8:18
  everybody in the realms. But there's a reason we have
• 8:22
  that 500 year number because. Like exactly 500.
• 8:26
  Yeah, not. Like 537.
• 8:28
  No, exactly 500 years. Yeah.
• 8:31
  And that is because after the Age of Myth and after the Age of
• 8:35
  Chaos, we finally Welcome to our Age of Sigmar podcast.
• 8:42
  Canonically an Age of Sigmar pod, yeah.
• 8:44
  We get to the Age of Sigmar crash course.
• 8:46
  In one episode. Yeah, he said the same thing at
• 8:51
  the end. I just finished the Shayish
• 8:53
  episode. You said the same, said the same
• 8:55
  thing. It's a callback.
• 8:57
  It's a callback. Yeah.
• 9:00
  After those five hundreds. And we don't know a ton about
• 9:02
  the Age of Chaos. Most of what we know about the
• 9:04
  Age of Chaos, we like, learn later.
• 9:06
  It is like testimony from people who are alive as the Age of
• 9:10
  Chaos becomes the Age of Sigmar. Mostly we know that it sucked
• 9:14
  like that. Yeah.
• 9:16
  Famously. Yeah, there are people who,
• 9:18
  like, did well during the Age of Chaos by turning to chaos.
• 9:21
  There are chaos nobility, like humans who have turned wholesale
• 9:26
  to the worship of chaos and through like, sacrifice and
• 9:29
  like, warfare and whatnot, have bought themselves some manner of
• 9:34
  leverage, some manner of power in this kind of fucked up world.
• 9:38
  Yeah, absolutely. If you're a literal God of
• 9:40
  civilization. From being that critical, right?
• 9:44
  But after 500 years, something finally changes to break us out
• 9:51
  of the age of Chaos. So when we last left off, Sigmar
• 9:57
  took all of the like Azir warriors he brought with him to
• 10:01
  the Battle of Burning Skies, as many as he could back through
• 10:04
  the gates of Azir. If you'll remember, the turning
• 10:07
  point at the Battle of Burning Skies was Nick Ash's betrayal.
• 10:11
  Yeah, he just decided this was a great time to be like, hey, I
• 10:15
  just heard you were skimming off the top and that's not cool, and
• 10:19
  I'm going to let everything fall.
• 10:20
  The chaos. You're a little bit like we
• 10:23
  should have beat you in the face with that.
• 10:24
  Guy, one more time. Absolutely.
• 10:28
  You couldn't answer your cell phone and so we should have beat
• 10:33
  your face in with the hammer one more time.
• 10:35
  When we have this. Gamble didn't pay off was.
• 10:38
  Sigmar in the wrong, yeah, but honestly you shouldn't have made
• 10:40
  that deal from the no. Absolutely not.
• 10:42
  Absolutely not. Nagash abandons the fight.
• 10:45
  Sigmar pulls back to his ear with his warriors and the gate
• 10:49
  seal. That's the last we see of Sigmar
• 10:51
  for 500 years on the day. 500 years from when the gates to 0
• 10:57
  close. So that's why it's exactly 500
• 11:00
  years. Yep.
• 11:01
  Yep. Because the Age of Chaos did not
• 11:03
  end by circumstance. And it didn't end like
• 11:06
  inconsequentially didn't fade. Sigmar ended it.
• 11:12
  And he did that with Bombast, yes.
• 11:17
  So today, and people who are already familiar with the
• 11:20
  setting, you know it's coming. Today we are going to talk about
• 11:24
  mostly one of the factions of Age of Sigmar, one of the groups
• 11:29
  that if you are a player of the game Age of Sigmar, this is a
• 11:32
  group that you can play. And they are the poster child
• 11:36
  for the setting because they are what make it the Age of Sigmar.
• 11:40
  OK, today dear listeners, we are going to be talking about Storm
• 11:44
  Cast Eternals. Are those my little guy?
• 11:47
  Those are your little guy, yeah. I don't.
• 11:49
  Know I'm sure did we talk of the podcast how I painted a little
• 11:52
  guy? I'm not sure we did, yeah.
• 11:54
  Over the summer there was a local gaming convention and
• 11:56
  there was a mini fig painting event and the example mini figs
• 11:59
  they had to paint were Warcraft Age of Sigmars.
• 12:03
  And so they just take Mars. They're.
• 12:05
  Just little guys. So I picked a little guy cuz I'm
• 12:07
  like I, I recognize the icons on this little guy and I was
• 12:11
  showing to my roommate Aiden actually the other night cuz he
• 12:14
  had fallen to the ground and he had gotten strangely moved
• 12:17
  outside of the baby gate that keeps the dog out of my room.
• 12:20
  But the cat's in and out and I'm like, this means the cat picked
• 12:23
  him up and took him. Out of the room.
• 12:25
  So showing him and Aiden some, he's like, oh, that would be
• 12:30
  from Warhammer 40K Space Marine. And I was like, oh, I guess
• 12:34
  maybe. And I looked at him like, no,
• 12:36
  no, I'm pretty sure that's the Sigmar stuff.
• 12:38
  He took a post. He just like saw like the helmet
• 12:41
  of him and thought so. But I was like, no, I think, I
• 12:43
  think he's a Sigmar boy. He's just like, oh, he's a
• 12:46
  Sigmar boy. You're right.
• 12:46
  So that's my little guy. Yeah.
• 12:50
  He lives next to my Kamala Pop who keeps following.
• 12:52
  Hell yeah. But today we were talking about
• 12:55
  Storm cast Eternals. We are talking about Sigmar's
• 12:57
  answer to What do we do now? And notably, not an answer he
• 13:03
  came up with on the fly. I would hope we're 500 years
• 13:07
  later. Yeah, I hope maybe we spent some
• 13:10
  time really thinking about what we were going to do next.
• 13:13
  Wow, right. What a cool looking dude.
• 13:16
  Right what? A cool.
• 13:18
  Looking guy, right? Look at their hair, look at
• 13:20
  their face tattoos. What a cool.
• 13:23
  Guy right I. That's majestic as fuck.
• 13:27
  I fucking love Storm cast Eternals.
• 13:31
  They are so cool. The she's got the yeah, she's
• 13:35
  got like the blue tattoos on her face and whatnot.
• 13:37
  Yeah, so look. At her.
• 13:41
  Wow. They just have ladies.
• 13:42
  Fighting and it's not. A big right?
• 13:44
  Right. Amazing, amazing.
• 13:46
  Well, listen, we're going to talk about Space Marines this
• 13:48
  episode. We're not a 40K podcast, but
• 13:50
  we're talking about Storm Cast. We're going to talk about Space
• 13:53
  Marines this episode. OK.
• 13:56
  I've been on other podcast recently and I've gotten to
• 14:01
  like, oh, well, at the end, like Darren, tell people we can find
• 14:03
  you. Oh, you can find me on my Percy
• 14:04
  Jackson podcast over here or my arrogant podcast over here.
• 14:07
  Or I also do a pockets with my buddy Dalton who tells me all
• 14:10
  about Warhammer and it's called Badman's Orbit.
• 14:13
  And they're like, Oh yeah, 40K. And I've been both times.
• 14:16
  It's different and I'm like, we famously not a 40 yeah Age of
• 14:21
  Sigmar. I'm sorry I should clarify.
• 14:23
  Warhammer Age of Sigmar, not a 40K podcast. 40K has got the
• 14:28
  larger cultural landscape. It also had a huge video game
• 14:30
  just came up, so it's a big. Yeah.
• 14:32
  And these are not folks who I think play.
• 14:33
  No, yeah, they're. Just oh 40K and I'm Yep.
• 14:36
  More more in the cultural. Consciousness, you're right.
• 14:38
  I should clarify that from the jump.
• 14:40
  We're a Warhammer Age of Sigmar podcast.
• 14:41
  Let me be clear. Put that in your show now.
• 14:43
  Yeah. So what is a storm cast Eternal?
• 14:47
  We've got to look at him now. After 500 years, Sigmar delivers
• 14:51
  his counterpunch and his counterpunches the Storm cast
• 14:53
  Eternals. Could he have done it sooner
• 14:56
  than 500 years? Maybe.
• 14:59
  But one thing that we are going to see going forward with Sigmar
• 15:02
  specifically, like as a character, is a deep sense of
• 15:08
  doubt. No, I get that.
• 15:10
  I get your confidence. Would have got really shook at
• 15:13
  that battle of the burning skies.
• 15:15
  Yeah, yeah. You're gonna second guess all of
• 15:17
  your choices after that. Yeah.
• 15:18
  Also, these are all humans, right?
• 15:21
  Not all, but. Most kind of.
• 15:23
  Oh yeah, so it's gonna. Be like, well, if you're dealing
• 15:26
  with humans and they don't live very long, like, it's gonna take
• 15:28
  you a while, but like, perfect. Oh, no, go on.
• 15:31
  Yep. So Storm cast, when I say
• 15:33
  they're kind of human, As far as we know, we don't have anything
• 15:36
  to confirm one way or the other. Every Storm cast starts human,
• 15:43
  but that's not what they are by the time that they're done.
• 15:47
  Then they're done cooking. Yeah, so when anywhere in the
• 15:54
  realms, when a mortal dies fighting Chaos, be that soldier
• 16:00
  in an army, be that desperately trying to like, defend
• 16:04
  themselves from an assailant, be that like prepping the charges
• 16:09
  on a bomb that will like, take out some chaos with you.
• 16:13
  Yeah, no matter what it is, when a mortal dies fighting Chaos in
• 16:17
  the realms, Sigmar grabs their soul before it can reach Nagesh.
• 16:22
  This is some Valhalla. Oh my God, you die in battle.
• 16:26
  You go to the Halls of Odes, Yes.
• 16:29
  Oh, you die fighting Chaos? You go to the Halls of Sigmar?
• 16:32
  Yes, I really like that. That was this was before Cass
• 16:38
  was in the realms, but even before Cass showed up, Sigmar
• 16:42
  started picking souls of notable like valor and a heroism so.
• 16:48
  He wasn't just taking all human souls.
• 16:50
  No, because I was like, well how would Nagash not notice?
• 16:52
  Yeah, because it was only certain one.
• 16:54
  Yes. And of course it would take a
• 16:56
  while to get enough to do a whole army, like if you only die
• 16:58
  under certain conditions. Yeah, he's grabbing.
• 17:00
  Like I said, even before Cass showed up.
• 17:02
  He's grabbing the Valoris, he's grabbing the brave, he's
• 17:04
  grabbing the compassionate. That is a very important part to
• 17:08
  him. He doesn't just want weapons, he
• 17:10
  wants people who are going to do good, and he's really particular
• 17:16
  about that because of the second part of what happens.
• 17:19
  OK. So when your soul is taken by
• 17:22
  Sigmar, he offers you a choice. First thing, you are pulled from
• 17:27
  the grasp of the gash, and Sigmar speaks to you and he
• 17:31
  offers You do you. Want to become a postman?
• 17:33
  Or do you want to go out that door?
• 17:35
  Yeah, yeah, he says. I am offering you forever, the
• 17:45
  Eternal and Stormcast. Eternal isn't just floral,
• 17:50
  Sigmar tells them. It comes with a price.
• 17:55
  But if you are willing, I will make you immortal to fight Chaos
• 18:01
  forever. That's.
• 18:04
  Really fucking. Cool, right?
• 18:07
  Right. I love Stark.
• 18:08
  Like that's so cool. And there's a little bit of it.
• 18:13
  We're going to see, like, we generally like Sigmar, but he is
• 18:17
  a person who's used to getting what he wants.
• 18:19
  Yep. And he's got very strict ideas
• 18:21
  about what is, like, good in the world.
• 18:22
  Yep. And we have in text confirmation
• 18:25
  that while he always asks the question, he's gotten really
• 18:29
  good at only grabbing people who are going to say yes.
• 18:33
  The vetting process is very strange.
• 18:34
  Yes, yeah, it's kind of, it's a little bit of a false choice of
• 18:38
  like he wants the show of being like, this is always your choice
• 18:42
  to make, but he's not going to pick anyone who's going to say
• 18:45
  no. Yeah, but that still means
• 18:47
  they're that person still made that choice.
• 18:49
  But yeah. Yes.
• 18:50
  For sure knew they would say yes.
• 18:52
  That doesn't negate the fact that they still made that choice
• 18:56
  to say. Yes, they made that choice.
• 18:57
  Like a magical manipulation or an enchantment or like a
• 19:01
  persuasion? Like it was, yeah.
• 19:05
  I mean, I only, I only hired you because I know you do a good job
• 19:09
  kind of thing. Yeah, they made that choice with
• 19:11
  the choices they made in life. Yeah, they were good before.
• 19:14
  And that is why they've been offered the chance to become
• 19:16
  Storm cast. So, Nick.
• 19:19
  Fury doesn't just show up at everybody's house to see whether
• 19:22
  or not yeah, Tony Stark said no at. 1st and then who was?
• 19:26
  Building Avengers Tower, right? Nick Fury's always right.
• 19:29
  In the end, Sigmar knows who he's picking for a special club.
• 19:32
  Yes. If Immortal says yes, which they
• 19:36
  always do, the next thing that happens is the most dangerous
• 19:41
  part of the process. Long time listeners and people
• 19:44
  already familiar with the lower are going to recognize the name
• 19:47
  the Anvil of Apotheosis. Yes, Yeah.
• 19:51
  OK. I also recognize.
• 19:52
  Yeah, well, sounds like a very interesting title for me to
• 19:56
  have. Yeah.
• 19:57
  You are. We mentioned the envelope of
• 20:00
  apotheosis all the way back in episode 2 on Shaman.
• 20:03
  Yeah. Because it is a thing that
• 20:05
  Grundy made. Yeah, it was one of the the
• 20:07
  magical artists. Yeah, it's it's one of the great
• 20:09
  wonders of Grundy way early on in the age of myth that's.
• 20:14
  Just been here. Yeah, yeah, it's a thing Sigmar
• 20:17
  had made a long time before he knew he was going to lose.
• 20:22
  Interesting. Yeah, that that's what I mean
• 20:25
  when I say this wasn't like a rash plan.
• 20:28
  Sigmar I. Think he just had this like
• 20:29
  just. Yeah.
• 20:31
  I have a backup. Plan.
• 20:32
  Yeah, interesting. Like I said, we generally like
• 20:34
  Sigmar. We start to see a little bit of
• 20:36
  like like I said, Sigmar was skimming souls off the top
• 20:40
  specifically for this plan If things went wrong, he had the
• 20:43
  envelope built a long time before Chaos showed up as like
• 20:47
  his contingency. Yeah, he's, he's planning, but
• 20:51
  there's a little bit like he didn't tell anybody about either
• 20:53
  of those plans. There's a little bit of like, I
• 20:56
  don't know, it gives Sigmar a, a bevel to him, I guess.
• 21:01
  Yeah, which I appreciate. I would say wouldn't have been
• 21:05
  any of this if you didn't ask the Gas to join your special
• 21:07
  guide club in the 1st place though if you just hit him in
• 21:10
  the face with a hammer. When we saw him again and we
• 21:12
  moved. The fuck on.
• 21:14
  I genuinely think it would have been better having him on the
• 21:17
  team. Didn't help in any way.
• 21:19
  Actively made it worse. If a soul says yes, then they
• 21:23
  are taken to the Anvil of Apotheosis and they are
• 21:26
  subjected to the six Smiths. These are dwarfs who are trained
• 21:31
  personally by Grundy, of course, to work with souls as a
• 21:35
  material. Oh.
• 21:37
  My God. Yeah, it's so good.
• 21:41
  They reinforce the person's soul like you would smelt, or they
• 21:46
  blast away imperfections on the anvil.
• 21:50
  They balance out impurities. They transfigured the person's
• 21:55
  soul into its most ideal form. That's so interesting.
• 21:58
  What does that? Mean oh, it's so good, OK and.
• 22:03
  That's the most. Dangerous part, yes.
• 22:05
  What makes it? I mean I can gather what makes
• 22:07
  it dangerous, but like canonically what are the
• 22:09
  consequences of when it is dangerous and I assume goes.
• 22:13
  Wrong. Yeah, we don't know the
• 22:15
  percentage, but an amount of souls, even if they're willing
• 22:19
  when subjected to the anvil, just can't handle it.
• 22:22
  Interesting. There's too much imperfection,
• 22:24
  there's not enough. And that can happen for a lot of
• 22:26
  different reasons, but they're so wired we.
• 22:29
  Just know that sometimes it doesn't.
• 22:30
  Work. Sometimes it doesn't work.
• 22:32
  It's a grueling process. Souls are not meant to be
• 22:34
  tampered with. It's kind of a profane thing a
• 22:38
  little bit. Doing what Sigmar is doing,
• 22:41
  that's Nagash's continuing beef with Sigmar, by the way, is that
• 22:44
  he's not just letting souls be souls.
• 22:47
  He's like, fuck off fucking with them.
• 22:49
  Yeah, no, no, for sure. Oh yeah, for sure.
• 22:52
  I do not, I do not do this like moral high ground, like no,
• 22:56
  you're, you're not either. What are you doing with the
• 22:59
  souls? But a like that we don't know
• 23:01
  the percentage, but a percentage of them are.
• 23:04
  The verbiage that is used is a percentage of souls are blasted
• 23:09
  apart on the anvil. Yeah, that reminds me in the
• 23:14
  Cassandra Clare Shadowhunter store books, the the Shadow
• 23:17
  Hunters are the this race of like demigod asked semi divine
• 23:22
  humans who have the ability to bear runes that give them
• 23:26
  magical powers and allow them to fight demons, right?
• 23:29
  They are the ones who maintain order right?
• 23:32
  In this world and the reality where demons sometimes spill
• 23:34
  over and you have to deal with that problem.
• 23:36
  Yeah. And they were given the ability
• 23:38
  to become Shadowhunters because by the Angel Raphael.
• 23:42
  Raphael. It was Raphael.
• 23:46
  Anyway, he gave him a magic cup and when you drink from the cup,
• 23:49
  that is how so shadow hunters are born like that is it's a
• 23:53
  like a bloodline biological trait.
• 23:55
  Like if a if a person who is a shadow hunter has a child, that
• 23:58
  child is always a shadow hunter. Like that's true, but you can
• 24:01
  also make more shadow hunters if a more like human totally normal
• 24:04
  human drinks from the cup, they become a shadow hunter.
• 24:08
  But it doesn't always work. Sometimes they literally burst
• 24:12
  into divine fire and die. We have seen it happen like one
• 24:16
  time to a character we really liked.
• 24:18
  It was a real bummer. I'm still mad.
• 24:20
  And there was no indication there's no reason for it.
• 24:22
  Like it literally is like the some Shadowhunters believe.
• 24:27
  It just indicates they weren't worthy and they were rejected by
• 24:29
  the Angel. But other just the the the
• 24:33
  actual like there's no canonical.
• 24:34
  There's no more reason like we that Cassandra Clare has never
• 24:37
  explained to like out of like Canon why it is.
• 24:39
  But like we just don't know. Sometimes it just doesn't work
• 24:43
  right. And I find that so interesting.
• 24:44
  And it is like like they go in knowing you can train really
• 24:48
  hard. You can learn all the stuff you
• 24:49
  can do all the things, you can be great.
• 24:51
  And at the end, there's no guarantee.
• 24:53
  Yeah. So.
• 24:55
  Yeah, yeah. It is.
• 24:57
  It's kind of got that temper. There are people we know would
• 25:00
  have made excellent storm cast that just for whatever reason
• 25:02
  their soul couldn't withstand the animal and we don't know
• 25:05
  what happens till like soul's destroyed on the anvil.
• 25:08
  Yeah. I can't reflect on that too much
• 25:10
  that yeah. No, that I'll.
• 25:11
  Get no absolutely, absolutely on this one.
• 25:13
  We move on. Absolutely.
• 25:15
  The soul's not surviving the. Anvil.
• 25:17
  The last part of the process, once the soul has been refined
• 25:19
  upon the anvil, is a little piece of Sigmar's own divinity
• 25:24
  is mixed into it tight. That is what makes them eternal.
• 25:28
  Yeah, yeah. Got to come from somewhere.
• 25:30
  Yeah, from that moment, the person is storm cast and their
• 25:35
  soul is tied forever to the Anvil of Apotheosis.
• 25:40
  If a storm cast dies in the world, they wake on the anvil.
• 25:43
  It's. Kind of cool.
• 25:45
  Yeah, it kicks ass. I can see the image of that
• 25:49
  someone waking up and like that's really.
• 25:51
  Great. So yeah.
• 25:55
  This is so. Thank you, man.
• 25:58
  I would have been in a completely different mood if I
• 26:00
  had been been able to be like, yeah, we'll record one more.
• 26:02
  I need to hear what happens. Next like.
• 26:03
  Wow, what a 180. What a satisfying 1. 80 right so
• 26:09
  Sigmar. They're going to go kick some
• 26:11
  ass. Yeah, they're going to go kick
• 26:12
  some ass, Sigmar, grab souls of the worthy, the noble, the
• 26:17
  brave. He starts remaking them on the
• 26:19
  anvil into a storm cast. You asked what it means to like,
• 26:23
  have your like soul remade, to have your like, perfections
• 26:27
  blasted away. Because a storm cast, like when
• 26:30
  you die, your body dies. Like, the actual physical
• 26:33
  content of what you are is gone. But storm cast are physical
• 26:37
  beings. It's just that their body is
• 26:40
  sourced from their soul. They're like gems, yeah.
• 26:43
  That's actually a really. Literally like a thing of light
• 26:46
  that comes straight from the gym, which is what they are.
• 26:48
  Yeah, it's actually a really good metaphor.
• 26:50
  Like storm cast are flesh and blood, but that flesh and blood
• 26:54
  is just like pulled from their soul.
• 26:56
  It is the truest representation of who they are.
• 26:59
  And so for most people, that just kind of ends up with them
• 27:01
  being almost like a physically idealized version of themselves.
• 27:05
  They just get Steve Rogers. Yeah, you just get.
• 27:08
  Super soldier serumed. Yeah, nice.
• 27:09
  Yeah, with the weird quirk that all storm caster in the like 7
• 27:12
  to 8 feet tall range. So I guess every I guess
• 27:16
  everyone's ideal self is like 2 feet taller.
• 27:18
  I mean, if you're going to go fight some chaos, I mean, it's
• 27:21
  getting a little bit of a high advantage, you can punt some
• 27:25
  fools, yeah. Absolutely.
• 27:27
  And also a part of it that I think is under explored and I
• 27:30
  will bet anything we're going to get more exploration on as the
• 27:34
  setting gets a little bit more developed, especially because we
• 27:37
  already have like an indication that this is a direction that
• 27:39
  we're probably going to be going.
• 27:41
  We know that there's at least one non binary storm cast.
• 27:44
  I was literally yeah, about like what about like non gender
• 27:48
  conforming, like individuals, trans individuals, like how what
• 27:52
  that that's so interesting. We're going to talk about them
• 27:55
  later. They're in my spoilers.
• 27:57
  The last half of my notes is called list of storm cast.
• 28:00
  I think kick ass and we're going to talk about them later.
• 28:04
  But yeah, like we know there's a storm cast who's non binary and
• 28:07
  because your body is formed from your soul when you are a storm
• 28:10
  cast, I would be shocked if there are not trans storm cast.
• 28:14
  Like that's just that's the most obvious, like storytelling.
• 28:18
  But you could possibly do. Come on GW, just give us one.
• 28:23
  Yeah, right. I.
• 28:24
  Think. It would be like wave.
• 28:27
  I think it would be. I'm not a trans person, I cannot
• 28:29
  speak, but I can see there being a concern if every trans storm
• 28:34
  cast is essentially CIS afterwards like that.
• 28:39
  I so I feel like you need to have trans writers and voices
• 28:43
  being able to speak to what that would feel like and be like
• 28:47
  because I think the idea of your ideals version is not your body
• 28:50
  for every single person, right? Would.
• 28:53
  Not be I feel like a likely true experience for trying to
• 28:56
  represent an entire community. Yeah, which?
• 28:58
  Absolutely do in fiction in any way, no, but.
• 29:02
  You can at least do it better. Yeah, people.
• 29:04
  Do better. But also like every if every non
• 29:06
  binary storm cast is androgynous right?
• 29:08
  That's also not a true identity or like a replicate of right?
• 29:12
  But still is true for some folks.
• 29:15
  So like, I think that's super cool and that'd be really cool
• 29:18
  to be explored and something that should be explored by folks
• 29:20
  who live that identity and can be the truest like version of
• 29:25
  sharing their own like and let it be personal.
• 29:27
  Like what do you want as the creator?
• 29:29
  And like, what does that feel like?
• 29:31
  That beats ass. I'm really glad.
• 29:32
  And they don't even let ladies be.
• 29:34
  The crazy. Reason.
• 29:35
  The other one, and this one literally has a canonically.
• 29:38
  Right. It's not hard.
• 29:40
  Right, this is probably a good way to segue into I don't want
• 29:43
  to spend a lot of the episode on it because we're not a 40K
• 29:45
  podcast, but I do want to briefly.
• 29:47
  If you are familiar with Warhammer in general and you are
• 29:50
  probably more familiar with Warhammer 40K, then you are
• 29:52
  probably familiar with Space Marines because Space Marines
• 29:55
  are 40K is equivalent of what Stormcast are.
• 29:58
  They are like meta humans who are in service to the, like,
• 30:04
  leader of humans, basically. That is where the similarities
• 30:09
  end. And so if you, dear listener,
• 30:12
  are familiar with Space Marines, I just want to briefly because I
• 30:15
  see it all the goddamn time, especially when Age of Sigmar
• 30:18
  was young and there are a lot of people who are still bitter
• 30:19
  about the old world. The term Sigmarine got thrown
• 30:22
  around last Sigmar Marine. Yeah.
• 30:25
  And. Listen, I always love a
• 30:28
  Portmanto. Thank you.
• 30:29
  Oh. My God, Delta, you.
• 30:33
  Know me, I always love the portmanteau.
• 30:36
  So in that way, I do love a Portman too.
• 30:38
  Simultaneously gross. Right.
• 30:41
  So real, just briefly, storm cast Space Marines both exist in
• 30:47
  the similarities they share are for product reasons, they're for
• 30:52
  business reasons. Really.
• 30:53
  Yeah. Storm Cast and Space Marines
• 30:55
  both have big flat panels of armor that are mostly in primary
• 31:00
  colors, which. Would explain why my roommate
• 31:02
  saw it and thought Space Marine. Yeah.
• 31:03
  Yeah, and they always have, like when you are building the model,
• 31:08
  they always come with an option to have a helmeted face so that
• 31:11
  you don't have to learn how to paint skin because it's really
• 31:14
  hard to paint skin. So from a product perspective,
• 31:18
  Games Workshop has these two ranges of miniatures that if you
• 31:21
  want to get into their games, you can slap one solid coat of
• 31:25
  blue on them and they look fine. Yeah, that's a really good
• 31:29
  beginner. Yeah, literally what was used
• 31:32
  for doing Yeah. Exactly, it's designed for that.
• 31:36
  You've got your simpler troops. You can buy a unit of like basic
• 31:40
  storm cast troops and just paint them completely solid gold and
• 31:45
  they look fine. But then they're each range also
• 31:48
  has more complex miniatures so that if you did start with those
• 31:51
  like easy to paint miniatures, you can grow your skills as you
• 31:53
  grow up. That's a really good like
• 31:56
  product and marketing and synergy, and that is the entire
• 31:59
  reason that star cast and Space Marines have anything in common,
• 32:02
  because that's the end of it from a narrative perspective.
• 32:06
  Yeah. In contrast, 40K is a grim dark
• 32:08
  universe. It originated the term really.
• 32:11
  Yeah, I think you said before and I.
• 32:13
  Forgot. Yeah, the the intro line to
• 32:15
  every 40K novel is in the grim darkness of the far future.
• 32:17
  There is only war, and it has been since the series, since the
• 32:21
  setting launched. I.
• 32:22
  Love learning where Origins awards.
• 32:24
  Come from right And so everything sucks in 40K and
• 32:28
  that's the. Point.
• 32:29
  Yeah, and it always will. It's it's a, it is a like zombie
• 32:33
  narrative where there's no chance of a cure, right.
• 32:35
  And you can tell really interesting stories in that kind
• 32:37
  of setting, but that informs what your characters are going
• 32:42
  to be like. So like, in contrast to storm
• 32:44
  cast, Space Marines are taken as children.
• 32:46
  They're indoctrinated into the ideals of the Imperium, which is
• 32:50
  mostly fascism. The Imperium is explicitly
• 32:52
  fascist. They worship the corpse of the
• 32:55
  Emperor of Mankind. Yep, who they believe to be a
• 32:58
  literal God. He's our Sigmar equivalent,
• 33:01
  except he sucks ass and everyone hates him except for humans.
• 33:05
  Because they are taught to worship him.
• 33:07
  They're indoctrinated to worship him.
• 33:08
  Like I said, Space Marines are taking his children.
• 33:10
  They're indoctrinated. They are pumped full of steroids
• 33:12
  and hormones and biological augmentations to become the meta
• 33:16
  humans they're not like rebuilt from their soul.
• 33:18
  It's almost the exact opposite where their individuality is
• 33:21
  repressed so they can be more perfect weapons.
• 33:25
  Good Lord. Yeah.
• 33:26
  And then the stories that you, and so consequentially the
• 33:29
  stories that you can tell with Space Marines are very similar
• 33:31
  to the stories you can tell with like Star Wars clone troopers,
• 33:34
  right? Where you have this tabula rasa
• 33:37
  of a person who is then put into a complicated world and have
• 33:41
  means and ability to express themselves outside of the like
• 33:45
  intent decided for them. It is a very different approach
• 33:51
  to like said Stormcast, who are interesting partially because
• 33:54
  they aren't a blank slate. They enter the service of Sigmar
• 33:59
  like Storm Cast, having lived a full life.
• 34:01
  Yeah. Well, a full life cut short, but
• 34:02
  a life in which they, I'm assuming, underneath their
• 34:06
  shoulder. What if a kid?
• 34:08
  We'd know of one person who was storm casted after dying as a
• 34:12
  child, but they don't come up much because like, that's
• 34:15
  obviously kind of a weird thing to yeah.
• 34:18
  In a world that is so horrible like that, and we know storm
• 34:23
  casts are picked because they died fighting against this
• 34:27
  horrible thing, I think acknowledging that young people
• 34:31
  in those situations also are not immune to the realities of it.
• 34:37
  Absolutely. Very interesting.
• 34:39
  Absolutely. So just to cut it off of the
• 34:41
  past. But also if the alternative is
• 34:42
  they go. To Nagash.
• 34:45
  Thank you, Nagash. Oh yeah, for sure.
• 34:48
  Let's close with you be picking the kid to join your spacer
• 34:52
  means, goddamn it. I mean, yeah, to join your.
• 34:55
  Your warriors, Yeah. Because otherwise, well, they
• 34:58
  get the criteria. And also the alternative is
• 35:01
  Nagash, Yeah. So yeah.
• 35:03
  So. Very, very different
• 35:04
  circumstances, yes. Absolutely.
• 35:06
  So yeah, just to not a 40K podcast, but just to cut it out,
• 35:09
  just to cut it off of the past. Like Space Marines, like also
• 35:14
  space Marines are by and large extremely evil.
• 35:17
  They are. They're the military force of a
• 35:19
  fascist empire. Like they suck, but everybody in
• 35:22
  40K sucks. That's the standard.
• 35:23
  So usually interesting stories about Space Marines is how they
• 35:26
  learned to not suck and usually die as a consequence.
• 35:29
  Of course, because it's a yeah, it's a grim dark universe.
• 35:32
  Hope doesn't make it out alive. No, but storm cast aren't that
• 35:36
  that. That's kind of the point of this
• 35:38
  tangent is that storm cast are allowed to tell other stories
• 35:41
  because that's not what they are.
• 35:42
  Cool. Yeah.
• 35:44
  So let's talk about more of what storm cast are.
• 35:48
  After storm cast are remade, they wake up on the anvil and
• 35:52
  they go into training. You do not have to have been a
• 35:55
  soldier to be remade as a storm cast.
• 35:57
  And so most storm cast need to just like, learn how to fight
• 36:00
  after they're woke it up. The official term for being
• 36:03
  turned into a storm cast is being reforged.
• 36:06
  Yeah, you're very cool. You're reforged upon the anvil.
• 36:11
  You were forged for the first time and you lived that life,
• 36:14
  and now you have been reforged as Stormcast.
• 36:17
  Also, every time a Stormcast dies, they're reforged.
• 36:20
  That's the process of being like remade upon the anvil.
• 36:23
  Yeah. Stormcast train on Azir.
• 36:26
  There's a whole huge like military traded complex on Azir
• 36:29
  basically for Stormcast to teach them how to like function and
• 36:34
  fight as a cohesive army. Stormcast biggest are the
• 36:38
  biggest disadvantage fighting cast the first time is that if
• 36:40
  you kill a demon it goes back to the plane of chaos and then it
• 36:43
  comes back right? You can't kill a demon
• 36:46
  permanently. Monsters going back to Tartarus
• 36:48
  in the Percy Jackson books, yeah.
• 36:49
  Same thing happens to Stormcast. Now they're on an evil playing
• 36:54
  or they're on an even playing field.
• 36:56
  And so Stormcast train. And then this is really cool
• 37:00
  things about Stormcast. They don't open the gates of his
• 37:04
  ear. It's the last safe bastion.
• 37:06
  You can't just like open that up to potential chaos corruption.
• 37:10
  So when storm casts are deployed to a fight and we get a blitz of
• 37:15
  storm cast at the end of the age of Chaos.
• 37:18
  Like the the heralding of the age of Sigmar is like every
• 37:21
  storm cast that then exists. Like arriving to the fight, and
• 37:25
  they arrive to the fight literally tossed as lightning
• 37:30
  bolts from Sigmar's own hand. Storm cast have lightning in
• 37:39
  their soul hard. Out.
• 37:40
  Ponies rest. Damn lightning in their soul.
• 37:44
  Yeah. A storm cast can ride a
• 37:47
  lightning bolt as you'd ride a train.
• 37:49
  Like, dude, OK, yeah. Someone just like all right,
• 37:53
  time to write and figure out the lore for Sigmar is like elite
• 37:56
  fighting force. All right, do a line of cocaine.
• 37:58
  OK, I'm ready, let's do it. What's the coolest shit you
• 38:02
  liked as a kid? Just the image of like a force
• 38:07
  of chaos warriors descending upon a town and there is just a
• 38:10
  monumentous crack of Thunder accompanied by a lightning bolt
• 38:14
  that hits the earth and where it leaves scorch barks storm cast
• 38:20
  are there and ready to push back there's.
• 38:23
  Like Thor showing up in the MCU? Yeah, damn, that's.
• 38:26
  Really. Cool.
• 38:27
  It's so good. The same thing like happens in
• 38:31
  reverse. When storm cast dies, their soul
• 38:34
  returns to lightning and they literally shoot back up into his
• 38:37
  ear as lightning bolts. Right?
• 38:40
  Some storm cast. It varies from storm cast to
• 38:43
  storm cast. There's a lot of like quirks in
• 38:45
  the reforging process. Some storm cast erupt so
• 38:49
  violently when they die that it can like hurt the enemies around
• 38:52
  them. Oh my.
• 38:53
  It was a move you can get in Haiti's like a boon called like
• 38:57
  vengeance. And if when you get injured, it
• 38:59
  sends a lightning blast out, that like, hurts the interface
• 39:02
  around you. I stacked that bad boy so hard.
• 39:07
  But the only downside to this is that storm cast can't willingly
• 39:11
  travel back to Azir by lightning vault.
• 39:14
  Generally the only way for a starfest to get back is to like
• 39:17
  find a realm gate that can get them back to Azir.
• 39:20
  Or die or die. They'll wake up.
• 39:23
  They'll wake up on the anvil. It's.
• 39:24
  Fine, they'll be fine. Yeah, a little bit like.
• 39:27
  Oh one great. Yeah, there are a lot of it.
• 39:29
  Sounds like. So are you, are you leaving?
• 39:31
  It's like, yeah, I guess it's like the the dramatic arrival in
• 39:37
  villages, like. OK, so where's the nearest
• 39:39
  store? I guess I'll walk.
• 39:41
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 39:43
  There's a lot of instances of because even though Sigma had a
• 39:46
  long time to build them up, there's still not a ton of storm
• 39:49
  casts. Like only some people can be
• 39:52
  picked for it. You only.
• 39:53
  Pick certain people and not everybody survives the forging
• 39:55
  process. Absolutely, absolutely.
• 39:58
  And so there are a lot of instances of like, OK, what's
• 40:02
  the bare minimum number of storm cast?
• 40:04
  We need to like, fix this problem to break the siege, to
• 40:08
  like fight back against this force and.
• 40:12
  Like we're going to send exactly that many and no more because
• 40:15
  they will do the job and they will die to a man.
• 40:18
  And that's like the ideal like. It's like.
• 40:21
  Working for an understaffed retail.
• 40:23
  Department. Yeah, honestly.
• 40:26
  It's Black Friday. All that being said, we we've
• 40:30
  had a little bit of a heroic high here.
• 40:33
  I'm going to bring us a little bit down.
• 40:35
  Yeah. Not all is well with the process
• 40:39
  of reforging. OK, so we we've talked about the
• 40:44
  core concept, right? Stormcast goes down, they fight
• 40:46
  hard, they die. They go back to the Anvil,
• 40:48
  they're remade, they do it all again.
• 40:50
  How many times can the soul handle having that done?
• 40:53
  Hey, you've got it. So Stormcast are functionally
• 40:58
  immortal, but any creature, any creature with a soul, when it
• 41:03
  dies, is going to sustain damage to their soul.
• 41:06
  Yeah. That's just a consequence of
• 41:08
  dying, Yeah. Most people only die once.
• 41:12
  So it's not, yeah, it's not generally a thing that is very
• 41:16
  impactful. But when you are remaking a
• 41:20
  person from their soul every time they die, it is like trying
• 41:24
  to stretch less and less of a sheet over the same like amount
• 41:28
  of space every time. Yes.
• 41:31
  Yeah. So hey.
• 41:34
  I know who someone we can talk to you about fucking with souls.
• 41:38
  Every time a storm cast dies it takes something from them and
• 41:43
  that can be small, like not remembering a face or a name, or
• 41:51
  it can be a lot bigger. It kind of depends on the
• 41:54
  severity of how they died and how many times it's been storm
• 41:59
  cast who go through it too much. Call it being lost to the storm
• 42:05
  because right you. Know what?
• 42:08
  Listen, I feel like early on there were a lot of, hey, this
• 42:11
  name kind of sucks. But recently there's been a run
• 42:14
  of like, wow, what a yeah, what a good title, right?
• 42:17
  What a good collection of proper nouns all together.
• 42:20
  Right. A storm cast who is lost to the
• 42:24
  storm has forgotten everything except for how to fight.
• 42:30
  That's another little bevel to Sigmar as a person.
• 42:34
  Is that through? Yeah, through there's.
• 42:37
  No retirement. No.
• 42:39
  There's no point where if you die again, you lose everything,
• 42:42
  so we'll keep you somewhere else.
• 42:44
  Reforging the process itself is also seemingly designed to
• 42:50
  preserve the part of you that knows how to fight.
• 42:54
  So there were things that were prioritized.
• 42:57
  Again. You don't lose your fighting
• 42:59
  skills, right? Again, it it makes sense, but
• 43:02
  it's it's a little bevel there to.
• 43:03
  Eventually lose what made you. You yes, which is interesting
• 43:08
  because remembered Stormcaster picked for what makes them them
• 43:12
  yeah, it's kind of a So I'll cut to the the note I have at the
• 43:17
  end here it's not a secret amongst the AOS community.
• 43:22
  It's called the reforging flaw officially yeah, the reforging
• 43:25
  flaw is a metaphor for like the PTSD experience the dehumanizing
• 43:30
  nature of war where you never a storm cast never stops being an
• 43:34
  effective soldier. But the things that made them
• 43:39
  able to be a good soldier be a good person in the 1st place do
• 43:44
  get lost. That's the price they pay for
• 43:47
  trying to build the better world that they want.
• 43:51
  Damn. Yeah, right.
• 43:53
  Yeah, OK. What happens when like the storm
• 43:58
  has like, lost to the storm? Like what?
• 44:00
  It depends. Interesting.
• 44:02
  Yeah. So the early consequences of the
• 44:07
  reforming flaw can be like, you lose a little bit of yourself,
• 44:10
  but it also makes you kind of weird.
• 44:14
  Like I said, messing with souls is already a little bit of a
• 44:17
  profane art, even if you're doing it for a good purpose.
• 44:20
  So Stormcast will get very weird imperfections if they're like
• 44:24
  when they're remade. In fact, there is a official Age
• 44:29
  of Sigmar tabletop RPG called Soul Bound.
• 44:33
  Great name. Yeah.
• 44:34
  If you play a storm cast character in Soul Bound, it has
• 44:36
  a table of reforging flaws that you can come back with.
• 44:39
  Hey, so cool. Do you pick or do you roll?
• 44:41
  You roll. That makes more sense.
• 44:43
  They don't pick what they lost. No, your eyes are filled with
• 44:46
  storm clouds. Rain can't touch you is one of
• 44:51
  them, which is so haunting. Yeah, right.
• 44:56
  There's a lot of stuff that can go like really weird with
• 44:59
  reforging, but the end consequences kind of.
• 45:04
  There's kind of two things that happened to a stormcaster reform
• 45:07
  just too much. So the first is the good ending.
• 45:11
  If a Stormcasters reform so much that they are no longer a
• 45:16
  reliable soldier outside of pure compatibility, so like they
• 45:20
  don't take orders well, they don't remember like what they're
• 45:22
  supposed to be doing then often what happens is you made a joke
• 45:26
  about no retirement homes earlier, which isn't actually
• 45:28
  strictly true. There are places in Azir that
• 45:32
  Sigmar has erected called the Bleak Citadels.
• 45:36
  OK, man, maybe we'll talk about branding.
• 45:37
  Yeah, that I don't think that's their official, Dave.
• 45:40
  Actually, I think that's just what the Storm cast call them.
• 45:43
  OK, that makes sense for the strong class to.
• 45:44
  Yeah. Storm cast can't probably die.
• 45:48
  You can't just like, send a storm cast to rest.
• 45:51
  So one who has reforged too much often get sent to the Bleak
• 45:54
  Citadel's as kind of a retirement home, or a
• 45:59
  combination of a retirement home and an asylum.
• 46:01
  That's what I was thinking, because at that point you've
• 46:04
  lost anything. There's nothing left for you
• 46:07
  except for combat. You can't even like enjoy a
• 46:11
  hobby anymore. Yeah, a lot of the Bleak
• 46:14
  Citadel's are just a bunch of storm cast just kind of staring
• 46:18
  off into space, so much of themselves lost that they don't
• 46:21
  even have intent anymore unless there's someone to like, yell at
• 46:25
  them to fight basically, which is not great.
• 46:31
  They're often portrayed as kind of stoic monasteries, storm
• 46:34
  casts who are closer to the storm, kind of being shepherded
• 46:37
  by ones who are a little bit further back, ones who still
• 46:40
  have enough of their wits to self direct.
• 46:43
  But it's ultimately a a pretty bleak fitting the existence
• 46:49
  that's the good ending for if you reforge too many times.
• 46:55
  The worst ending is if if you get too close to the storm and
• 46:59
  then you reforge more, eventually there's just not
• 47:04
  enough of you left. Yeah, to like manifest a body
• 47:09
  again. You arrive back at the anvil not
• 47:12
  as yourself, even a very flawed version of yourself, but you re
• 47:17
  manifest on the annual as something called a Geist is.
• 47:22
  There a visual of a Geist. There is not a visual of a Geist
• 47:24
  unfortunately, right? Wait, like, right.
• 47:26
  OK. Like in general.
• 47:27
  I thought you meant for a second.
• 47:28
  I was like, wait, you didn't add 1?
• 47:30
  And I'm like, Oh no, you mean no, we don't.
• 47:31
  We don't really know what Geists are like.
• 47:34
  Because it's such a closely guarded secret, Sigma does not
• 47:36
  want that information getting out to the public.
• 47:39
  They are basically formless. The only thing that's left of
• 47:41
  them is that tiny spark of Sigmar soul and lightning.
• 47:46
  Yeah, this. Is kind of OK.
• 47:49
  This is not what it is. I just read a I have a novel
• 47:54
  called up here, I think it's downstairs actually called
• 47:57
  Halloween and it's super cute. It's very fun.
• 48:00
  I highly recommend. Won't talk about it right now,
• 48:02
  but the there's like a Halloween world, like a Halloween
• 48:07
  hellscape essentially and a bunch of creatures come out.
• 48:09
  One of the creatures are these like bats that are just big
• 48:12
  fuzzy things with little bat wings and there's one big eye.
• 48:15
  So I am picturing. That.
• 48:17
  So like just but made of light. That is not it at all.
• 48:22
  But that is so. There's no canonical image that
• 48:24
  my brain has decided it's of lightning bat.
• 48:27
  With one big storm cloud eye. We we know, like I said, they're
• 48:32
  basically formless lightning elementals.
• 48:34
  Any sense of who they were before is gone, but this ability
• 48:40
  to fight still there and now they have no, they have nothing
• 48:43
  left to cling to of that like camaraderie or knowing who their
• 48:47
  enemy is. A lightning guy is immensely
• 48:50
  dangerous. They're just a force of nature
• 48:52
  at that point. They're.
• 48:53
  Just a storm. Yeah, yeah, completely lost to
• 48:56
  the storm. But they still can't die.
• 48:59
  Could you? Maybe take back your.
• 49:03
  Little. Divinity.
• 49:05
  There's no way to do it that we're aware of.
• 49:07
  What happens to most of them is they get sealed.
• 49:10
  You just have to contain them in something.
• 49:13
  Put them in a bottle. I mean, a little, yeah, no.
• 49:16
  It's just like string of bottles and they're glowing and it's
• 49:19
  like storm. Guys.
• 49:22
  But think of the ambience. Here's a little peek into the
• 49:26
  general like foreboding, but storm cast tend to approach the
• 49:29
  world from a lot of them get sealed into statues that are who
• 49:37
  they were in life, like statues of themselves.
• 49:40
  And those statues are prominently displayed on the
• 49:44
  streets of Azirheim, the capital city of Azir, as a reminder of
• 49:50
  what the cost of not like winning this war is, that even
• 49:54
  those who can't permanently die still sacrifice for this
• 49:59
  victory. I don't hate.
• 50:02
  That Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's foreboding.
• 50:05
  It's in your. Heim, where it's the only place
• 50:07
  untouched by this, and it's probably easy for the citizens
• 50:11
  who live there to get to act like it doesn't matter.
• 50:13
  Absolutely. And so.
• 50:14
  That real and stark reminder of the reality that they don't have
• 50:19
  to face, I think, is actually pretty good.
• 50:23
  Yeah, no, it's, it's good. It's poignant.
• 50:25
  It's just woof. But like, woof listen, I do.
• 50:31
  I imagine storm casts know that they are going to get one or the
• 50:34
  other ending regardless, and I wonder if there's a general
• 50:36
  preference. I think I'd rather get sealed in
• 50:39
  a statue. Of who it.
• 50:40
  Used to be, yeah. Like honestly.
• 50:43
  Most it seems like most storm casts just kind of try not to
• 50:46
  think about it. Yeah, like we do with death.
• 50:48
  Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, we're just trying not to
• 50:50
  think about. That we're going to win this war
• 50:52
  before it gets to that point. And I might not remember
• 50:54
  everything, but yeah, I'll be there.
• 50:56
  I'll be me still. I'll be me and I've got to see
• 50:58
  our victory. Yes, yeah, it's heavy.
• 51:01
  It's heavy. And that's like I said that.
• 51:03
  That's in the cocaine war off. Yeah, that that kind of double
• 51:08
  edged gift of immortality of you are immortal and with everything
• 51:13
  that that brings with it. You are immortal, but you are
• 51:15
  not a God. No, absolutely.
• 51:17
  Storm cast get sent down into the realms.
• 51:20
  The first wave of storm cast arriving in the realms sparks
• 51:23
  what a universe is known as the Realm Gate War.
• 51:27
  What a good name right? Sigmar knows that controlling
• 51:29
  the Realm Gates is the key to denying Chaos's victory.
• 51:33
  Chaos's ultimate goal is to corrupt the Realm gates.
• 51:35
  Yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, absolutely.
• 51:40
  Black. Hole yeah and the key to
• 51:41
  Archaeon's ultimate victory was controlling the all gates the
• 51:44
  the gates that led to the realms from the all points yeah and so
• 51:48
  the realm gate wars is exactly what it sounds like directed
• 51:51
  assaults on big important realm gates basically every storm
• 51:55
  casted existence pulling a blitz on just every important realm
• 51:59
  gate they could find that's. Really cool.
• 52:02
  Oh yeah, kicks ass. Storm cast.
• 52:05
  Find Gorka Morka. He's chilling.
• 52:10
  Gorka, Morka and the people who follow.
• 52:11
  Him What does chilling look like for Gorka Morka?
• 52:13
  Fighting Gorka, Morka and the people who follow him have been
• 52:18
  doing basically fine during the Age of Chaos.
• 52:20
  It sucks more than it used to, but they are generally OK with
• 52:23
  conflict. The orcs are fine.
• 52:25
  The goblins are fine. They don't hang out.
• 52:27
  Yeah, they don't hang out anymore, but they're generally
• 52:29
  fine. They go looking for the elves
• 52:32
  and they can't find them. We're not sure where.
• 52:35
  No. Yeah, we're not.
• 52:36
  Well, They they find elves. Sorry.
• 52:37
  They're going for the elven gods.
• 52:39
  And they can't find them. Yeah.
• 52:40
  Yeah, they find elves. They can't find Tyrion and
• 52:42
  Techless but and they can't find like Marathi and Mullerian have
• 52:46
  spent the last 500 years being extremely good and not very
• 52:50
  found. Yeah, that makes sense for them,
• 52:51
  honestly. On brand, no notes.
• 52:53
  Yep. Together too, though, yeah.
• 52:56
  Drangni's still in his ear. He's.
• 52:58
  He's helping with the Anvil. Like, this was as much his
• 53:00
  project as it was Sigmar's, honestly.
• 53:02
  I mean, he had the tech that made it possible.
• 53:04
  My favorite is when Stormcast go to Shayish.
• 53:10
  So Nagash's plan to just like, pull his forces back and, like,
• 53:14
  board up the windows to Shayish and pretend like no one's home,
• 53:17
  basically. Just like concentrate all his
• 53:19
  power on keeping the realm of death.
• 53:21
  Yeah, keeping the realm of death free from chaos if nowhere else
• 53:26
  was. Yeah.
• 53:27
  Failed. Yeah, As soon as Archaon could
• 53:29
  direct his full force on Shayish, it fell like everywhere
• 53:33
  else. Interesting.
• 53:34
  Is it because he, Sigmar, was literally able to seal it off in
• 53:38
  a way that like the other gods weren't able to do?
• 53:41
  Yes. Or also because there were no
• 53:43
  chaos already there, correct? That's it.
• 53:45
  OK. Yeah, there's no chaos on his
• 53:47
  ear, and Sigmar sealed the gate behind him.
• 53:51
  He also went in wrecked shop in Shayisha.
• 53:52
  Correct. Yep.
• 53:53
  So I bet that didn't help the whole no one's.
• 53:55
  Home. Yep.
• 53:56
  He stole Catacros his soul, Yeah.
• 53:58
  That's right, he like, really did.
• 53:59
  Fuck Yeah, I. Forgot.
• 54:01
  Yeah. Yep, Catacros is not a storm
• 54:03
  cast. Catacros got like put in a jar
• 54:05
  and thrown in the ocean basically just to spite Nagash.
• 54:11
  Yeah, he would not. Yeah, they would not make a
• 54:12
  good. Storm cast No, I don't think
• 54:14
  they would. Absolutely not.
• 54:16
  Archaeon beats the shit out of Nagash.
• 54:18
  He destroys his mortal form or like his physical body is.
• 54:23
  No, there's no accuracy in calling any part of Nagash
• 54:25
  mortal. But he he destroys Nagash's
• 54:28
  physical body and Nagash's like disciples take the pieces of
• 54:33
  Nagash's body and just like split.
• 54:37
  Just skip down. Yeah, all of the realms operate
• 54:40
  where the magic of that realm is strongest, at the edges.
• 54:44
  So Nikesh's disciples take his remains and they take them to
• 54:47
  the various edges of the realm. It makes it harder for anyone to
• 54:50
  try and come and get all pieces of him and it helps him
• 54:52
  regenerate faster because Shayishi and magic Yeah storm
• 54:56
  cast arrive in Shayish as like Nagash is starting to reform.
• 55:00
  He's still he's still very weak. If the if when Sigmar let Nagash
• 55:05
  out, he was trying to like play nice and be like look, I am I'm
• 55:11
  greeting you as an equal. Let's do this cooperation
• 55:13
  against chaos together. When Stormcast find the gash it
• 55:17
  is it is shotgun diplomacy. It is.
• 55:22
  You are still the God of the dead and you are going to push
• 55:25
  back chaos from your realm and we aren't going to fuck with
• 55:28
  with you while you're doing that.
• 55:30
  But we swear to God if you ever pull the battle of Burning skies
• 55:33
  again, we will chain your remains to a star.
• 55:36
  Like just no quarter. No like we are not playing nice
• 55:42
  anymore. You suck and we will replace you
• 55:45
  if we have to. It's been. 500 years?
• 55:50
  Was there not also a side plan on replacing the gash?
• 55:54
  Like probably. Surely if you're already
• 55:58
  collecting the souls of those who have died, I think the soul
• 56:01
  of immortal who has died would make a pretty good God of the
• 56:03
  dead, personally Speaking of the endless.
• 56:09
  Yeah. Death, the manifestation of
• 56:11
  lives, one day alive every 100 years, just to remember why
• 56:15
  living things are afraid of her. That's a great policy.
• 56:19
  Yeah, I feel like it should be. Required.
• 56:22
  We are going to start to see, and we're going to talk about it
• 56:24
  more as we talk more about the Age of Sigmar.
• 56:26
  But here we start to see the emergence of what in the Age of
• 56:29
  Sigmar are known as the Grand Alliances.
• 56:32
  These are not like literal formal alliances.
• 56:34
  There's no paperwork involved. But in the modern day of Age of
• 56:37
  Sigmar, all the factions that we see tend to align themselves
• 56:42
  with one of four kind of core philosophies.
• 56:45
  Basically. This is where we start to see
• 56:47
  that emerge. The Grand Alliance of order is
• 56:50
  where Sigmar is. It's where storm casts are.
• 56:53
  We're going to see like the dwarves and whatnot re align
• 56:57
  with that. The Cara drawn from before Order
• 57:01
  does not mean good. The Cara drawn are hyper
• 57:05
  capitalist. Sky pirates are order because
• 57:09
  you need order to do commerce. Yeah, Grand Alliance chaos is
• 57:13
  self-explanatory. It's the Chaos Gods and their
• 57:16
  followers. Grand Alliance death is Nagash
• 57:20
  and all his skeleton friends, and Grand Alliance destruction
• 57:23
  is Gorkamorca and the orcs and the ogres and the giants.
• 57:28
  Interesting. OK, Yeah.
• 57:30
  They don't rejoin the pantheon they've been having and find
• 57:33
  enough time and frankly, they're not super chill with because
• 57:38
  they get the sense that maybe Sigmar is going to be a little
• 57:41
  bit more tight leashed than he was during the age of Myth and
• 57:44
  they're not super vibing with that.
• 57:46
  That makes sense. They're just kind of doing their
• 57:48
  own thing. But so we're going to talk about
• 57:51
  Grand Alliances in the future. It's often it's very common for
• 57:53
  me to refer to things by like Grand Alliance.
• 57:56
  This has a common thing behind it.
• 57:58
  Like this is a certain characteristic of Grand
• 58:00
  Alliance. So I want to mention that now.
• 58:01
  Thank you. Yeah.
• 58:03
  But real quick, realm gate wars, Stormcast hit the Ignis gate,
• 58:08
  the gate that they retreated through from actually into back
• 58:14
  into his ear at the end of the Battle of burning skies.
• 58:16
  They take it back. And part of the Stormcast
• 58:20
  strategy is Stormcast are still few.
• 58:23
  If they have to fight this war by themselves, they're never
• 58:26
  going to win. They need allies, yes.
• 58:28
  So Stormcast take important realm gates and they found
• 58:33
  cities on them? Yeah, good.
• 58:37
  That's very. Good.
• 58:38
  Yeah. So Stormcast grab the Ignis
• 58:41
  Gate. They lead humans from Azir
• 58:44
  through it, and they found the City of Hammer Hall.
• 58:49
  They don't actually found the City of Hammer Hall on the Ignis
• 58:51
  Gate, which is kind of funny. They go to, I can never remember
• 58:56
  what it's called because it's eventually going to be called
• 58:58
  the Hammer Hall Gate, but they, they like escort those humans
• 59:03
  basically to what will become known as the Hammer Hall Gate.
• 59:06
  And they found Hammer Hall there.
• 59:08
  The Hammer Hall gate leads between Axi and Guy Ran the
• 59:11
  realm of life. And so Hammer Hall has two
• 59:16
  sides. The city of Hammer Hall spans
• 59:19
  from Axi to Guy Ran with the realm gate in the middle of it.
• 59:24
  That's really cool. It's very cool in the modern day
• 59:28
  post like Realmgate wars. Hammer Hall is the largest human
• 59:32
  settlement outside of Azir. It is basically the capital of
• 59:36
  like Sigmar's forces outside of Azir and it has a stable human
• 59:41
  dwarf health population. Like all all are welcome in
• 59:44
  Hammer Hall. Basically that's the idea we
• 59:46
  still have to work together. Like the battle of burning skies
• 59:49
  did not teach Sigmar. Like, oh, I was wrong to trust
• 59:51
  others. It taught him.
• 59:53
  I should have been more trusting.
• 59:54
  We should have made these plans together.
• 59:56
  This should have been like. This really needed to have been
• 59:59
  a group project. Yes, absolutely.
• 1:00:01
  They like they. Rely everybody like as in we all
• 1:00:04
  hang out at my house and have chips and work on it together,
• 1:00:07
  not just assume everyone else is doing their part.
• 1:00:09
  At their own house? Yep, Storm cast hit Guy Rand.
• 1:00:12
  Obviously they want to liberate Guy Rand to get like food and
• 1:00:16
  medicine back to the populace. Really.
• 1:00:18
  Got to deal with the life place where we get our food.
• 1:00:23
  Sigmar specifically tasks a storm cast that I love to death.
• 1:00:27
  He's my favorite storm cast. A man named Gardas Steel soul
• 1:00:33
  specifically tasks him with finding Alario other storm casts
• 1:00:37
  are going to hit realm gates they're going to try and secure
• 1:00:39
  territory Goddess's job is to find the goddess of life and
• 1:00:43
  bring her like help her like get her back on her feet and then
• 1:00:47
  try and get her behind this like revolution movement he does he
• 1:00:51
  tracks down the lady of vines man's.
• 1:00:54
  React to this. Worried like she doesn't know if
• 1:00:57
  this is just another fucking chaos plot but. 500 years she's
• 1:01:02
  been protecting the pod. Yeah.
• 1:01:04
  Did I make a Rory Williams last Centurion and the oh God, what
• 1:01:12
  is the cube called? The big cube.
• 1:01:13
  They're going to trap the Doctor in it.
• 1:01:16
  The tesseract. That's.
• 1:01:18
  Rory Williams protected the Tesseract.
• 1:01:20
  For 1000 years. With Yeah, yeah, but gardas. 1
• 1:01:25
  of Gardas. That was a Doctor Who reference.
• 1:01:27
  Yeah, I. Know, you know, Felton and I
• 1:01:29
  know many listeners who know No, Well, no.
• 1:01:32
  But anyone who doesn't know, I like to say that's what that
• 1:01:35
  was, yeah. Going.
• 1:01:38
  On one of Gardas traits as a character is that he is
• 1:01:40
  particularly immune to chaos corruption.
• 1:01:42
  All storm caster immune to chaos corruption, but Gardas is so
• 1:01:46
  immune that he kind of cleanses it around himself.
• 1:01:49
  Which kicks, right? It's going to make sense why
• 1:01:53
  when we talk more specifically about him.
• 1:01:55
  I love Goddess so much. And so Goddess finds the Lady of
• 1:01:59
  Vines. He manages to convince her that
• 1:02:01
  he's an ally, partially because, like Chaos, corruption like
• 1:02:04
  peels away from him as he walks. Pretty good evidence.
• 1:02:09
  He and the Lady of Vines like fight off a like group of chaos
• 1:02:13
  warriors who were chasing the Lady of Vines and the act of
• 1:02:17
  fighting them off and life magic and like heavenly magic
• 1:02:21
  intermingling and purifying the area where they're fighting is
• 1:02:25
  enough to wake Alario from. Her soul.
• 1:02:28
  Yeah, Alario returns from her soul pod.
• 1:02:35
  Every time she goes into her soul pod and wakes, she comes
• 1:02:37
  out in a different season. When we last saw her, she was in
• 1:02:41
  spring growth and renewal, and like joy and like big things,
• 1:02:46
  she comes out of her soul pod this time in fall.
• 1:02:50
  Interesting. So it's not like the cyclical.
• 1:02:53
  Interesting. It's just.
• 1:02:53
  Different every. Time decay, Reaping war.
• 1:02:59
  This is an appropriate aesthetic to be.
• 1:03:01
  Bringing to. This table.
• 1:03:03
  Yes, war. She comes out in her most
• 1:03:05
  warlike form ever, ready to fight for what she needs to
• 1:03:10
  fight for. Hell yes.
• 1:03:12
  Right. I'll leave that for a second.
• 1:03:14
  We're going to talk real briefly, mostly because I have
• 1:03:17
  pictures to accompany them about some of the like organization of
• 1:03:20
  storm casts because I think it's interesting.
• 1:03:22
  Storm casts are organized in two main ways.
• 1:03:25
  Storm casts are organized by chamber, which is a description
• 1:03:30
  of function and host, which is a like philosophy that guides them
• 1:03:36
  basically. So you can have a host is
• 1:03:39
  generally a larger organization and it will have many chambers
• 1:03:43
  within it. So examples of notable Storm
• 1:03:48
  host, like I said, storm host is philosophy.
• 1:03:50
  This is like we have been recruited in a certain way or
• 1:03:53
  our job is a such a specific thing that we train like unique
• 1:03:56
  from other storm cast and we are organized around that.
• 1:04:00
  So the Hammers of Sigmar are the oldest Storm hosts.
• 1:04:03
  They were the first put together.
• 1:04:04
  These are the people Sigmar gathered during the Age of Myth
• 1:04:08
  who he thought were like notable enough even before Chaos reached
• 1:04:11
  the world to be Storm cast again.
• 1:04:12
  Yeah. Oh yeah, it's been a long time.
• 1:04:15
  Coming yes, they are the largest storm host because they are not
• 1:04:20
  exclusively that. If you don't get specialized
• 1:04:23
  into another host, basically you end up as a Hammer of Sigmar.
• 1:04:26
  They are generalists. They also have like all of the
• 1:04:31
  important named characters in the lore because they were the
• 1:04:34
  first first reforging. The animals of Helen Hammer are
• 1:04:38
  another strong host. They are not reforged from
• 1:04:41
  people who died during the Age of Chaos or the Age of Sigmar.
• 1:04:47
  They are reforged from people who were who died like earlier
• 1:04:51
  in the Age of Myth. They did not make the choice
• 1:04:53
  when they died. This is part of the group that
• 1:04:57
  Sigmar stole from Nakash when he went on a rampage there.
• 1:05:00
  Yeah the animals of Hell and Hammer Hammer are re forced from
• 1:05:05
  long dead souls stolen from Nakash.
• 1:05:07
  They generally have a kind of dark and brooding disposition
• 1:05:11
  about them. They've been dead for a while
• 1:05:14
  but they have a lot of old knowledge.
• 1:05:16
  They're kind of like the librarians of like the storm
• 1:05:19
  cast hosts. They have they have forgotten
• 1:05:22
  more than any of us will ever know right that's kind of the
• 1:05:24
  they're generally regarded as like tacticians amongst
• 1:05:27
  Stormcast and often the anvils will show up alongside other
• 1:05:32
  hosts to act as like command even if the rest of their like
• 1:05:36
  ground forces aren't there. That's.
• 1:05:38
  Really. Cool, right?
• 1:05:38
  I like them a lot, the hallowed nights.
• 1:05:42
  I like that term. Yeah, the Hallowed Knights are
• 1:05:44
  Goddess's host. They're the most faithful.
• 1:05:47
  They believe in Sigmar not only as they're like commander and
• 1:05:51
  the person who saved them from death, but as God.
• 1:05:54
  They like literally worship Sigmar in that like godly way.
• 1:05:56
  They're excellent at purging Chaos corruption.
• 1:05:58
  Because of that, they're overtly holy and they tend to take on
• 1:06:01
  missions that others won't touch.
• 1:06:03
  They're a little bit of a specialist chapter in that they
• 1:06:06
  are willing to, yes. Yeah, we're willing to venture
• 1:06:09
  into the worst places in the realms because through Sigmar
• 1:06:14
  all things are possible. The Astral Templars.
• 1:06:18
  I love the astral Templars. Right, The Astral Templars only
• 1:06:24
  recruit from one group of humans native to Gur who are like a
• 1:06:28
  barbarian tribe who managed to eke out survival during the Age
• 1:06:31
  of Chaos largely by being a barbarian tribe.
• 1:06:33
  They have kept kind of a big Viking energy all throughout the
• 1:06:38
  age of Yeah, all throughout the Age of Chaos.
• 1:06:41
  Going to war to protect self in home and country, reveling in
• 1:06:45
  the fighting as an act of like worship.
• 1:06:48
  Notably amongst storm cast. They are polytheistic.
• 1:06:52
  They do not worship Sigmar as the God, they worship him as one
• 1:06:55
  of many God and. He Yeah, yeah, there are
• 1:06:59
  several. Yeah.
• 1:07:00
  And as storm cast, they keep a lot of their like tribal
• 1:07:04
  traditions. As storm cast, if they have like
• 1:07:08
  free time, they will just go and hang out with their still living
• 1:07:11
  descendants in there, like barbarian tribes.
• 1:07:14
  Yeah, right. That's.
• 1:07:17
  Really cool. Right.
• 1:07:19
  They it's, it's a little bit of pragmatism too, because it's so
• 1:07:23
  easy for storm cast to get like dower, to get reflective about
• 1:07:27
  kind of the eternity waiting for them with these horrifying
• 1:07:30
  fights. And if they fall too much, what
• 1:07:32
  they will become. And the Astral Templars push
• 1:07:34
  back against that by embracing every moment is just like they
• 1:07:38
  would have done in life when their threat was death, right?
• 1:07:41
  They drink, they revel, they host parties in Azir High, but
• 1:07:46
  not a lot of storm casts at Ted because.
• 1:07:49
  Yeah. It's weird like that's you're
• 1:07:51
  weird at my party. They're just like, they're just
• 1:07:54
  big polytheistic like Viking Berserker Storm casts which
• 1:07:58
  kicks. Good.
• 1:08:00
  I love that. And then our.
• 1:08:05
  Oh, sigh. The Nights Excelsior.
• 1:08:09
  What the hell? So we saw a side of Storm of
• 1:08:14
  Sigmar right at the end of the Age of Myth when in retribution
• 1:08:19
  for Nakash turning on him at the Battle of Burning Skies, Sigmar
• 1:08:23
  did not make a tactical play to go through Shyesh.
• 1:08:26
  He did not, like, make a calculated decision to go do
• 1:08:29
  this thing. He just let himself run rampant
• 1:08:34
  out of spite. I'm sure there.
• 1:08:35
  Are occupants to that, but I will maintain no.
• 1:08:38
  No. Absolutely, Babe deserved it.
• 1:08:41
  All storm casts are, in a way, a reflection of Sigmar.
• 1:08:45
  The things he values are what gets you picked to be a Storm
• 1:08:48
  cast. Yeah, the Knights Excelsior or
• 1:08:50
  Storm cast or are Sigmar's rage. Interesting.
• 1:08:54
  OK. They are where?
• 1:08:55
  They come from. Anyone who died fighting chaos,
• 1:09:00
  who can't give it up. Oh, just the anger of it.
• 1:09:05
  Knights Excelsior do not build. They do not foster community.
• 1:09:09
  They do not protect. I don't want to hang out with.
• 1:09:11
  These they kill. They do not.
• 1:09:13
  They definitely aren't coming to these.
• 1:09:14
  Parties. Absolutely not.
• 1:09:17
  Knight Excelsior loves nothing more than destroying the enemies
• 1:09:20
  of Sigmar, fighting chaos wherever can be found, and
• 1:09:23
  they're bar for what is a like violation worthy of
• 1:09:27
  annihilation. Very low so we could trip over
• 1:09:31
  it. Yup, Yikes.
• 1:09:32
  Yup. Knights Excelsior aren't looked
• 1:09:35
  favorably upon by other chapters, no.
• 1:09:38
  I can't. Imagine they are a little bit of
• 1:09:42
  yeah, like Sigmar's kind of dirty, like secret.
• 1:09:47
  They're not secret. People know what the nights
• 1:09:49
  Excel CR are, but they're not something you brag about.
• 1:09:54
  Even people who like Sigmar worry about the nights excel CR
• 1:09:59
  because they are just uncompromising annihilators.
• 1:10:04
  This is bad news. They're rough.
• 1:10:06
  They're rough. Most storm hosts get assigned to
• 1:10:08
  a city where they think there might be some chaos corruption
• 1:10:11
  happening, and they try and root it out and protect the city and
• 1:10:14
  purify things that have been desecrated.
• 1:10:16
  The night's Excelsior burn it to the ground.
• 1:10:20
  Any chaos corruption is bad and anyone who knew about it, even
• 1:10:23
  if they weren't involved, is complicit.
• 1:10:27
  Feels like we shouldn't be sending those guys out.
• 1:10:30
  Correct feels. Like that's not helpful.
• 1:10:36
  Yeah, actually, you'd think but. What the fuck?
• 1:10:41
  Send her to the frontline when there's low risk of what?
• 1:10:45
  Friendly fire. I mean, yeah.
• 1:10:47
  Yeah. Yeah, like send them to all
• 1:10:49
  battlefield but not like a city to do a job.
• 1:10:52
  Yeah, it's kind of a if you pray for Storm cast aid, you hope you
• 1:10:58
  don't get the hood and. Kind of be very specific.
• 1:11:00
  Yeah, Excelsior, but those are examples of hosts.
• 1:11:06
  Like I said, that's a kind of philosophical thing.
• 1:11:07
  Every host contains chambers. That's more of a description of
• 1:11:10
  roll. The largest is the warrior
• 1:11:12
  chamber. If you and this is partially do
• 1:11:15
  reforging. So most storm caster, warrior
• 1:11:18
  chamber, that's just your big, you are wearing armor, we're
• 1:11:22
  going to hand you one of three melee weapons and you are going
• 1:11:24
  to go be in the warrior chamber. Foot soldiers, basic range
• 1:11:28
  units, some Wizards and priests, some Wizards.
• 1:11:32
  Yeah, they're unspecialized. They're just here after the
• 1:11:35
  Warrior Chamber. There's our first specialized
• 1:11:37
  chamber, the Vanguard chamber. That's going to be the guy on a
• 1:11:41
  Yeah, it's going to be the guy riding the Griffin.
• 1:11:43
  Really. Cool.
• 1:11:44
  Really cool, Griffin. The Vanguard are scouts and
• 1:11:47
  assassins. They often ride mounts native to
• 1:11:50
  Azir who have a trait called Riding the Winds Etheric, which
• 1:11:54
  basically means that they can just like dip back onto Azir
• 1:11:58
  during a movement, functionally letting them teleport very fast.
• 1:12:03
  Excellent scouts. Also some storm cats that spent
• 1:12:07
  a lot of time with mounts that can ride the winds of Theric a
• 1:12:10
  learn learn to ride the winds of Theric themselves.
• 1:12:13
  That's really cool. It's very cool.
• 1:12:17
  After the Vanguard Chamber, we have one of my favorites, the
• 1:12:20
  Sacrosanct Chamber. OK, this is.
• 1:12:22
  Cool. Yeah, that's that Lady shooting
• 1:12:24
  lightning in the background. Just complete absolute yeah.
• 1:12:30
  Yes, the Sacrosanct Chamber is technically an administrative
• 1:12:34
  chapter. They are researchers and like,
• 1:12:38
  officially their job is to help with the reforging process, to
• 1:12:42
  like recover as much of a person's soul as they can each
• 1:12:44
  time they're reforged. But there is a point we're going
• 1:12:48
  to talk about where things got dour enough or they got dire
• 1:12:50
  enough that Sigmar just needed everybody to the front and so he
• 1:12:55
  pulled the Sacrosanct Chamber into the field.
• 1:12:57
  They are universally extremely powerful, whispers even.
• 1:13:01
  They're like foot troops, are magically capable and good at
• 1:13:05
  spell casting, and they have the absolute best, like unique
• 1:13:09
  Wizards and stuff. Cool bar none.
• 1:13:11
  Eat your heart up, techless. Absolutely.
• 1:13:13
  Next is the extremist chamber, which is Dragons there.
• 1:13:18
  Is in fact Dragons. Here I am see, I am seeing the
• 1:13:22
  Dragons. I couldn't find, like, good
• 1:13:24
  artwork, so that's just an actual storm cast miniature.
• 1:13:27
  But yeah, the extremist chamber heavy cavalry, their shock Cav,
• 1:13:31
  their goal is to like blitz a location and then get out.
• 1:13:35
  They have formed a symbiotic bond with the children of
• 1:13:37
  Dracothian. Yeah, no.
• 1:13:39
  That's like really good. Like of course they.
• 1:13:41
  Do I was going to say. Like Wolf Riders and Elf Quest.
• 1:13:44
  Yeah, it's as Dracothian carried Sigmar in his initial journey
• 1:13:48
  through the Realms, Dracothian's children carry the storm cast to
• 1:13:51
  liberate them once more. I love that.
• 1:13:53
  It's very good. It's very good.
• 1:13:55
  And then we have another side. Yeah.
• 1:13:59
  Well, this guy. Looks like a.
• 1:14:00
  Bummer. Yeah, that's.
• 1:14:01
  Like a bummer zone. So remember when I talked about
• 1:14:04
  the Blake Citadel's? Yeah.
• 1:14:05
  Oh yeah. So this is actually a recent
• 1:14:08
  Laura development. Shit's got real bad even by the
• 1:14:13
  standards of like Age of Sigmar very recently, and has compelled
• 1:14:19
  Sigmar to OK sending storm cast close to the storm.
• 1:14:26
  Yeah, they need handlers. They need people to point them
• 1:14:30
  in the right direction so they know what they're doing, but
• 1:14:34
  they are often the most experienced storm cast in
• 1:14:37
  existence. They're going.
• 1:14:38
  To die one time to become a storm guys.
• 1:14:40
  Yeah, that is a very real possibility.
• 1:14:42
  Every time. This lab is a, they are called
• 1:14:46
  the newly formed Ruination Chamber.
• 1:14:49
  Yeah, and this guy's one of them.
• 1:14:51
  Yeah, it looks like same silhouette.
• 1:14:54
  Yeah, Ruination, Chamber, Stormcast do have some
• 1:14:59
  advantages. It's not all downsides.
• 1:15:01
  Again, they're extremely capable warriors because they have those
• 1:15:05
  instincts and those like habits forged to an absolute point
• 1:15:09
  through all of their service. Also, not having much of a soul
• 1:15:14
  left can be an advantage on a battlefield.
• 1:15:18
  A lot of harmful magics and like negative effects and stuff
• 1:15:23
  target the soul, and a lot of that stuff just washes off of
• 1:15:28
  Ruination Storm Cast. Yeah, specifically the thing
• 1:15:32
  that got Sigmar to pull them out is that a huge chunk of actually
• 1:15:36
  recently got like corrupted basically by Chaos magic and
• 1:15:40
  Ruination Storm Cast are the only people who can safely
• 1:15:43
  navigate it. Yeah, yeah, I can see.
• 1:15:48
  Yeah, I can't see anybody in here and actually got hit and
• 1:15:52
  this is all you. This is you already kind of have
• 1:15:54
  this thing. It's like, yeah, you got to make
• 1:15:56
  bad calls in a shitty war. Yeah, so that's the ruination
• 1:16:00
  chamber. It's rough out there.
• 1:16:03
  It's. Rough out there?
• 1:16:04
  Gang, but those are hosts and chambers.
• 1:16:06
  I'm a speed up our pace a little bit.
• 1:16:08
  I want to mention one more important thing that happens
• 1:16:10
  during the realm gate wars. We're going to be talking about
• 1:16:12
  the realm gate wars for a little bit more.
• 1:16:14
  Kind of the structure going forward is I want to kind of go
• 1:16:16
  by Grand Alliance. We're going to spend the Realm
• 1:16:18
  Gate Wars talking a lot about the members of Grand Alliance
• 1:16:20
  Order. Makes sense.
• 1:16:22
  And then we'll get into like, fun fact or spoiler notice, the
• 1:16:25
  thing after the Realmgate Wars is the Soul Wars.
• 1:16:29
  Oh shit, I wonder who's involved in the soul.
• 1:16:32
  Wars, the Soul Wars, and let's just really RIP that cover off
• 1:16:35
  the Necro Quake. What a stupid next to Sharknado.
• 1:16:43
  I heard the natural disaster of such a wacky ass name.
• 1:16:47
  And then following the necro, Quake is the necro.
• 1:16:49
  Quake, Tell Me to Sci-fi, July 2025.
• 1:16:53
  Following that is the Era of the Beast, which is where we're
• 1:16:56
  going to be talking about Grand Alliance destruction is is my
• 1:16:58
  intent, of course. It'd be their era, yeah.
• 1:17:01
  OK but one of the big things else that happens before we just
• 1:17:05
  get into my big long list of cool characters I love, one of
• 1:17:09
  the special missions that Sigmar sends the Hammers of Sigmar on
• 1:17:14
  is the Retrieval of Gomeraz. Cuz I remember at the battle of
• 1:17:19
  burning skies Sigmar tried to one shot Archaeon by just
• 1:17:23
  fucking lightspeed throwing it at him.
• 1:17:26
  Yep, not work. Nope.
• 1:17:29
  Archaeon read him like a book. But Gomeraz is a uniquely
• 1:17:33
  powerful holy artifact. There's no way that it, even if
• 1:17:36
  they tried to, like, store it in the realm of Chaos, it would
• 1:17:38
  have just ejected itself eventually.
• 1:17:41
  Absolutely. So they know it has to be.
• 1:17:43
  Yeah, they know it has to be somewhere in the realms
• 1:17:47
  eventually. Stormcast tracked the hammer
• 1:17:50
  down. They find it secured in a Chaos
• 1:17:55
  fortress that was built in Shaman specifically to house it.
• 1:17:59
  Yeah. Gamras was originally made by
• 1:18:01
  dwarves and it's metal, so it being kept in the dwarf and
• 1:18:05
  realm of metal is weirdly poignant.
• 1:18:07
  Yeah, and even though they have to hit the fortress multiple
• 1:18:12
  times, a lot of storm cast die in our reforge and have to come
• 1:18:15
  back, they do eventually managed to retrieve gamma rows and
• 1:18:19
  retrieve to Azir. We need that.
• 1:18:21
  Right, but Sigmar is not the person who's going to be
• 1:18:24
  wielding it going forward. Whoa, what?
• 1:18:26
  He doesn't trust himself to do it anymore.
• 1:18:28
  From from this from this point forward, we never see Sigmar
• 1:18:32
  outside of Azirheim again. Oh.
• 1:18:34
  Shit. Yeah, he's done being on the
• 1:18:37
  front lines. He considers what happened to
• 1:18:39
  the Battle of the Burning Skies, like throwing gomeras to try and
• 1:18:42
  get Archaeon and being read like a book.
• 1:18:44
  That's like when his power faded from him.
• 1:18:46
  That's when all that, like trust and civilization faded out and
• 1:18:50
  the battle turned and he was the last person fighting Archaeon
• 1:18:54
  when the Old World died as well. Yeah.
• 1:18:57
  Yeah, so he's kind of like I said when I say the Sigmar's in
• 1:19:01
  a bit of a place that's going to persist.
• 1:19:06
  The big climax of the Realm Gate Wars.
• 1:19:08
  It's not the climax of the Realm Gate wars, but the big climax of
• 1:19:10
  that first blitz is that Stormcast managed to push into
• 1:19:15
  the all points. They find the all gates, they
• 1:19:19
  bash through the cast fortresses that have been erected there and
• 1:19:23
  they managed to permanently seal action and guy Rands gates shut.
• 1:19:28
  Hey, okay. Yeah, so chaos can't get to
• 1:19:30
  action and guy ran from the all points anymore, which is huge.
• 1:19:33
  It's. Huge for us.
• 1:19:34
  Yes, with Negash's help again, holding him a gun point the
• 1:19:37
  whole time, they managed to take the Shyish gate.
• 1:19:41
  They can't seal it. Interesting.
• 1:19:44
  And it's not clear why in the moment, but we've come to learn
• 1:19:47
  this because Nagash is intermingled into the power of
• 1:19:51
  Shayish and he doesn't want it closed.
• 1:19:53
  This little. Bitch.
• 1:19:54
  So he plays it coy. And I wonder why the Shayish
• 1:19:57
  gate can't close. That's crazy.
• 1:19:58
  It's. Weird, because we've closed
• 1:19:59
  several others just fine. Stormcast basically don't help
• 1:20:04
  taking the Gur Gate at all, but they clear the path for orcs to
• 1:20:08
  take the Gur Gate. Yeah, Orcs don't close the Gur
• 1:20:11
  Gate because frankly they don't know how or or don't really
• 1:20:16
  occupy the Gur Gate, but they just are there and they're
• 1:20:19
  enough of a ruckus that Chaos can't really take it back.
• 1:20:22
  They just get beat up every time they try.
• 1:20:26
  Olgu's gate is interesting because OLGU is Marathi and
• 1:20:30
  malarious to me, and Olgu's gate is still open.
• 1:20:34
  It's still open even into the modern day, but anything that
• 1:20:38
  goes through the 8 point side of the OLGU gate just disappears.
• 1:20:47
  So we did. We don't know what's up with the
• 1:20:50
  OLGU game, but we have some guesses.
• 1:20:52
  I think probably Bulerian and Rathi just diverted it into a
• 1:20:55
  star or something like that's pretty good.
• 1:20:58
  It's very good. Shaman is still controlled by
• 1:21:00
  Chaos. They just can't manage to wrest
• 1:21:04
  it from Zencha's control. Zencha's pretty much fully in
• 1:21:07
  Control Shaman and that's going to persist into the modern day
• 1:21:10
  as well. The dwarves that live there
• 1:21:12
  basically only managed to so be because their caradron.
• 1:21:15
  They have their like floating sky fortress cities they can
• 1:21:18
  move constantly to like get away from demon incursions and stuff.
• 1:21:22
  Whoa, OK. Yeah, they Caradron actually
• 1:21:27
  find like little realm gates in the sky that like aren't
• 1:21:30
  normally accessible and so they can travel between the realms
• 1:21:32
  without using the main realm gates, which is how they conduct
• 1:21:34
  commerce. Oh.
• 1:21:36
  God, yeah, Great. OK, Yeah.
• 1:21:39
  Good for. Them I was going to say wait,
• 1:21:41
  the character on are strictly on the side of order, but they're
• 1:21:44
  like. Only because you can't have
• 1:21:46
  commerce with chaos. Yep, Yep.
• 1:21:48
  So that's a brief summary of like storm cast burst into the
• 1:21:51
  realms. They do a bunch of cool stuff.
• 1:21:52
  We're they're going to keep showing up as we talk about
• 1:21:55
  other factions and like history and stuff that's going on.
• 1:21:57
  We're already deep into this episode, but I want to go
• 1:22:00
  through my list of cool characters.
• 1:22:01
  I think kick ass. The first one should be a guy
• 1:22:04
  with big art deco wings. Yes, there he is.
• 1:22:08
  Yes he does that is the celestant prime right?
• 1:22:14
  I love him He's the first storm cast first one ever made.
• 1:22:17
  He Sigmar handcrafted him himself, infused him with his
• 1:22:21
  divinity and he laid there on the anvil and refused to wake up
• 1:22:27
  and Sigmar was like what the fuck is wrong?
• 1:22:30
  He like sat him to the side. He wasn't sure what like was
• 1:22:33
  wrong. He made other storm cast, they
• 1:22:35
  were fine, but something just wouldn't the.
• 1:22:38
  First pancake just. Doesn't turn out something just
• 1:22:40
  wouldn't let the Salston Prime wake.
• 1:22:42
  When the Storm cast got back from Shaman with Gamma Raz,
• 1:22:48
  Sigmar took it and he put it in the Salston Prime's hands.
• 1:22:51
  Yeah. And once Gamma Raz was placed in
• 1:22:56
  the Salston Prime's hands, he awoke.
• 1:22:59
  Why? So the speculation, we don't
• 1:23:04
  have confirmation and we're never going to get confirmation.
• 1:23:07
  But the speculation is that while all of this term cast are
• 1:23:10
  people from the Age of Sigmar, the speculation is that the
• 1:23:15
  Celestin Prime is from the Old World.
• 1:23:18
  When Sigmar fought Archaeon right at the end of the world,
• 1:23:22
  he couldn't manifest properly. He was embodying the body of the
• 1:23:26
  last human emperor, Karl Franz. Girlfriends died during the end
• 1:23:31
  Times, but the theory is that enough of his soul was like left
• 1:23:36
  in his body that it just got like stuck to or mingled into
• 1:23:41
  Sigmar's soul. And so Sigmar put that part of
• 1:23:45
  Carl that was still left in him into the Salston Prime.
• 1:23:49
  Carl wielded Gomeraz as immortal.
• 1:23:52
  He carried it with him as a symbol of office.
• 1:23:54
  And so the thought is that only when reunited with his symbol of
• 1:23:59
  office, only when again given the trust to lead the fight
• 1:24:03
  against chaos, could Carl really come back.
• 1:24:07
  Basically. That's pretty good.
• 1:24:10
  I was. And so I was like, is it?
• 1:24:14
  How do I pronounce? The Hammer Gameros.
• 1:24:16
  Yeah, I was like, is it Gameros? Like they put it into this.
• 1:24:20
  Storm like living Gameros? I don't think so.
• 1:24:24
  That would be really cool, but it's probably Carl.
• 1:24:28
  We don't. Know, I mean if he's like, well,
• 1:24:29
  I'll just give him my my cool hammer and that seems like a
• 1:24:32
  weird thing to do if you don't know if it's.
• 1:24:34
  Carl. Right.
• 1:24:35
  But also if he's like he's I mean that's the Gamma's is so
• 1:24:42
  much a part of Sigmar, Like and if Carl's being intermingled
• 1:24:48
  with Sigmar, it's not. And it became so attached to
• 1:24:50
  that symbol of power. It's like, was it just like
• 1:24:53
  here's the special thing and the honor.
• 1:24:55
  It's like literally a part of him was missing because it was
• 1:24:58
  with Gaul Morass and that was gone.
• 1:25:00
  Yeah, 100%. It's like literally the last
• 1:25:03
  piece of the puzzle, like could not.
• 1:25:06
  That's pretty cool. I like that a lot, yeah.
• 1:25:08
  We also, if it is Karl like, it's probably not Olive Karl
• 1:25:11
  because. Is this spelled with AK?
• 1:25:13
  Like how is this man's name Karl?
• 1:25:15
  It's Karl with AK Karl Franz. It's it's very like, I mean,
• 1:25:19
  yes, Holy Roman Empire like Germanic holy is.
• 1:25:22
  The intent? They just call this man Karl.
• 1:25:24
  It has to be. Karl Franz, because otherwise
• 1:25:26
  we're just calling him Karl. If it is Emperor Franz, Emperor
• 1:25:33
  Franz, it's probably not all of him.
• 1:25:36
  Like I said, it's the bits of his soul that we're still
• 1:25:38
  clinging to Sigmar when they were inhabiting the same body.
• 1:25:41
  Notably, the Salston Prime is mute.
• 1:25:44
  He can't speak. He communicates when he has to
• 1:25:47
  through, like, sign language, but mostly he's there to just,
• 1:25:50
  like, help where he can. The Salston Prime is not part of
• 1:25:54
  any host. Actually, his his armor changes
• 1:25:57
  to match the color of the host he's currently helping.
• 1:26:01
  Yeah, it's very cool. Good.
• 1:26:02
  Teamwork. Yeah right, and he generally
• 1:26:05
  just shows up to the biggest fights when he's needed showing
• 1:26:10
  up to fight God beasts are still lurking around, or big chaos
• 1:26:13
  monsters or turn important battles.
• 1:26:15
  He's just kind of a spot like fix.
• 1:26:19
  Very neat. I like the Salston prime quite a
• 1:26:21
  bit. Vandis Hammer Hand.
• 1:26:23
  He's not a dragon. He is not a dragon.
• 1:26:26
  Hammer Hand. Yeah, nice.
• 1:26:28
  He's riding a Dracolith, which are like lesser descendants of
• 1:26:31
  Dracothian. They don't have a draconic
• 1:26:33
  intelligence to them, but they're they're like.
• 1:26:35
  Dragon. I thought it was a horse at
• 1:26:36
  first, before, yeah, I thought it was like a big, like a what's
• 1:26:40
  a big horse that pulls the bear? Clydesdale.
• 1:26:42
  I thought it was a Clydesdale for a second.
• 1:26:43
  So. Vandis is an early champion of
• 1:26:46
  the Realmgate Wars. He's part of the Hammers of
• 1:26:48
  Sigmar, so he's big name there. He's a rivalry with Corgis Cole,
• 1:26:54
  the like champion of Corn who started being a Chaos champion,
• 1:26:59
  can artificially extend your lifespan.
• 1:27:01
  Corgis has been around since the.
• 1:27:02
  Age of the mid. He's still around and he's a
• 1:27:05
  nightmare. Vandis has been around for a
• 1:27:09
  long time. He fought in the Realm Gate wars
• 1:27:12
  to give you perspective them like modern day stories they're
• 1:27:15
  being told in the age of Sigmar. Now are about 300 years into the
• 1:27:17
  age of Sigmar OK. So we haven't even, not quite
• 1:27:20
  even as long as the Age of Chaos lasts.
• 1:27:22
  Yes, correct. Interesting specific choice.
• 1:27:25
  Yeah, Vandis has been around for all of it, which means he has
• 1:27:28
  reforged a lot, especially since he has a personal rivalry with
• 1:27:32
  one of the greatest champions of Chaos.
• 1:27:35
  They have fought each other a lot.
• 1:27:37
  There's been a couple of times where Corgos would have died if
• 1:27:39
  he hadn't been like specifically saved by corn.
• 1:27:43
  And Vandis has been killed by Corgos a lot.
• 1:27:47
  The last time we saw Vandis, it was too much.
• 1:27:53
  There's a character we're going to talk about in a man named
• 1:27:55
  Ionis. Ionis is a part of an order of
• 1:27:59
  Stormcast whose job is to tend to like ruination chamber or to
• 1:28:04
  tend to people who are getting too close to the storm.
• 1:28:08
  Ionis was the first. He founded that order because he
• 1:28:10
  knew someone would need to be caretakers of the lost.
• 1:28:14
  The last we saw a Vandis, Ionis was taking him as a Lightning
• 1:28:21
  Geist to be entombed. Yeah, they are both heroes of
• 1:28:26
  the Round Gate Wars. They were in that first bull.
• 1:28:29
  That's not fair. He would have killed that other
• 1:28:30
  guy if his God hadn't gotten involved.
• 1:28:32
  Correct, but you could also say the same thing about Vandis, if
• 1:28:35
  we're being ready to. Show up to the battlefield and
• 1:28:38
  specifically scoop him up. He just gave him like
• 1:28:40
  immortality and some cool tools. I think it's a little different.
• 1:28:45
  Yeah. Last we saw Evandis, we don't
• 1:28:47
  know if it's the last we will see Evandis, probably.
• 1:28:49
  He's a lightning guy. Snow.
• 1:28:51
  That's kind of it. If they were going to do a story
• 1:28:54
  in which exploring that concept and what that means, it feels
• 1:28:57
  like that would. Be the best.
• 1:28:59
  Absolutely. Absolutely one of my favs.
• 1:29:03
  Hello Yindrosta. Look.
• 1:29:06
  At her Mohawk. Right.
• 1:29:08
  Oh my. God, wow, she's.
• 1:29:11
  So fucking. Cool, I love.
• 1:29:13
  Yindrosta, look at her right. Tell me.
• 1:29:17
  About her? Yindrosta the Celestial Spear is
• 1:29:20
  her full title. She is also hostless like the
• 1:29:23
  Salston Prime, and that is because she is Sigmar's Grand
• 1:29:27
  Huntress. She is taking over Gorka Morca's
• 1:29:30
  job. Yes, she is fighting creatures
• 1:29:34
  in this one and that's crazy. She was raised on ger to like a
• 1:29:38
  human tribe renowned for their beast hunting.
• 1:29:41
  They survived the age of chaos largely by just establishing
• 1:29:45
  themselves as very potent beast hunters.
• 1:29:47
  You dressed a grew up fighting chaos.
• 1:29:49
  Her tribe like turned to just like, OK, we're not hunting like
• 1:29:53
  the native big girlish monsters anymore.
• 1:29:56
  We are hunting. There's a better prey to try,
• 1:29:59
  yeah. Yeah, we're hunting chaos
• 1:30:00
  monsters now, Jabber Slice, which are like a chaos monster
• 1:30:05
  that are very silly. Yeah.
• 1:30:08
  And Roster was renowned as a hunter during her time as a
• 1:30:11
  mortal. She died fighting a demon of
• 1:30:15
  corn called Blood Brand, and Sigmar saw so much in her valor
• 1:30:23
  and her ferocity in trying to win that fight that he elevated
• 1:30:27
  her not just into being a Storm cast, but there are a lot of
• 1:30:31
  places where Sigmar refers to Indrasta as his daughter.
• 1:30:35
  He sees it as a like you are worthy to like inherit this
• 1:30:40
  legacy from me. So interesting.
• 1:30:43
  Right, right. But.
• 1:30:45
  The thing about that is Thanos also calls me the more his.
• 1:30:49
  Daughter, right? So right.
• 1:30:52
  And there's like, there's definitely some kind of like to
• 1:30:56
  that. Like when Yandrosta wakes up
• 1:30:58
  from her first forging, she doesn't remember her real
• 1:31:01
  parents. Interesting.
• 1:31:03
  Yeah, she is absolutely terrifying on every level.
• 1:31:07
  She, she is a nuclear missile in human form.
• 1:31:12
  We have so much of her just like, like imagine just there's
• 1:31:16
  a fight happening between humans and like some force of chaos
• 1:31:19
  with a huge monster behind them. And just the pinpoint like of
• 1:31:23
  lightning of a single storm cast arriving at the battlefield and
• 1:31:27
  a cruise missile hits it at like Mach 4 and tears it to shreds.
• 1:31:32
  Yes, I've been watching kaju #8, Yeah.
• 1:31:36
  She's got big Night Fury energy is how I describe her.
• 1:31:39
  She is remarkably fast. She is probably the best Monster
• 1:31:43
  Hunter in existence. And she's gay, yes.
• 1:31:49
  She's the perfect. Woman we don't have a ton of
• 1:31:53
  details about like Indrastha's relationships when she was
• 1:31:56
  immortal. She kind of lives for the hunt
• 1:31:58
  now. So it's we don't have other 10
• 1:32:00
  details post reforging. Yeah, so that is another element
• 1:32:04
  of, like, Endrosta's great. I love her terribly, but she's
• 1:32:09
  not my best boy. Not your best boy.
• 1:32:13
  Is this your best boy? It's Goddess.
• 1:32:15
  No, that's Endrosta. OK, I.
• 1:32:17
  Was. Wondering.
• 1:32:18
  OK, she's got the wings. I should mention the wings.
• 1:32:20
  Endrosta has pinioned wings. Oh.
• 1:32:22
  I In this first image with all the lightning, I.
• 1:32:24
  Didn't mention. Those as wings?
• 1:32:25
  I thought it was more lightning. But yeah, oh, that's she's the
• 1:32:28
  only storm cast with like real pinioned wings.
• 1:32:31
  Like some of them have that like art deco light wing thing going
• 1:32:33
  on. But Sigmar, yeah, Sigmar gave
• 1:32:36
  her wings specifically so that no foe would be outside her
• 1:32:39
  reach. His words.
• 1:32:40
  Good. Very good.
• 1:32:43
  OK, and so who's your best boy? The guy doing the superhero
• 1:32:48
  landing, that's Garda Steel Soul.
• 1:32:51
  We mentioned him already a little bit.
• 1:32:54
  He is my favorite Storm cast and it's not close.
• 1:32:57
  He was not a warrior, he was a doctor in life.
• 1:33:01
  He was a doctor. He died fighting Chaos because
• 1:33:05
  he stayed behind in guy ran when Nergal warriors came for his
• 1:33:10
  patients. Yeah, no, he did not kill a
• 1:33:14
  single chaos warrior in life. He died like trying to hit a
• 1:33:18
  chaos warrior with a scalpel. Like to defend people under his
• 1:33:22
  care, taking his duty to do no harm to it.
• 1:33:26
  I'm listener but I am crying I've I've been super emotional
• 1:33:31
  lately anyways and also I love gardens.
• 1:33:34
  I have big feelings in general and I'm talking about my
• 1:33:37
  favorite. Character of all the things.
• 1:33:39
  Yeah, I'm going to cry now. They're so good.
• 1:33:42
  Died defending his patients, took the deal to become a star
• 1:33:46
  cast in a heartbeat. It was a really long road for
• 1:33:50
  him to like, learn how to fight. It's just like against his
• 1:33:53
  nature. But he recognizes the need for
• 1:33:57
  it to happen. And the I'm going to cry again.
• 1:34:00
  The thing that gets me every time is that Gardas is most
• 1:34:05
  important. Like his stated Scardis's stated
• 1:34:10
  goal. His biggest hope is that through
• 1:34:15
  his efforts and the efforts of all the other Storm cast, he can
• 1:34:19
  eventually make the world better enough that he can go back to be
• 1:34:27
  a good doctor. He wants to be a.
• 1:34:29
  Doctor, he wants his most important skills not to be how
• 1:34:33
  he fights and causes harm, but how he helps and saves people,
• 1:34:38
  and he wants that and needs that to happen before reforging takes
• 1:34:42
  it from him. That's so good and so.
• 1:34:45
  Fun, right? Right.
• 1:34:47
  Every. Because every time, even he
• 1:34:49
  knows it's an important fight. He knows it's something that has
• 1:34:52
  to happen. But every time he dies, he risks
• 1:34:55
  losing the part of him that he values the most, which is his
• 1:34:59
  ability to help people hold. Information from medical school
• 1:35:02
  that's. Stripped away, yeah.
• 1:35:05
  Textbooks. There's a lot there.
• 1:35:08
  Gardas has been around for a while.
• 1:35:09
  One of Gardas's like recurring traits as a storm cast.
• 1:35:13
  Like I said every reforging is different.
• 1:35:14
  As a that he's like just kind of exudes that anti corruption
• 1:35:17
  aurorum stuff. It's because he's a doctor, he
• 1:35:20
  knows how to heal. You were sent to save.
• 1:35:25
  Find the goddess of. Life when the infection took
• 1:35:28
  hold. Yeah, when Goddess dies.
• 1:35:34
  That's just some stop. That's just a top tier.
• 1:35:36
  Story right there, right? I love Goddess.
• 1:35:39
  When Gardas dies it takes him a long time to reforge that.
• 1:35:43
  That's just always been a quirk of his storm cast.
• 1:35:45
  Reforging varies by person. It can take anywhere between
• 1:35:49
  like a days to months. Gardas is always like multiple
• 1:35:52
  months every time he dies before he reforges.
• 1:35:54
  We don't have like a Canon reason why, but I choose to
• 1:35:58
  believe it's because he is clinging as tightly as possible
• 1:36:02
  to his medical knowledge. He doesn't want to lose that,
• 1:36:04
  and so he's willing to stay yeah away longer if it means he can
• 1:36:08
  hold on to more nice. Yeah.
• 1:36:11
  Right, I love Goddess Goddess more so than I think any
• 1:36:16
  character. Goddess embodies like the big
• 1:36:19
  theme of age of Sigmar which is things getting better through
• 1:36:24
  great sacrifice. Like, a better world is
• 1:36:27
  possible, and it will be really hard.
• 1:36:31
  And the people who need to pay the price to make it better
• 1:36:33
  aren't always the ones that should.
• 1:36:36
  Yeah, right. I love gardas.
• 1:36:41
  We've got a couple more I want to talk about before this very
• 1:36:44
  long. I probably should have, but
• 1:36:49
  there's a couple where I want to talk about before this very long
• 1:36:51
  episode is over. You go to the next one.
• 1:36:53
  We got a guy in, like a procession that's bastard
• 1:36:57
  Carthalos. Remember that guy?
• 1:37:01
  Yeah, it's been a while since we recorded.
• 1:37:03
  Wait. Wait, wait, you see the guy that
• 1:37:04
  defended the wall? Yeah.
• 1:37:05
  Not the. Wall the gate.
• 1:37:06
  The gate. I was thinking earlier about
• 1:37:08
  that guy when I. Was talking.
• 1:37:09
  Room gates back and how they were able to escape and I'm
• 1:37:11
  like, it's cuz that guy yeah, I'm so glad he got there yeah.
• 1:37:16
  That's Bastion the late, the last person through the gates of
• 1:37:19
  Azir before they closed. Because he's making sure
• 1:37:21
  everybody else got out safely. He fought Archaeon as a mortal.
• 1:37:25
  Yeah. Held him off of the Azir gate so
• 1:37:27
  everybody else could get through.
• 1:37:29
  Yeah. Right.
• 1:37:31
  He was terribly wounded in that fight.
• 1:37:33
  I'm sure. I honestly thought he died.
• 1:37:36
  Didn't know he made it through the gate.
• 1:37:37
  Definitely thought that dude was dead.
• 1:37:39
  He. Clearly, he was.
• 1:37:41
  But yeah, yeah, he he actually is the only Storm cast we know
• 1:37:44
  of that got reforged before he died.
• 1:37:48
  Wait, what the fuck? Yeah, they kept him like they
• 1:37:51
  kept him stable while the reforging process awards worked
• 1:37:54
  through. By all accounts we got the
• 1:37:55
  Salston Prime and then we got Bastion.
• 1:37:59
  Bastion was put on the anvil while still alive because he
• 1:38:02
  didn't want to wait for the like healing process do.
• 1:38:05
  It do it. Now, yeah, like he would rather
• 1:38:08
  take the lightning than wait. That's so cool.
• 1:38:11
  OK, so none of the SO Sigmar was collecting humans for a while,
• 1:38:17
  yes, but he didn't like pull the trigger on this plan until after
• 1:38:20
  the boarding surprise like totally failed.
• 1:38:22
  Because Sigmar knows the cost. Yeah, he knows that what
• 1:38:26
  reforging is going to do to a person.
• 1:38:27
  This was always the last result. The last didn't want to do it
• 1:38:30
  unless he absolutely had to anything.
• 1:38:33
  Yeah, man, he does. Yeah, There's no no question
• 1:38:36
  now. Bastion Carthalis is the Lord
• 1:38:39
  Commander of the Hammers of Sigmar.
• 1:38:40
  He's the top ranking guy of that Storm host.
• 1:38:45
  I'm gonna mention a thing that's frustrating from a Laura nerd
• 1:38:47
  perspective. This is the first mention we get
• 1:38:49
  of something called the grand bolts.
• 1:38:51
  OK, Sigmar has seven grand bolts.
• 1:38:54
  OK? Like lightning bolts.
• 1:38:56
  Yeah. Like Zeus's bolts kind of OK.
• 1:38:59
  Maybe I thought of the bolts and Frankenstein's neck initial and
• 1:39:02
  that's. Why?
• 1:39:02
  I asked for clarification. Go on.
• 1:39:04
  We don't know basically anything about them except.
• 1:39:07
  That OK real quick. I don't want a single person
• 1:39:10
  being like I was like 1. I don't care.
• 1:39:14
  Two, the creature is often referred to as Victor's son,
• 1:39:18
  thus the surname Frankenstein. 3 Culturally, you all know if you
• 1:39:23
  go to Universal Studios and park in the Frankenstein garage,
• 1:39:27
  which girl who's the image on the garage?
• 1:39:29
  We all know when I say a Frankenstein what that means as
• 1:39:32
  a monster creature. Like we're all there.
• 1:39:34
  You're not clever and cute, so sit down.
• 1:39:39
  Listen, don't be a pedant, that's my job.
• 1:39:43
  You would never. You're right, there's 7 grand
• 1:39:48
  bolts. We don't know where they came
• 1:39:50
  from. We don't know why there's only
• 1:39:51
  7. We do know they're one time use
• 1:39:53
  and two of them have been used. Interesting Wait.
• 1:39:56
  One of them gets used right now right now.
• 1:39:58
  So it isn't used as a weapon, which seems to be their intent.
• 1:40:02
  Bastion Soul is so damaged after the fight with Archaeon that
• 1:40:05
  they have to patch it with the grand bolts.
• 1:40:08
  Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's very cool.
• 1:40:11
  That's. Really cool that I can do that.
• 1:40:12
  Right? So Bastion more than most is
• 1:40:15
  like mostly lightning from the jump.
• 1:40:19
  He still has his mind. I have.
• 1:40:20
  To let the cat out because he's. Crying.
• 1:40:21
  Yeah, that's fair. That's fair.
• 1:40:23
  OK, so Sigmar patches Bastion soul with a grand bolt.
• 1:40:29
  Makes him immensely powerful. We have not yet suppose for our
• 1:40:33
  audience we're going to record an episode where we actually
• 1:40:35
  play the game agency Mark for context for stuff like this.
• 1:40:37
  Yeah, but like in game at the end of every like in game turn,
• 1:40:43
  Bastion heels to full health because he's got the bolt
• 1:40:46
  powering him, which is very cool.
• 1:40:48
  He can also just like project it from himself.
• 1:40:50
  So every turn he gets to just hit somewhat on the board with
• 1:40:53
  lightning, which is extremely funny.
• 1:40:55
  Bastion is immensely powerful. He is basically the like field
• 1:40:58
  commander of the forces of Sigmar and I just like him.
• 1:41:02
  He's a cool guy. He sounds.
• 1:41:03
  Like, he's a cool dude. He's one cool dude, yeah.
• 1:41:06
  We've got our boy Ionis. I mentioned him once.
• 1:41:09
  He's riding a big ass dragon. He is riding a big ass dragon.
• 1:41:15
  Ionius is the first, or Ionis is the first of what will come to
• 1:41:19
  be known as Lord Relictors, Shepherds of the Lost.
• 1:41:23
  They they he does. He is self appointed himself,
• 1:41:28
  like a protector of storm cast to get clued too close to the
• 1:41:31
  storm. And he has the self stated goal
• 1:41:34
  of trying to find a fix for the reforging flaw.
• 1:41:37
  It's probably not possible based on what we know.
• 1:41:41
  Yeah, but that hope is what he has to hold on to.
• 1:41:45
  Something. Yes, absolutely.
• 1:41:47
  And it's a it's a personal hope. Like I said, he fought in the
• 1:41:49
  realm gate wars next to Vandis. He watched him deteriorate in
• 1:41:52
  real time. And not just him anymore.
• 1:41:54
  Like him. Yeah, he has a personal
• 1:41:56
  investment in trying to find a flaw for reforging.
• 1:41:59
  Not just a way to prevent it from happening, but a way to
• 1:42:01
  reverse it. Right.
• 1:42:03
  Yeah, it's a very where. Did those pieces of your soul
• 1:42:06
  go? If you could find them, could
• 1:42:08
  you put them back together? They're just gone.
• 1:42:10
  Is what we're pretty sure like. It's probably it.
• 1:42:14
  Was what we've been led to believe at this moment.
• 1:42:16
  But like, I don't know that practice of if you wouldn't
• 1:42:19
  like, I don't know the word for the Japanese practice, you break
• 1:42:21
  something is broken. And you?
• 1:42:23
  Yeah, like if we decide in this world that, yeah, the soul
• 1:42:28
  pieces are gone, then that's what it is.
• 1:42:29
  But they're pieces of the soul and they go somewhere.
• 1:42:32
  Could you get them back together?
• 1:42:33
  Could you fix it like that? Not like stitch it back together
• 1:42:36
  but add like they have Sigmars. Something else feels like that
• 1:42:38
  could fill in the gaps to make you you again.
• 1:42:41
  Maybe, And that's what keeps the eye on us going.
• 1:42:44
  For sure, that feels like what would be the stiff like that
• 1:42:46
  ultimately feels like what would be the difference between Age of
• 1:42:50
  Sigmar and Warhammer, Between something that is grim, dark and
• 1:42:52
  something that is ultimately meant to be.
• 1:42:54
  In the end, theoretically there is hope.
• 1:42:58
  That that's the hope that keeps it going.
• 1:43:00
  We'll probably never know, is kind of the like, especially
• 1:43:03
  because now Ionis has kind of like a philosophical counterpart
• 1:43:08
  we're going to talk about in a second.
• 1:43:09
  Yeah, Ionis is the hope that like that can be fixed even when
• 1:43:14
  there's no evidence to support it.
• 1:43:16
  Like I said, personal friend of Vandis, he brought him to like
• 1:43:19
  be entombed when he turned into a lightning guest looked after
• 1:43:22
  until. The very end.
• 1:43:23
  Yeah, I didn't put in the slideshow I should have.
• 1:43:27
  There is a harrowing image of Ionis, just like, with both of
• 1:43:32
  his arms wrapped around what's left of Vandis.
• 1:43:35
  Just like, hauling him into like, a cell to contain him
• 1:43:39
  until they can put him in a statue, basically.
• 1:43:42
  Yeah. Just brutal.
• 1:43:44
  It's too much. He made friends with that
• 1:43:47
  dragon. Cool guy.
• 1:43:49
  Dragon have a. Name.
• 1:43:49
  Yeah, he does. I just don't remember what it
• 1:43:51
  is. He goes everywhere with him
• 1:43:54
  looking for a cure. Officially, he's part of the
• 1:43:57
  Warrior Chamber, but he doesn't take orders from them.
• 1:43:59
  I don't take. I don't work for.
• 1:44:00
  You No. Yeah, he'll he'll show up to
• 1:44:02
  fights if it benefits him. But his ultimate?
• 1:44:05
  Even if Sigmar gave him a direct order, he probably wouldn't
• 1:44:07
  follow it. At this point he's just looking
• 1:44:08
  for a cure and he's going to spend his immortality doing it.
• 1:44:11
  And I can let myself die and then not.
• 1:44:13
  And he's like, sounds like the only one trying this.
• 1:44:15
  Yeah. If he dies and gets too close to
• 1:44:16
  the storm and he gets lost in the storm, then no one else is
• 1:44:18
  doing it. He can't let that happen.
• 1:44:20
  Pretty much right next one. Only a couple more to go.
• 1:44:25
  Hello. I like her.
• 1:44:27
  This is Neve Black Talon. She's cool.
• 1:44:29
  She's very cool and. They're all cool.
• 1:44:31
  But she's cool. She has her own animated series
• 1:44:35
  I'm. Sorry, what?
• 1:44:36
  Yeah, it's called Black Talon, and it's pretty good.
• 1:44:41
  We're gonna watch. That.
• 1:44:42
  Definitely for a bonus episode. Neve is not to be confused with
• 1:44:47
  you Andrasta. Neve is Sigmar's personal
• 1:44:49
  assassin. OK, personal.
• 1:44:52
  Hunter of Sigmar, personal assassin.
• 1:44:54
  Yeah, yeah, one. Two very different things.
• 1:44:56
  Yeah, 1 Sigmar, there's. An Artemis and there's an
• 1:44:58
  Athena. Yeah, 1 Sigmar wants a monster.
• 1:45:00
  Daddy sends you Andrasta when he wants a political rifle.
• 1:45:03
  Daddy sends Neve. Neve is super fascinating
• 1:45:09
  because she is, like, weirdly close to the storm for how
• 1:45:15
  capable she is. Like, she still has a lot of her
• 1:45:19
  faculties, but she doesn't remember almost anything about
• 1:45:22
  when she was mortal. Interesting.
• 1:45:24
  Yeah, and there's a good reason for that.
• 1:45:27
  It's because we don't have like a ton of evidence, but we're
• 1:45:32
  pretty sure Neve was a chaos warrior in life.
• 1:45:37
  Yeah. That's so cool.
• 1:45:39
  What happened? Tell me more.
• 1:45:42
  We like I said we don't have a ton, just the memories that Neve
• 1:45:46
  tends to get back in flashes, especially when she's reforging,
• 1:45:50
  seem to show her on the wrong side of these wars.
• 1:45:55
  The thought is that Sigmar picked someone who just like had
• 1:46:00
  what he needed, like the skills to like be his personal assassin
• 1:46:06
  and during that first reforging just made sure those parts of
• 1:46:10
  her that were aligned to chaos were gone.
• 1:46:13
  Did she agree to this? No, almost certainly not.
• 1:46:16
  Yeah. I mean not even just the
• 1:46:17
  obviously not agreeing to like get rid of those parts, but
• 1:46:19
  like. Being a storm.
• 1:46:21
  Calf, yeah, getting that like hey.
• 1:46:24
  Right. Yeah, probably not.
• 1:46:26
  I mean. I could see the yeah, probably
• 1:46:31
  not. And that's a big bummer if we
• 1:46:32
  didn't want to do a bummer narrative.
• 1:46:33
  The idea of like you have what I need.
• 1:46:36
  I'm willing to take like if she's like cuz the people do the
• 1:46:41
  chaos thing and then at the end it's like horrible at the end.
• 1:46:45
  I imagine if they would, most of them would be like if I could go
• 1:46:47
  back. I wouldn't.
• 1:46:48
  Do this. Lots of people who serve chaos
• 1:46:50
  would never have done it if they had any other options.
• 1:46:52
  Yeah, for sure. There's a version of the
• 1:46:55
  narrative where he does offer that and just out it says I can
• 1:47:00
  you can work for me and that doesn't have to be the end of
• 1:47:03
  your tail. And she could have been the one
• 1:47:04
  that asked take away all of that.
• 1:47:05
  I don't want to be I don't want to remember that part like and I
• 1:47:08
  think that's very interesting and then doesn't get in this
• 1:47:12
  icky lack of agency for this female character.
• 1:47:16
  And I don't know, it depends on, but I, I, I personally think her
• 1:47:20
  being given this choice and also kind of like the idea that no
• 1:47:27
  one is beyond redemption. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:47:29
  Is a is a thing I really like. And this the service of being a
• 1:47:36
  storm cast, knowing what will be lost and being so close to the
• 1:47:39
  room and still doing this thing against chaos as her path of
• 1:47:44
  redemption. I like that tale better.
• 1:47:47
  There's some people who like to frame Neve has like another
• 1:47:51
  glimpse at like Sigmar not quite being always cracked up to be.
• 1:47:54
  I do think there might be an element of that.
• 1:47:56
  I also like that narrative better that Neve look back on
• 1:48:00
  her past and had regrets and just to like move past them just
• 1:48:05
  to try and be better. Because I also think it's very
• 1:48:07
  because she's listen, there's a lot of chaos words be really
• 1:48:10
  good at just killing people for you, right?
• 1:48:12
  I think it'd be interesting if like Sigmar, she wasn't the 1st
• 1:48:15
  that was offered, she was just the first to say yes.
• 1:48:18
  Right Cuz not everybody is willing to seek redemption.
• 1:48:22
  It's very God who's that guy that sells his soul from magic
• 1:48:26
  from the devil. Faust.
• 1:48:27
  Yeah, it's very Fausty. And like not everyone, you get
• 1:48:30
  endless opportunities and not everyone is willing to even go
• 1:48:34
  for that, or they think they're better off without or they think
• 1:48:36
  they don't deserve it or whatever reason.
• 1:48:38
  And so like that idea that like no one is beyond redemption, but
• 1:48:41
  not everyone is willing to do the hard work to.
• 1:48:44
  Yes, absolutely. But it depends on like what the
• 1:48:47
  overarching vibe of the narrative.
• 1:48:49
  Is and I think Age of Sigma tends to be more hopeful than
• 1:48:52
  40K and then I like that read better.
• 1:48:57
  Neve. Neve is.
• 1:48:58
  I mentioned this earlier. Neve is one of the storm cast
• 1:49:01
  who has learned to ride the winds etheric so she can dip
• 1:49:03
  back on to like a 0 as a plane like mid combat and then emerge
• 1:49:07
  somewhere else to like short range teleport while she's
• 1:49:10
  fighting, which makes her an excellent assassin.
• 1:49:12
  What does that sound that Nightcrawler makes when you?
• 1:49:14
  Tell Banff, Yeah. But yeah, I I really like Neve.
• 1:49:18
  There's still a lot like Left in the Shadows about her even after
• 1:49:23
  her like animated series. Also she operates with a team
• 1:49:27
  called the Black Talons and they all kick ass.
• 1:49:30
  It's like four other Storm cast. And show an animated series that
• 1:49:35
  didn't like establish what her back story Laura was what
• 1:49:37
  incredible like stuff restraint. Right.
• 1:49:40
  They keep hinting at it like that's largely how we know that
• 1:49:43
  when she gets flashes of her like mortal life, they're on the
• 1:49:46
  wrong side because she keeps getting those and like trying to
• 1:49:49
  confide in her companions. Like, what am I seeing?
• 1:49:52
  Like, why am I getting these visions is how she interprets
• 1:49:55
  them because she can't grapple with the fact that, like, she
• 1:49:58
  might have been a chaos word. Yeah, the Black Talons are great
• 1:50:02
  because it's four other Storm cast and an idon F, which is
• 1:50:07
  very cool. That's very.
• 1:50:09
  Cool. It's a cool.
• 1:50:10
  It's a good representation of Idon F tool as I get a good look
• 1:50:14
  at them one that I'm excited to talk about next one on the list
• 1:50:18
  that is if anything. Yeah, they don't have a lot of
• 1:50:24
  official art yet because that's Iridin the witness are non
• 1:50:28
  binary, right yeah, and they're like brand new.
• 1:50:31
  They're super new yeah neat. I like their.
• 1:50:35
  Outfit they've got this like chainmail robe thing hood going
• 1:50:40
  on. It's very.
• 1:50:42
  Good, right? Iridin is ruination chamber.
• 1:50:46
  They've reforged a lot. They're very close to the storm
• 1:50:50
  feared and became noteworthy because.
• 1:50:55
  OK hold on real quick, sorry to interrupt the.
• 1:50:58
  Do we know for a fact they identified as non binary before
• 1:51:02
  they? Got we don't know.
• 1:51:04
  I know that's kind of the like. Concern of like I.
• 1:51:07
  Just don't want to. Miss things therefore, which I
• 1:51:09
  think is an interesting yeah take, provided they are not
• 1:51:14
  literally the only example. Yeah, the lesson More
• 1:51:18
  representation is good and it doesn't have to be perfect
• 1:51:21
  representation. And I'm hoping we get a like
• 1:51:24
  Iriden was non binary before they got close to the storm but
• 1:51:29
  our other 9 but non binary Rep in age of Sigmar are all demons
• 1:51:32
  who like strictly don't have like physical sex.
• 1:51:35
  Yeah, which feels like a very different thing.
• 1:51:37
  Yeah, so it'd be nice to have Iriden not be that.
• 1:51:41
  Let let's maybe not do the narrative of losing parts of
• 1:51:44
  your personality is what makes you not have gender.
• 1:51:47
  Yeah, and certainly that because it's like that feels like they
• 1:51:49
  become less and less human and that would suck.
• 1:51:54
  That would be a bad, so you need.
• 1:51:55
  Please don't do. That four more at least, and
• 1:51:58
  then this could be a narrative that we can tell without it
• 1:52:00
  being icky. It could be a bummer zone, but
• 1:52:04
  if you establish that this is a story with intention and over
• 1:52:08
  here we've got other characters who that is not what has
• 1:52:11
  happened to them and we're not saying right This like being non
• 1:52:15
  barrier equals lack of humanity. Right, right.
• 1:52:17
  Please Please which? Doesn't feel like a big ass.
• 1:52:21
  Yeah, right. Or is it?
• 1:52:23
  We don't know a ton about Iridin.
• 1:52:24
  They're very new to the narrative.
• 1:52:28
  They worshipped before they became Row Nation.
• 1:52:32
  They worshipped Sigmar alongside one of the gods of death from
• 1:52:35
  the Old World. Interesting.
• 1:52:38
  Who, based on stuff we're getting now, might have
• 1:52:41
  successfully like HID from Nagash Oh.
• 1:52:44
  Right, because Nagash murdered. All of them.
• 1:52:46
  Nagash murdered all the gods of death when he got to Shahish it
• 1:52:48
  seems. Morda was a God of death from
• 1:52:52
  the old world. It seems she made the jump to
• 1:52:55
  the Mortal Realms and has. Invited to the club.
• 1:52:58
  I got hid so successfully that no one knew she was around
• 1:53:02
  basically. Kind of had to when Nagash was
• 1:53:05
  running around cornelling. Everybody correct?
• 1:53:06
  Nagash got invited to the club, so you can't show.
• 1:53:09
  Up. Yeah.
• 1:53:10
  You were not on murder. You.
• 1:53:11
  Hey, speak if we need a new death.
• 1:53:13
  God, yeah, right. I think that might be.
• 1:53:15
  Obviously it'll never like fully happen because Nagash is an
• 1:53:17
  established part of the story and they sell a big miniature of
• 1:53:19
  him, but I feel like that might be the like, here's Nagash the
• 1:53:23
  God of death and here's the cooler God of death situation.
• 1:53:26
  That doesn't just actively suck at every opportunity, there's an
• 1:53:30
  opportunity to be the worst. Nagash has already done a worst
• 1:53:34
  thing, actually. We know at some point Eredin was
• 1:53:39
  sent to the police Citadel's. Much like most people who get
• 1:53:42
  too close to the storm, they lived in existence there for
• 1:53:45
  some time. When they got like pulled back
• 1:53:51
  into active duty because of the big terrible thing that recently
• 1:53:54
  happened in the lore. They were like serving alongside
• 1:54:00
  their fellow Ruination chamber and feeling their anxiety,
• 1:54:06
  feeling their worry that this would be the last time that they
• 1:54:10
  reforged, that they would come back as something monstrous as
• 1:54:14
  Lightning Geist. Lightning Geist.
• 1:54:15
  I think you kept saying storm Geist earlier lightning.
• 1:54:18
  Geist and they reached out to Morda for an answer and Iriden
• 1:54:26
  is the kind of philosophical mirror to Ionis because Ionis is
• 1:54:31
  looking for a cure and Morda gave Iriden release.
• 1:54:38
  What is? What does that mean?
• 1:54:40
  Iriden is, to our knowledge, the only person who can kill a storm
• 1:54:44
  cast permanently. Oh my God, yeah, that's so
• 1:54:52
  interesting. And almost definitely assured
• 1:54:54
  the guarantees that yeah, there's this other death God
• 1:54:56
  hiding. Out like Oh yeah, Oh yeah, no
• 1:54:58
  way. No, no, no.
• 1:54:59
  Morta's definitely out there, yeah.
• 1:55:01
  She's just not really vibing with this situation.
• 1:55:05
  Basically is kind of the idea we get.
• 1:55:08
  Yeah. No, for sure, for sure.
• 1:55:09
  This other. Dude, permission to do whatever.
• 1:55:11
  You want and then. He killed all your friends.
• 1:55:13
  Yeah, because it sounds like all the death gods are probably
• 1:55:16
  doing their own thing pretty harmoniously, had their own
• 1:55:18
  groups with and, he said. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:55:20
  Interesting. So Iridin is, like I said, the
• 1:55:24
  philosophical counterpart to Ionis.
• 1:55:26
  Ionis is not ruination chamber. Ionis is from the outside and he
• 1:55:32
  is seeking a cure that almost certainly doesn't exist.
• 1:55:36
  Iridin has a cure, they are on the inside, they have actually
• 1:55:41
  lived the experience of being ruination chamber felt that
• 1:55:45
  suffering, felt what their companions need and want and
• 1:55:50
  offer them the grammar but real answer.
• 1:55:56
  That is so interesting. It's like literally the the the
• 1:56:00
  point of like them being on the inside and actually this is
• 1:56:05
  their lived experience. And this is the answer that
• 1:56:08
  someone with the lived experience has deemed as the
• 1:56:11
  appropriate and only option is so very interesting.
• 1:56:17
  Right, right. I'm very excited about like I
• 1:56:21
  said, Erdon's pretty new. We don't know to talk about
• 1:56:23
  them. I'm very excited.
• 1:56:24
  I want them and I honest to interact so bad it.
• 1:56:28
  Feels like that's. What you said they're literally
• 1:56:29
  like foils. Yeah.
• 1:56:31
  I want I want to see that conversation of like.
• 1:56:37
  OK, Zidus, their name from the like, we know that.
• 1:56:42
  How do we know what any of their names are still after?
• 1:56:44
  Like, they've been the Ruination Chamber and they've been the
• 1:56:46
  Bleak Citadel. They've lost all these things.
• 1:56:49
  A lot of even Ruination chamber storm cast will hang on to their
• 1:56:51
  name, like to the very end, and Aeriden is less close to the
• 1:56:55
  storm than some. Yeah, Ionis's the larger Lecter
• 1:57:00
  on the dragon. Erdin's riding a big crow, which
• 1:57:04
  is great. The crow is the symbol of Morda,
• 1:57:07
  so that's part of it. That's.
• 1:57:08
  So OK, that's like, wait, there's a bird demon?
• 1:57:10
  Yeah, it's a symbol of Morda. And you don't get to just claim
• 1:57:14
  all of these symbols for yourself.
• 1:57:16
  Yes. Erdin.
• 1:57:19
  Also, one of Erdin's traits which makes some kind of unique
• 1:57:22
  amongst Ruination Chamber storm cast is that Erdin has an, I'm
• 1:57:27
  going to say this wrong idalectic memory.
• 1:57:32
  Idatic. Yeah, where they have perfect
• 1:57:34
  recall. Yeah, that's what Leslie Crusher
• 1:57:37
  has in Star Trek. Yeah, so Eridan.
• 1:57:42
  Also Fillmore's friend from Fillmore.
• 1:57:44
  Yeah, did. You watch Fillmore?
• 1:57:46
  No, it was a show. It was an animated show about
• 1:57:49
  hall monitors. Hell yeah and.
• 1:57:51
  It was like. A kid cop show.
• 1:57:52
  Hell yeah. She had a part.
• 1:57:54
  She was my photographic memory. But that's what she had, yeah.
• 1:57:57
  In You should reach the City Watch novels for Terry Pratchett
• 1:58:01
  I. I'm on.
• 1:58:02
  I'm on. Libby.
• 1:58:03
  No, Libby, Let's just. Libby.
• 1:58:04
  Hell yeah. No.
• 1:58:05
  I'm working on it. I have.
• 1:58:06
  Guards guards like reserved on Libby audiobook for like months
• 1:58:12
  now it's two weeks out. Hell yeah, I was just gonna say.
• 1:58:18
  As is the night before Christmas.
• 1:58:20
  Yeah, I we're probably fighting for the same copy.
• 1:58:24
  No, the library has 2 copies in you.
• 1:58:27
  There you go, I'm. Third in line, one in.
• 1:58:30
  Line I'm 4th. In slide.
• 1:58:32
  I was gonna say we both saw it on the the book club at the same
• 1:58:35
  time and I went for it. I have, I've had yeah, I had
• 1:58:39
  notifications for it to be like tell me when it's cuz Lucy and I
• 1:58:41
  have talked about it for when I first found out about it.
• 1:58:43
  So that's a. Great thing I was trying to.
• 1:58:45
  Figure out how do I work it under the Aragon podcast Listen
• 1:58:49
  I can. Just talk about it.
• 1:58:51
  But I was just gonna say there's a, a city guards book where it
• 1:58:55
  gets established that I can't remember the context of the
• 1:58:59
  argument, but Vimes is the main character of the city watch
• 1:59:02
  books gets into an argument with a dwarf about like title and
• 1:59:05
  rank because it's very important to dwarves often.
• 1:59:09
  And the dwarf is like, what's the like most important position
• 1:59:12
  or like rank you've held. And Vimes Snidely says he was a
• 1:59:16
  blackboard monitor when he was in elementary school.
• 1:59:21
  But, like, some time passes in the book.
• 1:59:23
  And then they come back to it. And the dwarf is comes up to,
• 1:59:27
  like, actually, no. Like, that is, like, your role.
• 1:59:33
  You were trusted with the, like, preservation or erasure of
• 1:59:39
  knowledge that is more important than what you do now.
• 1:59:42
  Damn it. Yeah.
• 1:59:44
  Oh wow. Right.
• 1:59:46
  Yeah, get wrecked, Vines. Wow, what are you going to do?
• 1:59:48
  You don't come back for that. You're gonna lie down for the
• 1:59:51
  rest of the day. So blackboard monitor vymes When
• 1:59:53
  you said hall monitors is what I thought of cuz he starts like
• 1:59:57
  using it as a title which is very funny.
• 2:00:00
  It's like on his mostly to spite nobility which he hates.
• 2:00:03
  It's like on his formal title. That's so good, Vymes was in
• 2:00:08
  monstrous regimen. He was.
• 2:00:10
  He's right there at the end. Yeah, and only they didn't refer
• 2:00:13
  to him as Blackboard Monitor. Vymes no I.
• 2:00:14
  Definitely would have talked to him and like what the fuck.
• 2:00:16
  I think Monster's resume came out before that happens in the
• 2:00:20
  5th Elephant. Iriden has an idiotic memory,
• 2:00:25
  but they don't remember their own stuff.
• 2:00:28
  So they're they're slowly losing parts of themselves, but they
• 2:00:31
  remember all of the comrades that they send beyond.
• 2:00:37
  That's the why they're aired in The Witness.
• 2:00:39
  That's why they were given this responsibility is that even when
• 2:00:44
  Iriden is gone, they will still remember everyone else that's.
• 2:00:48
  So interesting. Right, that's.
• 2:00:51
  Really. Cool, right?
• 2:00:52
  So. Don't fuck it up by having their
• 2:00:54
  non. Bindings right the.
• 2:00:55
  Result of them losing the pieces of themselves.
• 2:00:57
  Like just don't fuck it up, it's really easy.
• 2:00:59
  Also, before people get at me in the comments, I said Iriden is
• 2:01:01
  the only person who can permanently release a Stormcast
• 2:01:04
  from life. That is true.
• 2:01:05
  But they have like, imparted that power onto like, a close
• 2:01:10
  inner circle because they can't be everywhere.
• 2:01:12
  Yeah, so Iriden's axe is what does it.
• 2:01:17
  That can just remove a storm cast soul from this plane.
• 2:01:21
  We don't know where it goes, but it grants them permanent death.
• 2:01:24
  Eridan established an order called the Lord Terminos and
• 2:01:27
  they do the same thing. What?
• 2:01:29
  Does someone know about this? Yes.
• 2:01:33
  Does. He have opinions, he has like
• 2:01:36
  formally allowed it. Like he said that it's OK if
• 2:01:40
  storm cast choose it but it's pretty clear he doesn't like it.
• 2:01:44
  Yeah, you'd rather just put him in a statue.
• 2:01:48
  Like, come on, Sigmar. It's more that he seems it seems
• 2:01:52
  he's worried that if there is a way to release term cast
• 2:01:55
  permanently from like immortality, then it might get
• 2:01:58
  wielded against them. That's a very good point because
• 2:02:02
  as soon as you said that the that you were did yes, has given
• 2:02:07
  this ability to others, I immediately just a little bit
• 2:02:10
  red flags a little bit like, but like, yeah, I think I trust Irid
• 2:02:14
  explicitly. I don't know these other people.
• 2:02:16
  Though, Yeah. That's too many factors we can't
• 2:02:19
  control. Yeah, Also, I haven't read this
• 2:02:21
  book yet, but I want to. There's a book that came out
• 2:02:23
  recently that talks a lot about the Ruination Chamber and they
• 2:02:27
  actually have a like Lord Teramos or terminus ceremony in
• 2:02:30
  it. 1 of Eridan's like disciples granting a storm cast final
• 2:02:34
  death on the battlefield. That just happens in the moment
• 2:02:37
  you more of them later. But a like ruination chamber who
• 2:02:41
  isn't active duty who chooses final death?
• 2:02:43
  There's like a whole ceremony involved.
• 2:02:47
  It is almost treated like a baptism is kind of the vibe I've
• 2:02:52
  gotten from like other people's accounts where the person is
• 2:02:55
  present and all of their friends, families, often
• 2:02:58
  descendants because if you've been reforging for a long time,
• 2:03:00
  then you'll likely have mortal descendants.
• 2:03:02
  Yeah, so interesting are invited.
• 2:03:05
  And yeah, all of them are invited and they are encouraged
• 2:03:10
  to, like, tell stories about these soon to be deceased.
• 2:03:14
  It is. These are.
• 2:03:14
  Stories they can't remember. Yeah, yeah, It is a bringing
• 2:03:18
  something back to them before the final decision is made.
• 2:03:22
  Yeah. Because at the end, some say,
• 2:03:26
  no, actually, I think I'll keep being going, like close to the
• 2:03:30
  storm. Yeah.
• 2:03:30
  And some say I don't remember any of this, but I'm glad to
• 2:03:33
  know it, that this is what you know of me.
• 2:03:35
  Yeah. But I'm, I'm ready to be done.
• 2:03:38
  That's. So.
• 2:03:39
  Interesting. Yeah, is.
• 2:03:41
  Oh, OK. So thinking about like Stormcast
• 2:03:44
  having descendants does, is it common for the still living like
• 2:03:50
  relatives and family to know? That an individual would become
• 2:03:53
  a. Storm cast Depends.
• 2:03:55
  I mean, obviously the Vikings. Also, yes, you don't get like a
• 2:03:59
  letter. It's like, yeah, like.
• 2:04:05
  A. Military, yeah.
• 2:04:06
  There's no structure in place to like tell living descendants
• 2:04:10
  that like a family member has become a storm cast and some
• 2:04:14
  storm cast prefer to leave it that way.
• 2:04:16
  Some storm casts are like this is my life now.
• 2:04:18
  I'm doing the fight against chaos.
• 2:04:20
  I take I would it would hurt my family more to know that like
• 2:04:25
  I'm still around and I can't be with them.
• 2:04:28
  Some storm cast go back to their family.
• 2:04:31
  I'm going to give a brief spoiler for an incredible book
• 2:04:34
  called God eater son that I love terribly that we are definitely
• 2:04:38
  going to do a bonus episode about at some point.
• 2:04:41
  But the main character of God Eater Son's mother becomes a
• 2:04:46
  storm cast. And God Eater Son is a story
• 2:04:49
  about the protagonist's fall to chaos.
• 2:04:53
  And she intentionally like leaves it a mystery that she is
• 2:05:00
  his mother basically like through all of her early
• 2:05:03
  interactions with him until she thinks it's the thing that can
• 2:05:05
  stop him from walking that path. And it it doesn't, it doesn't
• 2:05:10
  work. But that is very indicative of
• 2:05:12
  the relationship that Stormcast will often have to living
• 2:05:16
  relatives where it's better to keep an arm's reach.
• 2:05:19
  I I can't meaningfully be with you anymore.
• 2:05:22
  But like not all some of them fail that like intent.
• 2:05:26
  Yeah, I think the way that we're like knowing and so then people
• 2:05:30
  know what Storm cast. Are they know the deal?
• 2:05:33
  They know what they all are. That is so interesting.
• 2:05:35
  I wonder if it feels like, I mean the like the Viking Barbara
• 2:05:38
  would be like it is noble to die and become a storm cast and
• 2:05:41
  that's feels so cool. And then like I, I could see
• 2:05:46
  also an interesting like perspective on it of like storm
• 2:05:49
  cast would want their family and the family's descendants to know
• 2:05:52
  this, to hold on to those stories.
• 2:05:56
  Because if the only people that know your other storm cast, then
• 2:05:59
  eventually the stories that they know about you will be lost.
• 2:06:02
  To Yeah. It's the only way to survive.
• 2:06:05
  Those piece like keep those pieces of you alive is like the
• 2:06:08
  living memory of your family's descendants.
• 2:06:11
  Yeah, Ruination Storm cast when they're sent into battle are
• 2:06:15
  often if they're too far gone, are often accompanied by what
• 2:06:19
  are known as memorians. Those are mortals who have been
• 2:06:24
  told that storm cast story so they can just like try and spark
• 2:06:30
  something in them like jump start them with tales of their
• 2:06:32
  own heroism. And memorians are often picked
• 2:06:35
  because they are descendants of the storm cast in question.
• 2:06:38
  That's. Such an interesting.
• 2:06:39
  Dynamic, yeah, it's crazy. I love I love Stark.
• 2:06:46
  That's. A lot of cool shit going on.
• 2:06:48
  Right not only are the realms aware of storm cast, the realms
• 2:06:52
  have mixed opinions on storm cast.
• 2:06:54
  Like usually they're like a savior force, so the.
• 2:06:57
  Whole guys that burn the whole town down.
• 2:06:58
  Yeah, you don't want. Them the Knight Excelsior, Yeah.
• 2:07:01
  Yeah. No, thank you.
• 2:07:03
  But some places can get a little bit bitter.
• 2:07:05
  There's only so many storm casts, and there's lots of
• 2:07:07
  fronts. Yeah, a lot of.
• 2:07:10
  One of my favorite Warhammer novels is called Gloomspite.
• 2:07:13
  It is a horror novel, and it's about this little city that's
• 2:07:17
  about 50 miles from Hammer Hall that like, everyone there is
• 2:07:22
  just kind of constantly bemoaning the fact that if,
• 2:07:24
  like, a big Chaos force gets close to Hammer Hall, you know,
• 2:07:28
  100 storm cast drop out of the sky instantly to defend the
• 2:07:31
  biggest human settlement. But they're lucky to get like
• 2:07:34
  one on a good day because there's only so many storm
• 2:07:37
  casts. You're only 50 miles from Hammer
• 2:07:39
  Hall. You also true.
• 2:07:41
  Like. Respectfully, I get it.
• 2:07:43
  Like the land, like heritage, like your family is here and
• 2:07:47
  you're like only 50 miles. You're only 50 miles.
• 2:07:51
  Like I know you don't have cars but like what even is that for a
• 2:07:55
  walk you could move? That is also an interesting We
• 2:07:59
  are. I just split this episode in
• 2:08:01
  half. Yeah, we might.
• 2:08:05
  That is an interesting point you bring up about having lived here
• 2:08:10
  for a long time and like culture and heritage.
• 2:08:14
  A lot of the cities are people who survived the age of chaos
• 2:08:18
  and their descendants. A lot aren't.
• 2:08:23
  A lot are all as airborne. Yeah, yeah, because a lot of
• 2:08:28
  people probably didn't make it out of the Age of Chaos alive.
• 2:08:31
  And people who did survive the Age of Chaos without Sigmar's
• 2:08:35
  help. Oh, the resentment.
• 2:08:37
  Have opinions, of course, about a bunch of Azurians moving on to
• 2:08:42
  their land and telling them that they're reclaiming them for
• 2:08:47
  Sigmar. Oh, interesting.
• 2:08:50
  And they tend to have very different opinions about star
• 2:08:53
  cast. Yeah, yeah, that's so.
• 2:08:58
  But none of the Storm cast would have been Azurian.
• 2:09:03
  Some of them. I'm sure now.
• 2:09:04
  Yes, now some not. Beforehand.
• 2:09:07
  Not really, yeah. Listen, before they had their
• 2:09:09
  grand debut, yes, none of them would have been because there
• 2:09:11
  was no chaos on Azir. So no Azurian would have had the
• 2:09:14
  opportunity to die and meet that criteria.
• 2:09:17
  And so like, what's also very interesting is that like, right,
• 2:09:22
  you, you used our people for this like constant battle
• 2:09:25
  farther where they're going to die forever until they're lost
• 2:09:28
  entirely, but not your own. Yeah, we know and.
• 2:09:31
  I'm sure they were still just living and dying, but.
• 2:09:33
  Yeah, we know some like Native actions who see Stormcast as a
• 2:09:36
  perversion like you've. You've taken our ancestors and
• 2:09:39
  turned them into weapons. Like we know that there are like
• 2:09:44
  humans in the realms who are order aligned.
• 2:09:46
  They want chaos pushed out, but they don't like Sigmar.
• 2:09:50
  They correctly have assessed what he's doing as colonialism.
• 2:09:57
  There's. There's that whole goddess
• 2:09:58
  civilization flogging. We see it in Gloomspite again, a
• 2:10:03
  novel I love which follows a mercenary company.
• 2:10:05
  Everyone in the mercenary company is Azarian born except
• 2:10:10
  for their guide who actually knows the landscape and actually
• 2:10:13
  born man named Old Chev, who I love by the way, who likes the
• 2:10:20
  people he's traveling with and he's broadly like in favor of
• 2:10:23
  what they are doing. But he doesn't want to move to a
• 2:10:26
  city and he doesn't want to worship Sigmar because he
• 2:10:29
  doesn't think everything Sigmar does is good.
• 2:10:33
  She thinks he's a useful, he thinks he's a good ally in these
• 2:10:36
  trying times, but he would never worship him as a God.
• 2:10:39
  And that is a really interesting perspective that.
• 2:10:43
  No for. Sure, yeah, huge fan of.
• 2:10:47
  I don't know, I like Age of Sigmar because it is a story
• 2:10:51
  about people trying to good do good and why that's complicated.
• 2:10:55
  Yeah. That is in contrast to 40K,
• 2:10:58
  which is a story about people being shitty for basically no
• 2:11:01
  reason. Because the world is bad.
• 2:11:04
  I'll just be bad. It means nothing.
• 2:11:06
  Yep. Yeah, if if we were having this
• 2:11:08
  conversation about how like the Imperium treats non aligned like
• 2:11:13
  human civilizations, they kill them.
• 2:11:15
  Yeah, they just wipe them out, I'm sure.
• 2:11:17
  Extermination Join. Or die.
• 2:11:19
  The number one cause of death of humans in 40K is the Imperium of
• 2:11:23
  man. Whether that's your world
• 2:11:25
  decided they didn't want to be part of the imperium so we
• 2:11:28
  exploded it. We death started.
• 2:11:32
  Exterminatus is what it's called in 40K.
• 2:11:36
  Or whether that's you died in an industrial accident at 12
• 2:11:39
  because you were expected to be working the industrial machines
• 2:11:42
  by like 8. Yeah, I, I, I, for I.
• 2:11:49
  Not everything is for me. Everyone has their interests.
• 2:11:51
  I don't see the appeal of something so grim.
• 2:11:53
  Dark right like I get. I'm not This is not not an.
• 2:11:57
  Also not an Is there a lizard? Not an invitation for you to
• 2:11:59
  explain it. Yeah.
• 2:12:01
  And also not a critique on it. It's just real.
• 2:12:03
  Not for me whatsoever. Yeah, I've dipped my toes into
• 2:12:06
  40K before and I just always bounce off because for whatever
• 2:12:09
  appeal it has of like, here's a world that's bad and can't get
• 2:12:12
  better, here's a character who's going to try and do good has as
• 2:12:16
  a story. Yeah, I just can't get past the
• 2:12:19
  overwhelming flaw that a the Imperium sucks in a way that I'd
• 2:12:23
  never want to root for. Like, you can't make me care
• 2:12:25
  about the desires of Space Marines.
• 2:12:27
  They're all garbage. Yeah, yeah, no.
• 2:12:31
  The the like the most notably good space marine is a guy named
• 2:12:35
  Rubuta Gilliman, which is a good name.
• 2:12:38
  Nobody can pronounce it, which is my favorite running meme in
• 2:12:40
  40K. Everybody calls them Robo
• 2:12:42
  Gorilla Man or Robot Gorilla Glue or like it's very.
• 2:12:51
  It's very it's very Bandersnatch called Cucumber.
• 2:12:54
  Buns. Yep, Rubuta is OK.
• 2:12:59
  Slight 40K tangent. The most interesting thing about
• 2:13:01
  40K is that the Emperor or Sigmar equivalent XFT sucks.
• 2:13:06
  Like, sucks more than Sigmar does.
• 2:13:07
  Yeah, if Sigmar is like, I generally have broad good goals
• 2:13:12
  but I don't have a great ability to understand my own influences
• 2:13:15
  via like collodialism and stuff. The Emperor is I am in charge of
• 2:13:18
  the entire universe and if you don't like it I'm going to kill
• 2:13:20
  you. And people think he's a good guy
• 2:13:23
  sometimes, which is completely fucking insane.
• 2:13:26
  That's an. Odd take to have.
• 2:13:28
  Ryan, as part of his big plan to conquer the Galaxy, the Emperor
• 2:13:32
  had the Emperor of Mankind had twenty sons.
• 2:13:38
  A statement that is completely factually wrong but is like the
• 2:13:43
  common consensus. Which is very interesting. 1 The
• 2:13:47
  Emperor of mankind has no biological children.
• 2:13:50
  He like gene spliced 20 super soldiers.
• 2:13:54
  Yep. He calls them his son, but he
• 2:13:56
  does not think of them as that. He calls them his son so that
• 2:13:58
  they more willingly work with him.
• 2:13:59
  He thinks of them as tools. He refers to them by their
• 2:14:02
  numbers in private. The Emperor of Mankind isn't
• 2:14:07
  human, so he's not really the Emperor of Mankind.
• 2:14:12
  And he had 21 sons. Yeah, those 21 kids are called
• 2:14:20
  the primarks of the most interesting thing about 40K
• 2:14:23
  because of each of the original space frame chapters is based
• 2:14:25
  off of them. So that's where we get our like
• 2:14:27
  storm host esque quirks to them. It's like you've got Ruby,
• 2:14:31
  Gillum and and also they were all kidnapped as babies and
• 2:14:34
  raised on distant planets. And Jean spliced.
• 2:14:39
  Yes, gross. So like Rubuta Gilliman grew up
• 2:14:42
  on like a distant planet that had self styled itself on like
• 2:14:45
  the Roman Empire. That's why he's named Rufuta
• 2:14:47
  Gilliman. He is like styled the little
• 2:14:51
  like Roman like Leafs into his armor, which is very cool.
• 2:14:55
  I do like that. And he's like law and order and
• 2:14:59
  by the book and structure and the Senate.
• 2:15:00
  And we will solve this by a lessened debate guy.
• 2:15:06
  And then you have someone like Conrad Kurz, which is a very
• 2:15:11
  funny name for a jeans fly super soldier.
• 2:15:14
  All primarks have stupid names. Don't get at me.
• 2:15:18
  Conrad Kurz had horrifying premonitions of the future from
• 2:15:22
  a young age and he got teleported to like a shithole
• 2:15:26
  industrial planet. So he was raised on the streets
• 2:15:29
  by nobody and grew up to be like a psycho murderer because of it.
• 2:15:32
  Because he was just plagued by these horrifying nightmares of
• 2:15:35
  the future and had no way to deal with it.
• 2:15:40
  The absolute funniest name in all of Warhammer.
• 2:15:42
  Don't get at me. Ferris Manus of the Iron Hands
• 2:15:47
  chapter. His name means Iron Hand in
• 2:15:51
  Latin. Interesting.
• 2:15:55
  Perturabo, the siege specialist. So his name means Perpetual when
• 2:16:01
  he's the guy who's good at sieges.
• 2:16:04
  Listen. Pretty funny.
• 2:16:06
  Lehman Russ of the Space Wolves. Also, Space Wolves is an
• 2:16:10
  objectively funny thing to call a group of super soldiers.
• 2:16:16
  I think this 40K tangent is good because it means that I, I
• 2:16:22
  suspect there are folks who were like, yeah, not a 40K podcast.
• 2:16:25
  Don't talk about it. We'll form an opinion.
• 2:16:28
  Well, you just don't know anything about it.
• 2:16:29
  You just don't understand it. And now we can demonstrate.
• 2:16:32
  No no, Alton knows a ton about this and has made the educated
• 2:16:36
  decision of fuck that. I don't know a ton by the
• 2:16:39
  standards of people who are really into 40 Ki will preface.
• 2:16:42
  Yeah, but. You know it's you know more than
• 2:16:44
  me who's just decided fuck that. We're not a 40K podcast and run
• 2:16:50
  tricks ass Yeah I feel like. We don't feel more for a second.
• 2:16:52
  I can feel I could feel a slipping.
• 2:16:53
  I had to pull us back. As of the recording of this
• 2:16:56
  episode, we have 700 downloads, which is Yeah, thank you.
• 2:17:01
  By the way, say that huge. Thanks for listening.
• 2:17:04
  Yeah, that's really cool. Thanks for spending your time
• 2:17:06
  with us, especially this episode.
• 2:17:08
  Extremely thankful for all of you.
• 2:17:11
  Hey, Dalton. Yeah, there's one more image.
• 2:17:13
  There's one more image. I'm sorry, visual aids.
• 2:17:15
  There's one more image. We're gonna talk about the last
• 2:17:17
  important star of cast for our presentation today.
• 2:17:20
  Surprise have. To be sorry, this has been a
• 2:17:21
  delight. I have a great.
• 2:17:23
  Time Surprise, they're Dragons. There's two Dragons.
• 2:17:27
  There's two Dragons. Those are Tricothean's kids,
• 2:17:32
  yeah. Direct descendants, not.
• 2:17:35
  Or direct kids like they are. They are fluid, red.
• 2:17:40
  They fought alongside Dracothian during the battle.
• 2:17:43
  Burning Skies. Holding.
• 2:17:46
  A knife? No, I think he's holding like a
• 2:17:47
  Shard of statue probably. This was just punching a guy out
• 2:17:52
  of the frame, yes. They're so cool.
• 2:17:57
  That is, Krondis and Kazurai is. Kazurai, the blue one.
• 2:18:00
  Kazurai is the red 1. Interesting, Krondis just felt
• 2:18:03
  like a more aggro name. That's fair.
• 2:18:06
  Krondis is the blue one, Kazurai is the red one.
• 2:18:09
  They're Dracothians, first born children.
• 2:18:11
  To our knowledge they were in hiding during the age of Chaos.
• 2:18:15
  They can really fight back by themselves and Chaos has a habit
• 2:18:18
  of capturing Dragons and corrupting them to Chaos.
• 2:18:20
  Yeah, we don't want. To avoid.
• 2:18:22
  That total respects. Yeah, Kronda spent his time in
• 2:18:25
  isolation learning magic, which kicks so much ass it's unreal.
• 2:18:30
  He does look the. Blue one does look like he does
• 2:18:32
  magic. Yes, he's a huge dragon wizard.
• 2:18:34
  Dragon wizard in in game he can cast spells that he's really
• 2:18:38
  good at it. It's so good.
• 2:18:42
  Kronda, they're mirrors to each other.
• 2:18:44
  Kronda spent his time in isolation learning and bettering
• 2:18:46
  himself. Kazurai kind of went stir crazy.
• 2:18:49
  I could see he was extremely like upset that they couldn't do
• 2:18:54
  more to prevent the age of chaos from happening.
• 2:18:56
  He want to get back in the fight earlier and Qandas largely like
• 2:18:59
  tempered him from trying to do it.
• 2:19:02
  When they finally did like re emerge.
• 2:19:04
  They actually only join us in the narrative during the era of
• 2:19:06
  the beast, a thing that happens that like empowers Dragons as
• 2:19:10
  part of the era of the beast stuff.
• 2:19:14
  So that's when they like rejoin us in the narrative.
• 2:19:16
  Qandas like rejoins the storm cast eternals.
• 2:19:19
  He acts as advisor to Sigmar Casseri goes on a big murder
• 2:19:25
  spree. Yeah, Casseri's pretty crazy at
• 2:19:28
  this point. He just kind of drove himself to
• 2:19:31
  it, like lusting after his revenge.
• 2:19:34
  Yeah. And he mostly goes on big murder
• 2:19:37
  rampages against Chaos warriors. But.
• 2:19:39
  But mostly, yeah, he's kind of a big murder dragon.
• 2:19:43
  Well. You know what?
• 2:19:45
  Fair. Yeah, honestly, right.
• 2:19:47
  Like. You know what?
• 2:19:48
  It'd be that way, yeah. Slay listen for all the times
• 2:19:53
  that he obliterates a chaos fortress single handedly.
• 2:19:56
  I think we'll we'll take it. But those are our notable stone
• 2:20:01
  cast. I'm going to very quickly
• 2:20:03
  mention Tornist the Redeemed just because I didn't put them
• 2:20:06
  in the Yeah, I didn't put them in the notes initially because I
• 2:20:10
  didn't know how much of. Figure in lore he was going to
• 2:20:13
  be going forward, but he actually just got like a big
• 2:20:16
  thing. You got a model which is like
• 2:20:18
  the the gold standard for you being important.
• 2:20:21
  Yep. Everyone I have in the slideshow
• 2:20:24
  has a model, so that's the metric I use.
• 2:20:26
  But Tornas just got his model. Tornas was a chaos warrior and
• 2:20:30
  he did the Neve thing we were speculating on where he called
• 2:20:32
  out to Sigmar to redeem him in his death.
• 2:20:35
  OK, so if we've already done that, the knees will probably be
• 2:20:37
  a little bore of a bummer fest, Yes, Isn't that interesting?
• 2:20:41
  But he knows, though. Torn.
• 2:20:43
  Yes. Tornis knows that he was once a
• 2:20:45
  Chaos warrior. He's part of the Hollowed
• 2:20:47
  Knights, the ones who are really good at cleansing Chaos
• 2:20:50
  corruption specifically so that he can do as much as possible to
• 2:20:53
  undo the harm he did. Yeah.
• 2:20:56
  I. Really like.
• 2:20:57
  That yeah, he's really cool. He's a Knight of Zeros now,
• 2:21:00
  which is a type of Storm cast that have those like art Deco
• 2:21:03
  wings. Yeah.
• 2:21:04
  So he's just flying across the battlefield, like purifying
• 2:21:07
  stuff. He's great.
• 2:21:07
  And I like Tornos a lot. That's.
• 2:21:10
  Really cool he leads a group that are in a similar situation
• 2:21:15
  to him, other Storm or other chaos warriors who regretted
• 2:21:17
  their choice and called it Sigmar to redeem them.
• 2:21:19
  This happened a lot. It does happen.
• 2:21:20
  We don't know where Neve is, is the thing, because all those
• 2:21:23
  people remember that they were Chaos Warriors.
• 2:21:26
  That's. Kind of what?
• 2:21:27
  Brings the question, yeah. Was it the first time?
• 2:21:30
  Yeah. OK.
• 2:21:31
  So CAS where is take this deal a lot?
• 2:21:33
  Yeah, not, not super duper not. Not a lot, but like more than I
• 2:21:37
  thought I would have thought 0. There's like there's like a
• 2:21:41
  solid football team of redeemed as far as we know which that.
• 2:21:44
  Makes me really happy. Yeah, that makes me really
• 2:21:48
  happy. Yeah.
• 2:21:50
  But yeah, so it's definitely possible.
• 2:21:53
  But hey, 2 hours and 40 minutes into this recording, I think
• 2:21:56
  that's where we're going to cut it for the star cast episode.
• 2:21:58
  I knew this was going to be a long one.
• 2:21:59
  We're talking about like the poster child faction of Ager
• 2:22:02
  Sigmar. They're on the front of all the
• 2:22:04
  books on the front of. All the books, I have one, yeah,
• 2:22:09
  Warhammer ages. I have one Warhammer thing in
• 2:22:11
  general that I own and it's a mini that is a storm cast.
• 2:22:14
  Yeah, that guy's from the Sacrosanct Chamber.
• 2:22:17
  Like I was saying, that's the Wizards.
• 2:22:18
  Hey. They're like, really into the
• 2:22:20
  Wizards, yeah. But hey, thank you once again,
• 2:22:24
  dear listeners, we already called you out earlier in this
• 2:22:26
  episode, but we are super appreciative of everything that
• 2:22:29
  you listen to us talk about here, and we're always happy to
• 2:22:33
  have you also. Yeah, shut up.
• 2:22:36
  Yeah, I was gonna say we hear the bad moods.
• 2:22:39
  Orbit would also like to shout out our friends at Battle Shock
• 2:22:43
  Wargaming. They if you are looking for we
• 2:22:46
  cover the lower side of Age of Sigmar here on the podcast.
• 2:22:50
  If you are looking for gameplay of Age of Sigmar, I cannot
• 2:22:53
  recommend a better YouTube channel.
• 2:22:55
  They have good tactics, they know the game very well, they
• 2:22:58
  take a lot of effort into editing them to look nice.
• 2:23:02
  Whenever I am craving Age of Sigmar the game and I don't have
• 2:23:06
  time to play, I always love to sit down and watch an episode of
• 2:23:08
  Battle Shock Horror gaming. Shout out to them.
• 2:23:13
  We love to see and their locals Idaho like we are.
• 2:23:16
  We love to see local community lifting each other up it.
• 2:23:21
  Did just occurred to me that there is a non zero chance that
• 2:23:23
  there are folks who are going to download it and start listening
• 2:23:25
  to this podcast because they are looking for tips on how to play
• 2:23:27
  the game better. If they're looking for like
• 2:23:29
  strategy to help improve their their quest.
• 2:23:32
  And I'm just like, oh man. You won't find that here.
• 2:23:37
  Won't. Find that here I can almost
• 2:23:40
  guarantee. If we ever have a Patreon, maybe
• 2:23:42
  we'll have a tier where you can ask me for game advice or ask
• 2:23:46
  Darian for game advice, because that would be funny.
• 2:23:48
  That would. Be so funny.
• 2:23:53
  Well, have you tried flipping the game board?
• 2:23:58
  Now? You say some people can Banff.
• 2:24:00
  How often can we Banff? Could they potentially teach
• 2:24:03
  this skill to others? Usually hold a seminar.
• 2:24:06
  Usually once a turn, always always evaluate a unit by how
• 2:24:09
  fast it can move. That's your AOS tip for the
• 2:24:11
  episode. That would actually be really
• 2:24:14
  fun to do that. Going forward at the end of
• 2:24:16
  everyone here's. Your tip for?
• 2:24:17
  The episode I actually talked with Michael, one of the guys
• 2:24:20
  from Battle Shock War Gaming, because it was like, it'd be fun
• 2:24:22
  to do like some kind of collaboration in the future
• 2:24:24
  because we're all like local Idaho, like interesting, more
• 2:24:27
  content creators. And one of his proposals was us
• 2:24:31
  doing a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 style conversation over the
• 2:24:36
  top of footage of one of their games.
• 2:24:40
  That would be really delightful. That would be wild.
• 2:24:44
  But anyways, I'm. Going to be a little tipsy for
• 2:24:47
  it. That yes, that's probably.
• 2:24:48
  Going to get peak chaos staring. I don't know what's going on, so
• 2:24:51
  I'm going to need just a little bit of box strawberry wine.
• 2:24:55
  Listeners, thank you so much for being here.
• 2:24:57
  I hope that you have enjoyed this exploration of the Mortal
• 2:24:59
  Realms and our first dip into the actual Age of Sigmar.
• 2:25:03
  We. Thought we're here.
• 2:25:04
  We're here. Hey listener, thanks for hanging
• 2:25:06
  around. If you're just like, OK, I don't
• 2:25:08
  care. I don't care.
• 2:25:09
  When are we going to get to the part I wanted this to be?
• 2:25:11
  Hey, Stormcaster here. We're here.
• 2:25:14
  Yeah. Next episode we're going to be
• 2:25:17
  talking about a mystery. I have kept this secret from
• 2:25:20
  Darien for a long time. Dalton's very good at.
• 2:25:23
  That I'm very excited to talk about it, but not in this
• 2:25:25
  recording session because it's going to be another long
• 2:25:29
  episode. I'm just going to warn you now,
• 2:25:30
  what do? You do too.
• 2:25:31
  I'm like. No, not tonight.
• 2:25:35
  Listeners, thank you so much for being here.
• 2:25:37
  I have been, as always, your Night Quest store Dalton
• 2:25:41
  Montgomery. And I'm Darren the Endless.
• 2:25:43
  And remember, you get what everyone gets.
• 2:25:45
  You get a lifetime. Thanks so much.
• 2:25:47
  See you next time. Unless you're a storm caster.