Latest / The Bad Moon's Orbit / Episode 20: Be'lakor

Transcript

Episode 20: Be'lakor · The Bad Moon's Orbit

• 0:31
  Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of The Bad Moons
• 0:34
  Orbit. I am, as always, your shadow in
• 0:37
  the Earth. Dalton Montgomery and.
• 0:40
  I'm your basic average girl, Darian smart.
• 0:43
  Welcome back truly and formally, everybody, to another episode.
• 0:48
  Peek behind the curtain. It has been a minute since we
• 0:51
  recorded, and since you've probably heard an episode, we're
• 0:55
  back. Yeah, there's probably going to
• 0:56
  be a couple episodes you've heard post hiatus before this
• 0:59
  one. We've got a couple that just
• 1:00
  haven't reached the end of the editing pipeline yet, but this
• 1:04
  is the first one we are recording since we had to take a
• 1:07
  pause from recording. I'm not going to get into why,
• 1:09
  but here's life pro tip to everybody listening to this.
• 1:12
  Take care of your back. It's important, really
• 1:15
  important. You could.
• 1:18
  It's really, it's a lot easier to injure than you think it is.
• 1:23
  That's Dalton's advice for this episode.
• 1:26
  We come with a slice of life advice for this bad moon's
• 1:28
  orbit, but that is not what we're here to talk about today.
• 1:32
  Let me give you some nonsense slice of life advice.
• 1:35
  Eat cake for breakfast. Oh, there you go.
• 1:37
  Not frequently. Yeah.
• 1:38
  Sometimes eat cake for breakfast.
• 1:40
  Balance in all things. Take care of your back and eat
• 1:42
  cake. Cake for breakfast Hell yeah
• 1:46
  today friends, we are coming back with a with a bang coming
• 1:50
  back swinging. We are going to be talking about
• 1:54
  a very interesting character for Ager Sigmar, a very interesting
• 1:58
  character for Warhammer overall. Because this is going to be
• 2:02
  another fans who enjoyed our Tekla Centurion episode or our
• 2:06
  Nagash episode anyone where we talk a lot about people from the
• 2:09
  old world. This is going to be another
• 2:10
  character who's been with Warhammer kind of from the
• 2:14
  beginning, OK? This is a character who is
• 2:16
  behind the scenes in a lot of different things that have
• 2:19
  happened throughout the Warhammer universe.
• 2:20
  And so while they have a presence in Age of Sigmar, we
• 2:23
  are going to spend a little bit more time in the world that was
• 2:25
  today. Oh, we haven't.
• 2:26
  Been there in a while. Yeah, no need to to keep a cover
• 2:31
  on who we're talking about today, everybody.
• 2:33
  Today's episode is about Bellacore.
• 2:37
  Hey, that's a cool name. It's a cool name.
• 2:39
  Bellacore. The first Prince.
• 2:42
  Oh, the first anointed Prince of Chaos.
• 2:46
  OK. Big bad guy?
• 2:47
  Big bad guy sounds like. A big bad guy.
• 2:49
  Yeah, but before we get into our first Prince Darian me, do you
• 2:55
  have a games thing to talk about today?
• 3:00
  Yeah, dice towers. Oh, dice towers, I don't.
• 3:02
  Own I don't use any, but for my brother.
• 3:05
  My eldest brother just turned 14 and he told me he wanted a dice
• 3:10
  tower because he joined his D&D club at school.
• 3:12
  I'm like, hell yeah. So I went to a couple local game
• 3:15
  stores to track down a cool 1 and I found him a little small
• 3:18
  one that was that's like a mimic.
• 3:20
  It's a 3D printed one and it's a mimic.
• 3:22
  Drop it. It bounces out.
• 3:24
  It comes out of the mixed mouth or as you drop it.
• 3:26
  I don't know. It was cool.
• 3:27
  He liked it. I think dice towers are super
• 3:29
  fun, even if I don't have one because I don't need one to
• 3:35
  play. But I'm I really enjoyed playing
• 3:37
  with my brothers and it's fun just to watch it bounce, bounce,
• 3:40
  bounce and I find it very satisfying.
• 3:42
  I think it's just a cool they. The first story I went to was
• 3:45
  like, oh, we just had like the acrylic 1 and I was like, no.
• 3:48
  It's like. Not the point.
• 3:50
  Like, I don't know, I feel like you can roll a dice into a box
• 3:54
  and you're getting the exact same effect.
• 3:55
  If I'm going to get a dice tower, it should be a little
• 3:58
  piece of art to like be a part of the ritual of playing the.
• 4:03
  Game. Agreed.
• 4:04
  So dice towers, they're just neat.
• 4:07
  Hell yeah. Love a good dice tower add.
• 4:10
  Like you said, adds a little bit of ritual to what you're doing,
• 4:13
  makes it feel like an event, and that is a ton of fun.
• 4:16
  My cats also really liked the dice tower set out.
• 4:19
  I took a little video of rolling the dice to send it to my family
• 4:22
  and they were all super interested.
• 4:25
  Eat a cat. Literally did pick up the D4 and
• 4:27
  try to walk away. With it.
• 4:29
  And I screamed. That was alarming.
• 4:31
  Yep, that's absolutely not. Not for cats, dice.
• 4:34
  Not for cats also. Fun fact, dice not for cats.
• 4:38
  Yeah, add to the list of life advice from this episode Dice.
• 4:42
  Not for cats. What?
• 4:43
  About you, Dalton. I'm going to shout out a video
• 4:46
  game that I quite enjoy. As Allude to earlier in the
• 4:49
  episode, I've been fighting a little bit of an injury, and it
• 4:51
  has been nice to have a consistent thing that I can use
• 4:55
  to just like while away the time while I recover.
• 4:58
  This is not a new game by any means, but it's one of my
• 4:59
  favorite. I just cracked 350 hours on a
• 5:04
  game called Satisfactory. One of my favorite games of all
• 5:07
  time. It's just about building huge
• 5:10
  ass factories and I love it terribly.
• 5:12
  Is it? Saddest factory or satisfactory
• 5:16
  and the pun is the factory. Yes, it's a satisfying factory.
• 5:19
  Game cool. I was worried for a second that
• 5:21
  it was a. Very.
• 5:22
  No, it's not the saddest factory.
• 5:26
  No, absolutely. If you've played Factorio and
• 5:29
  you bounced off because it was just like a little bit too like
• 5:34
  techie with not enough spectacle.
• 5:36
  That's kind of my interaction with Factorio was I love
• 5:39
  Satisfactory because I get all the the greebly little like math
• 5:44
  brain. Yeah, we're trying to balance.
• 5:46
  OK, we've got 180 units of iron coming in every minute.
• 5:50
  And I got to split that across these couple factories to make
• 5:53
  plates and bolts and bolt those bolts into the plates to make
• 5:57
  this thing like you get all that joy.
• 6:00
  And then also if I want to, I can build a huge tower that
• 6:03
  looks cool, like and that's great.
• 6:06
  The huge, huge, huge point of enjoyment for me.
• 6:09
  Nice. Yeah, it sounds like a very
• 6:11
  Dalton. Game it is.
• 6:13
  It's not a game I'd recommend to everybody, but you're listening
• 6:15
  to a Warhammer podcast, so I'm you probably will, yeah.
• 6:20
  I briefly wanted to start playing Animal Crossing New
• 6:22
  Horizons, but I didn't want all my little animals to yell at me
• 6:27
  for. Not Yep and a half Yep Yep.
• 6:29
  And you're like, we'll just restart the game, old dear
• 6:32
  listener. I can't restart the game because
• 6:33
  I named my island hero Aisle after the cat I had at the time.
• 6:37
  You see the on Delta gave. He understands I can just.
• 6:40
  Delete hero. Aisle No, Certainly.
• 6:41
  Can I ever return? No, it's.
• 6:44
  It's a metaphor for life. Tragic so, but let's get back to
• 6:50
  our subject today, Bellacore. Bellacore.
• 6:53
  Bellacore the first. I already know who that is.
• 6:56
  No, we have not talked about him before.
• 6:57
  Yes, you're fine. We've not talked about him
• 6:59
  before. I'm gonna give a little quick.
• 7:02
  Like who's who, both for our benefit minutes since recording
• 7:06
  and also for the listeners benefit minutes since listening
• 7:09
  about people that are going to come up during this episode that
• 7:11
  we should know about. Obviously our main man, Sigmar,
• 7:15
  very important God of civilization, ascended to
• 7:17
  godhood during his life as a mortal in the old world.
• 7:20
  We're going to get some Sigmar this episode.
• 7:23
  The elven twins, Tyrion and Techless, they're going to be,
• 7:26
  they're going to make a brief appearance.
• 7:28
  Archaeon, obviously. We're talking about chaos.
• 7:30
  We're going to talk about Archaeon.
• 7:32
  Those are the kind of big names to reacquaint ourselves with.
• 7:35
  But our story actually starts before any of that.
• 7:40
  Yeah. We're going way, way back, even
• 7:43
  before, like, Nagash and like. Yeah, like the older, like elven
• 7:48
  peoples and stuff. Like Bellacore is without a
• 7:51
  doubt except for like cosmic immortal entities, right?
• 7:57
  Like the cast gods themselves. Bellicor is without a doubt the
• 8:00
  oldest person we've talked about yet on the podcast.
• 8:03
  He's been around a long time. So Bellicor, the first Prince,
• 8:09
  first of the damned part of his official title, he is.
• 8:14
  Oh, before we get started proper, I do also want to give a
• 8:17
  broad bulk disclaimer. Bill Kor is the oldest character
• 8:21
  like in the fiction that we've talked about so far.
• 8:23
  Bill Kor is also probably one of the oldest characters like
• 8:26
  written in Warhammer. Like he is there with Yeah, like
• 8:29
  he's he's there in like the original like source works when
• 8:33
  Warhammer kind of developed from like probably like AD and D game
• 8:37
  that the original creators were playing and just kind of spun
• 8:40
  out from there, man. That's like having an in your
• 8:42
  novel that's just hung on since the D&D game from 2013.
• 8:45
  Yep, whatever. That's like.
• 8:48
  That's really weird. So you're getting the double
• 8:52
  disclaimer today. You're going to get the Delton
• 8:55
  Old World disclaimer where we're not an old World podcast.
• 8:57
  I try and do my best for research, but it's just not a
• 8:59
  setting I'm as familiar with as I am with Age of Sigmar.
• 9:03
  I'll probably get some stuff wrong.
• 9:05
  I'll probably have like notes that I got from an unreliable
• 9:07
  source, what have you. You're also getting the
• 9:10
  Bellacour disclaimer because Bellacour's been written a lot.
• 9:13
  He's been written by a lot of different authors.
• 9:16
  There's definitely been periods in like Warhammer, the
• 9:18
  franchise's history, where they have been more or less precious
• 9:22
  with like the canonicity of stuff.
• 9:24
  So there's going to be stuff that contradicts.
• 9:27
  I'll try and call it out when it comes up.
• 9:29
  There's going to be stuff that you probably just don't hear me
• 9:30
  mention because it's like from one book that I haven't read
• 9:35
  that like other sources go against and said it's just not a
• 9:39
  thing that I've come across. There's going to be 1 big thing
• 9:42
  that's stupid and so, and even Games Workshop knows it's stupid
• 9:48
  now and have like Retcon did in more recent lore because it
• 9:51
  sucks. Yeah.
• 9:52
  So we're gonna we're gonna talk about all that.
• 9:53
  But again, I want the disclaimer of like, like if I don't mention
• 9:56
  your favorite Bellacour fact, it's probably 'cause I didn't
• 9:58
  see it or something else contradicted it or any number of
• 10:02
  things. It's just the nature of a a
• 10:03
  franchise, this one you. Can share that fact?
• 10:05
  Yes, please do this. Is my favorite part of this
• 10:08
  character. This is something I've always
• 10:09
  liked about this character. Like I know I don't usually
• 10:11
  chime in the hey you should interact with this.
• 10:13
  I'm like, I'm not allowed to, no.
• 10:16
  No, no, no. Yeah, no.
• 10:19
  Dalton has never said I am not allowed to do anything Like that
• 10:22
  is not what I mean. Like it is not like, oh, I can't
• 10:24
  engage with it, but like the premise of our show is I do
• 10:27
  genuinely don't know anything. Except for.
• 10:31
  What Dalton has disclosed to me here, literally they've been
• 10:33
  conversations with Dalton's like, I want to tell you about
• 10:35
  this. I can't never mind.
• 10:36
  So like I so The thing is like, I usually am not being like,
• 10:38
  yeah, you should e-mail us. You just tell us about these
• 10:40
  things because it's like I'm not the one who's going to be
• 10:43
  engaging on the wider beyond the creating of the OR the.
• 10:46
  Literally the recording podcast. But y'all really can like
• 10:50
  totally feel free to be like oh I've always liked this or this
• 10:53
  is my favorite part or I really like or what do you think about
• 10:57
  this? Don't be a Dick.
• 10:59
  And be like, oh for sure, you ever.
• 11:00
  Got this thing or this is like like?
• 11:05
  Yeah, of course. Like.
• 11:06
  Definitely be like, hey, I think you'd find this fact I know
• 11:09
  super interesting. Like if your intent is to, I
• 11:12
  want to share this with you because you love it and I love
• 11:14
  it and I have a piece that I think you'd love that's super
• 11:17
  cool. But like, y'all like, be cool,
• 11:20
  man. Yeah.
• 11:21
  Just I'm not a 40K cup podcast. I believe in you.
• 11:23
  I believe in your ability to be cool.
• 11:25
  So be nice to Dalton. I'll find.
• 11:29
  Out just be like, I always appreciate when people offer
• 11:31
  additional advice, offer additional information, correct
• 11:34
  something that we did wrong. We haven't recorded since this
• 11:38
  came up, but this was a huge blunder on my part that I was
• 11:41
  planning on addressing next episode because we're going to
• 11:42
  talk about it more anyways. But in the Marathi episode, I
• 11:46
  claimed Anvilguard is an OLGU, the realm of shadows.
• 11:49
  It's not. I have no idea where.
• 11:52
  Yeah, I have no idea where I got that.
• 11:54
  I think just because Marathi operates out of OLGU, like, I
• 11:56
  just didn't bother checking. But like, Anvilguard's on action
• 12:01
  like that. That's part of why it's like a
• 12:02
  huge kind of weird. Like, that's part of why it was
• 12:05
  such a huge deal. Like it would have been a huge
• 12:07
  deal anyways because Marathi like it captured an independent
• 12:10
  city, but actually is where like a huge chunk of the original
• 12:14
  like founded cities are. And so it's not like, oh, here's
• 12:19
  this like one far off place that Marathi like took over in her
• 12:23
  own realm. It's like 01 of the like core
• 12:26
  cities in like Sigmar's new like emerging free states is a
• 12:31
  Daughters of Cain temple now. Like, oh, wild.
• 12:37
  But yeah, so like if you if you have corrections, I'm always
• 12:39
  happy to read them and like, mention them the next time the
• 12:42
  subject comes up on the podcast. There's always usually a bit of
• 12:45
  a gap between recording and a release, so you might not hear
• 12:47
  it right away. But yeah, like I said that as
• 12:49
  long as you're not a a. Yeah, exactly.
• 12:52
  And. You know.
• 12:53
  Yeah, of course. Absolutely.
• 12:55
  Like like, I don't like it being like I, I just, I just know this
• 12:59
  thing. Yes, I just really care about
• 13:01
  this thing and I want to tell you because it was wrong, but I
• 13:03
  I'm not trying to like you, can't believe in you again, I'll
• 13:06
  know. Yeah, absolutely.
• 13:07
  Between. Being like cool about it and
• 13:10
  like having that ha ha. I have one up buddy.
• 13:12
  Like why? We're podcasts.
• 13:13
  It's free entertainment. Well said, well said.
• 13:17
  But now that our disclaimers are out of the way, let's talk about
• 13:21
  Bellacour. So Bellacour's main claim to
• 13:25
  fame. The the thing that makes
• 13:26
  Bellacour Bellacour is Bellacour is the first demon Prince.
• 13:31
  Demon Princess for listeners at home who we talked about them
• 13:35
  very briefly in prior episodes. Yeah, we talked about one in
• 13:39
  like the corn episode right of Valkya is a demon Prince.
• 13:42
  A demon Prince categorically is a mortal who has been turned
• 13:46
  into a demon. Yes.
• 13:48
  Is the only any mortal that gets turned into a demon.
• 13:51
  They become a demon Prince. It's just the thing that happens
• 13:54
  to a mortal soul when it gets turned into a demon soul.
• 13:57
  So demon Princess are like very diverse there.
• 14:01
  There's not like a lot of core traits that they all share
• 14:03
  because they are just like, yeah, exactly.
• 14:07
  Yes. It's a just a catch all term
• 14:08
  basically for like what happens to a mortal soul when it gets
• 14:11
  turned into a deep in soul. Yeah, yeah.
• 14:15
  So Bellacour was the first. That's why his title the first
• 14:19
  Prince like. Literally not like the oldest
• 14:21
  one living or surviving, but literally the 1st.
• 14:23
  Yes, the very first Bellacour is the first Prince, and he's so
• 14:27
  old. Like, that happened at such a
• 14:29
  time that we don't know anything about Bellacour's life before he
• 14:35
  was the first Prince. Damn.
• 14:36
  OK. Yeah.
• 14:37
  Like, we don't even, like, strictly speaking, we don't even
• 14:39
  know what, like, species Bellacour was before he.
• 14:43
  No, No. Yeah like a lot of demon
• 14:45
  Princess are humans because humans are easy to corrupt they
• 14:48
  follow the chaos pretty easily but they're like Slaneshi demon
• 14:51
  Princess who are elves because Slanesh wants after Alvin souls
• 14:55
  more. Yep, but Bellicor was the 1st
• 14:57
  and we don't know anything beyond that.
• 14:59
  Like from his origin he was well or except that sorry Bellicor
• 15:03
  was the first demon Prince. Bellicor was the first mortal to
• 15:06
  ever swear himself to Chaos. That's what got him like,
• 15:10
  elevated. To like in the world.
• 15:12
  In the world that was. In the world that was, yeah, we
• 15:15
  know Bellacour's from the world that was, so at least that far
• 15:19
  back, like, we don't know, like if there were presumably there
• 15:23
  weren't demon Princess from previous worlds.
• 15:25
  Interesting, because like, Bellacour survived into AOS by
• 15:28
  virtue of being a demon. Yeah.
• 15:31
  Yeah. So like, he's probably genuinely
• 15:34
  like the first demon Prince. That was really fucked up, yeah.
• 15:38
  It's so bad that this is the first time in all of realities
• 15:43
  that immortals for themselves to chaos.
• 15:45
  Right, this is. The one where they tried really
• 15:47
  hard to prevent. This right, it's it's a wild,
• 15:51
  it's what a wild strange journey.
• 15:53
  It's I said we don't know anything about his immortal life
• 15:55
  except that he was the the first immortal ever swear himself
• 15:58
  willingly to chaos. And for that honor, he was
• 16:01
  anointed the first demon Prince. He was elevated to demon hood.
• 16:06
  He underwent dark apotheosis. That's the the term for becoming
• 16:10
  a demon Prince. And uniquely, kind of, we'll
• 16:13
  talk about it uniquely, he is not a demon Prince of any of the
• 16:18
  singular Chaos gods, right? He's the demon Prince of all of
• 16:23
  the Chaos Gods. Like together, yes.
• 16:26
  But they don't get along. No, it is the first time all
• 16:29
  four of them collaborated on a project, basically.
• 16:33
  Wow. All four because we have lots of
• 16:34
  independent demon Princess, right?
• 16:36
  They all came after Bellacor. But like, like I said, Valkya
• 16:40
  well. This was such a great idea.
• 16:41
  OK, well I'm going to do it on my own.
• 16:42
  Now, yes, like Valkya is a demon Prince of corn.
• 16:46
  Like Sigvald's not a demon Prince, but he might be at some
• 16:50
  point. Corgas, we haven't talked about
• 16:53
  Corgas in a minute. He's also like a corn.
• 16:56
  He's the the corn guy who did the blood feast and all that.
• 17:00
  Yeah, I remember him. His most recent lore development
• 17:02
  is he underwent dark apotheosis and became a demon Prince.
• 17:06
  That happened after we recorded that episode.
• 17:07
  So yeah. Yeah.
• 17:09
  So we haven't seen his, like, new model yet, but presumably
• 17:12
  he's going to get one at some point.
• 17:13
  So yeah, I was going to say, yeah, right.
• 17:15
  I'm excited for it. That's been coming for a while.
• 17:18
  He's been doing a lot of doing a lot of good work for Corn since
• 17:21
  the start, pretty much. But yeah, the the Chaos gods all
• 17:26
  come together, the four of them, and they put Bellacour through
• 17:29
  dark apotheosis, raise his soul into demonhood, and he becomes
• 17:34
  when someone is the champion of all four Chaos gods
• 17:37
  simultaneously, they're called Undivided.
• 17:40
  And Bellacourt is stated in multiple places to be the only
• 17:45
  undivided demon Prince. Yeah, right.
• 17:49
  See, that's where it gets fuzzy though, because he gets called
• 17:53
  the only undivided demon Prince a lot.
• 17:57
  But like, there are others like it.
• 18:01
  It is not like this. This is why it's fuzzy because
• 18:03
  there's not like there's never like a major character who's
• 18:06
  another undivided demon Prince. There aren't any that like have
• 18:10
  appeared in more than like a single book or like a mention
• 18:13
  here or there or like a single article.
• 18:15
  But in both the actual like tabletop game Age of Sigmar
• 18:22
  demon, you can play a undivided demon Prince in your army.
• 18:26
  Like you can you can buy that model and you can build them as
• 18:29
  like an undivided where they don't have like all the the
• 18:32
  markings of like other chaos gods on them and like use them
• 18:35
  in your army. Which like, the point is that
• 18:38
  the game is supposed to tie into the lore in that way where any.
• 18:40
  Yeah. Supposed to be a real thing that
• 18:42
  has happened in one of the realms.
• 18:44
  Yeah, and we have like, like, I know that.
• 18:49
  So if you're listening to this podcast, there's a pretty good
• 18:51
  chance that you've interacted with the Total War series of
• 18:54
  video games because they have three games in a series that are
• 18:59
  set in the old world. Yeah.
• 19:01
  It's where a lot of people first experience the setting.
• 19:04
  And they're great. I like them a lot.
• 19:05
  I've played them. They're.
• 19:06
  They're good. And in the third one, one of the
• 19:09
  characters you can play in that game is an undivided demon
• 19:12
  Prince. And like and again, those games
• 19:16
  aren't like strictly Canon but like it is an official Warhammer
• 19:21
  product and set in. And those minifigs are strictly
• 19:24
  Canon, Yeah. So like having one that is an
• 19:27
  undivided demon Prince, even though we've got Bellacore who
• 19:30
  is called multiple times the. Old, yeah, and then?
• 19:34
  Apparently this is just like never acknowledged as a
• 19:37
  contradictory reality. Yeah, again, put it in that like
• 19:41
  camp of like, who knows what the truth is, but some people have
• 19:48
  like conflictingly decided either he is or he isn't, and we
• 19:53
  just kind of live in both of those realities.
• 19:55
  Both are true. Yeah, all.
• 19:58
  Right. Sure, right.
• 20:00
  But for for all intents and purposes, most of the the like
• 20:05
  actual. Setting treats him as if he's
• 20:08
  the only undivided demon Prince, and that's going to be relevant
• 20:11
  for a lot of reasons. Yeah, it sounds kind of like a
• 20:13
  big deal, yeah. Absolutely.
• 20:15
  Like I said, it's the first time it happened.
• 20:17
  First mortal sworn to chaos. I mentioned we don't know what
• 20:19
  species he is. We actually don't know when like
• 20:22
  Bellacour technically like started operating in the world.
• 20:27
  Our earliest records of Bellacour, like in setting, we
• 20:32
  also haven't talked about this very much, which is probably a
• 20:34
  shock to people who are like familiar with the old world
• 20:36
  specifically. But it's just like not as much
• 20:37
  of a thing in AOS, even though it's like a huge thing in the
• 20:39
  old world. Doors in the old world are kind
• 20:42
  of defined by their relationships to others, it
• 20:46
  said. Like the loyalty of a dwarf full
• 20:47
  last year, the rest of their life.
• 20:50
  But more importantly, the grudges of dwarves are the kind
• 20:53
  of thing that you never want to accumulate.
• 20:56
  And while independent individual dwarves and even like individual
• 21:00
  dwarf and clans will hold individual grudges against
• 21:03
  people or places. Oh, not places, but like certain
• 21:07
  towns, certain factions. Yeah, who?
• 21:09
  Doesn't have a grudge against that one Denny's.
• 21:11
  Yeah, right. I'll go to.
• 21:15
  Applebee's, but I won't go to that Applebee's.
• 21:16
  Right. A grudge against dwarven kind is
• 21:21
  not kept at the individual level.
• 21:22
  It is elevated and it is recorded in the demos Cron the
• 21:27
  Great Book of grudges Yeah yeah it is the IT is the like royal
• 21:34
  symbol of the dwarven kings like every dwarven king keeps
• 21:38
  personal account of the Great Book of grudges or the High King
• 21:41
  of the Dwarfs. It keeps personal account of the
• 21:43
  Great Book of Grudges. They have it on them at all
• 21:45
  times. And the the Dumas Cron goes back
• 21:50
  literally. Like as long as anyone knows
• 21:52
  there are things written in there about like the earliest
• 21:56
  men when they were still like tribal hunters and stuff, right?
• 22:00
  Yeah. Like dwarfs, grudges are eternal
• 22:03
  and the grudge against dwarven kind is going to last all of
• 22:06
  dwarven. Kind, yes, have this for OK, OK.
• 22:09
  So our earliest. That's rat as hell and I.
• 22:11
  Respect it, right? It rules.
• 22:14
  So our earliest mention of Bellacour, and it's not even by
• 22:18
  name, is the earliest entries in the Great Book of Grudges are
• 22:23
  all referencing something that in the dwarven language is
• 22:26
  called the shadow in the Earth, which is Bellacour.
• 22:31
  We know, like, Word of God is Bellacour, and it was Bellacour
• 22:35
  probably scheming or messing with them, trying to like
• 22:37
  accumulate power for himself. And like, Yep, probably a good
• 22:45
  time actually to show you what Bellicore looks like just so you
• 22:47
  have like a, an image in my head, a good mental image in
• 22:50
  your head. He's just kind of a demon.
• 22:52
  And again, that's the that's the privilege of like being a being
• 22:57
  like an early character when you don't feel the need to, like,
• 23:00
  differentiate him a lot visually.
• 23:02
  He's just kind of a demon. Yeah.
• 23:03
  Lots of horns. Yeah.
• 23:04
  But other than having more horns than you maybe would expect,
• 23:08
  kind of, yeah. Demon gargoyle looking
• 23:10
  motherfucker. Yeah, he's just kind of a he's
• 23:12
  just kind of a dude, and that's great.
• 23:14
  He's classic, yeah. Classic demon I I could fight
• 23:17
  that guy in Castlevania. Yeah, exactly.
• 23:19
  We like that guy. So yeah, we got the the
• 23:22
  Bellicore early in the great book of Grudges.
• 23:25
  And so we know he's been around for a long time, but again, we
• 23:27
  don't have a lot of history about him like super early on.
• 23:31
  The reason, the reason he's often stayed to be the only
• 23:35
  undivided demon Prince, and the reason why that's important is
• 23:38
  that after his like apotheosis, all four Chaos gods realize at
• 23:44
  the same time that because this is something they collaborated
• 23:48
  on, like they all exerted an equal amount of influence over
• 23:51
  creating Bellicore, none of them has control over him.
• 23:57
  Yeah. They've all cancelled each
• 24:00
  other's influence out right like zinch and nergal or change in
• 24:04
  stagnation. Corn and slanesh are experienced
• 24:07
  and outcome like they just oil and water.
• 24:10
  Like cancel out into where Bellacourt is free.
• 24:16
  He is the only if he is the only undivided demon Prince.
• 24:19
  He's the only demon, period, who is not bound to the will of a
• 24:24
  chaos guy. Interesting.
• 24:26
  So what does he do with that? Whatever he wants.
• 24:29
  Yeah, obviously. That's on me.
• 24:32
  Bellacour does whatever he wants.
• 24:34
  Plus, by all four, he can act freely.
• 24:36
  He basically like plays it coy. Like he's just like, hey, hey,
• 24:41
  you can't force me to do anything, but like, I'm still in
• 24:44
  your service. Like I'm the first like mortal
• 24:46
  swarm to Chaos. I'll do what you want me to do.
• 24:49
  And he kind of like Bellacour's primary character trait is that
• 24:54
  he's a schemer. He's slippery, he's a snake.
• 24:58
  He basically promises service to all four of the chaos gods and
• 25:03
  then like goes behind each of their backs to promise more
• 25:06
  service to each of them independently, right?
• 25:09
  He's just right. He's just playing them all for
• 25:14
  power because that's ultimately what he wants.
• 25:17
  That's why he's here. And pretty much as soon as he
• 25:23
  has like, obligations to all the Chaos gods, as soon as he has
• 25:26
  been like, granted power by them to go out and enact their will,
• 25:29
  he like, descends into the mortal world and starts
• 25:34
  basically just doing whatever he wants.
• 25:36
  Yeah. It's hard for chaos to get into
• 25:39
  the world. Like, the Chaos gods themselves
• 25:41
  can manifest into it, right? And in the old world, it was
• 25:44
  hard for, like, demons even to get into the world without,
• 25:48
  like, the specific places in the world that they could, like,
• 25:50
  slip through. So it's hard for the Chaos gods
• 25:53
  to, like, yank Bellacour's leash, basically.
• 25:57
  So he just gets into the world and starts doing whatever he
• 26:02
  wants to do, Right? Yeah.
• 26:05
  Yeah, that seems like what you're going for when you spur
• 26:07
  yourself to chaos. You had don't have the power to
• 26:08
  do whatever. You want?
• 26:09
  Yeah, absolutely. And what he wants to do is rule
• 26:14
  basically that. Makes.
• 26:16
  Sense Bellacour starts like he establishes his own capital in
• 26:20
  the far north. He starts leading like conquest
• 26:24
  of the surrounding, like human tribes.
• 26:27
  Basically. This is pre Sigmar.
• 26:30
  Yeah, humans are. Yeah, good.
• 26:32
  Thing is pre sigmar because I know someone who wouldn't
• 26:34
  appreciate. That yeah, all the all these
• 26:36
  disparate human tribes, Bellicore like unites some of
• 26:39
  them, brings them under his banner.
• 26:41
  He uses his like personal power to open riffs to bring demons
• 26:46
  in. And he leads this like massive,
• 26:48
  like world conquering army mixed of like mortal followers and
• 26:54
  demons, and that's going to kind of be like Bella course
• 26:58
  trademark as we as like we follow him forward.
• 27:01
  Archaeon is the Everton of chaos.
• 27:03
  He's the the grand Marshall, the apocalypse, but he doesn't trust
• 27:07
  demons. Archaeon will not work alongside
• 27:08
  demons if he can help it. Prefers mortal followers.
• 27:12
  And Bellicore is almost the exact opposite where he trusts
• 27:15
  he doesn't trust demons, but he trusts demons to be demons.
• 27:19
  You always know that a demon isn't going to do right by you,
• 27:23
  right? You can trust them to stab you
• 27:24
  in the back. And so he he works with demons
• 27:27
  more readily and he works with humans that he can like
• 27:30
  overpower basically right. Like this is not a trust
• 27:33
  relationship. I'm not leading you.
• 27:35
  I am threatening you into service because I'm this big
• 27:38
  powerful demon Prince. Yeah.
• 27:41
  Absolutely. He conquers quite a bit.
• 27:44
  There's like a real threat if what we're going to talk about
• 27:49
  next hadn't happened. There's a real threat that like
• 27:52
  Bella Core could have been because like they've they've
• 27:54
  done the the Crisis on infinite Earths things.
• 27:56
  However many times cast always shows up, finds the world and
• 27:58
  destroys it, there's a pretty good chance that that could have
• 28:01
  been Bellacour. Like this could have been the
• 28:03
  thing that just like, Yep, Bellacour conquers the whole
• 28:06
  world, opens a bunch of chaos rifts, everything gets
• 28:09
  destroyed. And instead of Age of Sigmar
• 28:11
  'cause he wasn't born yet, we get Age of Bellacour, age of
• 28:16
  right. But he makes it like into like
• 28:19
  the early, like kind of north of what would eventually become the
• 28:23
  Empire. Like he conquers like most of
• 28:25
  the northern parts of the world, like a kind of tiny slice in the
• 28:30
  north of Othawan where the elves live.
• 28:33
  Yeah. And is like on the campaign
• 28:37
  March when March when things start to like, shift.
• 28:43
  So first, I just have a note here I'm going to mention before
• 28:45
  I forget about it. Bellecore's like base of
• 28:47
  operations in most of the like human populated lands he conquer
• 28:51
  will eventually come to be Norsca, the kind of like Norse
• 28:55
  themed like northern tribes that exist north of what would
• 28:59
  eventually become Sigmar's empire.
• 29:02
  So Bellacour's influence is long felt.
• 29:04
  They're like far after like far into the future where Bellacour
• 29:09
  like monuments Bellacour erected to himself and like cities that
• 29:12
  Bellacour founded on his like campaign trail marches have
• 29:15
  these like thousands of year old like traditions or like
• 29:19
  histories of the time when these people were like in service of
• 29:23
  Bellacour. That's why chaos worship tends
• 29:25
  to be this, like almost kind of ingrained cultural practice in
• 29:28
  Norska into the era of Sigmar's Empire.
• 29:33
  That's why Norska still has people who live there, and those
• 29:37
  people are chilled with, like, raiding empire coastlines and
• 29:40
  stuff for their way of life. We do.
• 29:42
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 29:44
  You know what? That's crazy, but makes sense.
• 29:46
  Yeah, so while Bellicore is doing all this, the gods figure
• 29:50
  out that he's not going to do any of the things that he
• 29:52
  promised them. And they they try and like they
• 29:54
  send like demons after him and it just like doesn't work
• 29:57
  because he's too powerful and they'd like try and exert their
• 29:59
  influence over him. And it doesn't work because he's
• 30:01
  too powerful and he's not like bidden to any of them right
• 30:04
  there. You cancel each other out.
• 30:06
  And so they then, instead of like trying to get at Bellacour
• 30:09
  specifically anymore, because none of the chaos gods like each
• 30:12
  other, they all go well, if if none of us can control
• 30:17
  Bellacour, I'm going to get a jump on like having my own Bella
• 30:22
  course. I was basically yes.
• 30:25
  This is the origin of other demon Princess yes and also.
• 30:29
  Like, OK, that's why it seems like weird that there's just
• 30:31
  like occasionally in a mini or on a video game, just another
• 30:38
  undivided demon Prince. It's like they wouldn't do that
• 30:42
  again. No, yes, they.
• 30:43
  Just legitimately wouldn't do that.
• 30:45
  Yeah, they learn their lesson. They they just make demon
• 30:48
  princes of themselves now, like to bind them to their will.
• 30:52
  Get them to work together again. Yeah.
• 30:54
  So it does not make sense for that to be just an unquestioned
• 30:58
  element in other parts of this game.
• 31:01
  World right. Weird.
• 31:02
  OK, very weird. So yeah, all of the all the
• 31:04
  other cast Gots start elevating their own demon Princess.
• 31:07
  They just pick mortals. None of them are as strong as
• 31:10
  Bellacour because Bellacour had the power of all four.
• 31:12
  Yeah, and like he was fully committed to tag team.
• 31:16
  Like not all four, but like the two that don't hate each other.
• 31:19
  No, all, all demon Princess from here on out are there's there's
• 31:22
  a pretty good evidence to think that like like if, if Nergal and
• 31:26
  corn got together to try and make a demon Prince together,
• 31:30
  that person might just like explode or their their their
• 31:32
  soul get like torn to shreds because those are opposing
• 31:35
  forces without like the full balance of all four, right.
• 31:39
  But individual demon Princess get raised.
• 31:44
  Like I said, they're not as skilled.
• 31:44
  They're not as capable because the gods are now just like, kind
• 31:47
  of picking people who are good enough, right?
• 31:49
  You only get a perfect candidate every so often.
• 31:51
  And that's Bellicore. Yeah, exactly.
• 31:55
  And So what that does, like during these campaigns the
• 31:59
  Bellicore is waging, is it both starts to draw power from him in
• 32:02
  a very, like, practical sense. Like now you have like, when
• 32:06
  Bellacour was the only game in town for being like a chaos
• 32:08
  marauder, you're joining Bellacour's army.
• 32:11
  But now there's this new, like, coronate demon Prince who's
• 32:14
  strutting their stuff, and they're pulling warriors away
• 32:17
  from Bellacour's 'cause they're pulling demons out of the realm
• 32:20
  of chaos to serve them. And it's reducing, Yeah, As you
• 32:25
  say, it's reducing, Yeah. It's reducing his military
• 32:28
  might. It's reducing his like practical
• 32:30
  power but more demon Princess just like in the world also
• 32:35
  start to pull his power in like a very metaphysical way, almost
• 32:40
  in kind of like a speed force way.
• 32:43
  Or if you have too many speedsters in the same universe,
• 32:45
  none of them are as fast as if they were the only ones.
• 32:49
  If right. If that's main cannon, that's
• 32:51
  from not Injustice but the other one where they're evil.
• 32:54
  Flash. Maybe the Flash ends up in
• 32:58
  another universe for the justice, like you're evil.
• 33:00
  And their version of the Flash is like.
• 33:03
  I could tell he the second he got here because my access to
• 33:06
  the speed force halved because in their universe, their Flash
• 33:09
  killed all the other speedsters so that he could be the fastest.
• 33:12
  Also, he's Australian. I don't know why that's wrong.
• 33:14
  He's also Yeah, I. Hate his flashpoint.
• 33:18
  I don't know, gang Flashpoint. Yeah, it's been a minute.
• 33:20
  Let us know. Yeah, but yeah, so like just
• 33:24
  more demon Princess, more mortals with like access to like
• 33:29
  demonic souls and chaos magic in general pull from Belle course
• 33:32
  strength in a very real way. Really.
• 33:34
  Pisses him off, yes. And so he just kind of catches
• 33:38
  the double whammy of like, there's more competition in now
• 33:40
  in town now and he's not as impressive as he was anymore.
• 33:44
  Yeah. Well, real burnout kids, right?
• 33:49
  Neat to see it. So Bellacourt starts waging war
• 33:53
  on the other demon Princess. Like they all start infighting.
• 33:55
  He figures if he can kill them like a demon can't die
• 33:58
  permanently. They just go back to the realm
• 33:59
  of chaos. He figures if he can kill like a
• 34:01
  big swath of them or or like convince them to join his side,
• 34:04
  then it could be like a whole thing.
• 34:06
  But basically all this infighting like long story
• 34:09
  story, all this infighting makes the opportunity that the elves.
• 34:14
  So here's here's Tyrion and Tecla are showing up kind of
• 34:18
  yes, because they weren't here, but it's their ancestors.
• 34:23
  Okay, this is the opening that the elves of ultra one.
• 34:27
  This is even before it's not even accurate to call them high
• 34:29
  elves because this is before the high off dark elf.
• 34:31
  Like what else? Split.
• 34:32
  Yeah, it's just the elves. Yeah, this is the opening that
• 34:36
  was created that allowed the elves of Ultawan under tutelage
• 34:39
  of the Seraphon, the like, lizard people who taught the
• 34:44
  elves magic to make what would come to be known as the Great
• 34:47
  Vortex of Ultawan, this big Whirlpool in the middle of the
• 34:51
  island of Ultawan. The just acts as like an
• 34:55
  overflow drain on magic in the world.
• 34:58
  It pulls all of the excess magic out of the world, which makes it
• 35:02
  really hard for demons to stay stable.
• 35:06
  Yeah, the elves pull just a big like, no, you can't and
• 35:11
  basically banish all of the demons from the world at once.
• 35:14
  That sounds. Very effective.
• 35:16
  Yeah, the vortex is the reason why the old world lasted as long
• 35:20
  as it did, because even if it wasn't Bellacore, if demons
• 35:23
  could just like, keep manifesting in the world, Yeah,
• 35:26
  like they would have. Yeah.
• 35:27
  There would have never been an opportunity for like, the empire
• 35:30
  to build up and like the the people who fought diligently
• 35:33
  against Chaos to ever get their feet underneath them.
• 35:35
  Yeah, the the vortex, yes, certainly.
• 35:39
  Like, this is at the same time of we talked in the the Seraphon
• 35:42
  episode about like, Lord Croke. Yeah.
• 35:46
  And like the first invasion of Chaos, how he, like, blew up a
• 35:50
  huge, like, chunk of demons that came for the city of Exelon and
• 35:56
  it like, killed him, but not really.
• 35:57
  And they just, like, wheel his body out and kick it to have him
• 36:00
  blow up more lizards or demons again.
• 36:03
  Yeah. That was this event.
• 36:05
  This was the first invasion of Chaos.
• 36:07
  Yeah, Demon Princess and demons just like getting over to
• 36:11
  Lustria, which is far from like Bellacour's domain, but it was
• 36:14
  enough to like threaten it and whatnot.
• 36:17
  But Vortex goes off, pulls all the the demons out of the world
• 36:21
  or pulls enough magic out of the world that their bodies can't
• 36:24
  stay stable. And they just like dissipate and
• 36:28
  creates kind of the status quo for the next however many like
• 36:33
  thousands of years until the world just gets destroyed.
• 36:36
  Yeah, that's where. It always ends.
• 36:38
  Yeah, that's the one of the big points in the end times that the
• 36:43
  end of the world it was is the destruction of the vortex of
• 36:46
  Ulta One. Yeah, Yes, really.
• 36:49
  Really hard thing to bounce back from in the end times.
• 36:51
  Yep, we have Marathi to thank for that.
• 36:55
  Thanks, Marathi. Thank you, Marathi.
• 36:57
  Yeah. Back when she was authentically
• 36:59
  a chaos cultist. Yeah.
• 37:02
  Oh. That was great.
• 37:03
  Pretty bad? No Pretty.
• 37:04
  Bad sounds pretty. Bad, but as as the vortex was
• 37:07
  being like established like as the magic was going off, Ultiman
• 37:10
  was fighting off like a demon incursion like demons caught
• 37:14
  wind of what was they were trying to do and had to fight
• 37:16
  them off and to win that fight Tyrion and Tekla's ancestor
• 37:22
  pulled the sword of Cain. That's the origin, yes, that's.
• 37:26
  The thing? That's that's where the curse of
• 37:28
  Kate so when I said the Tyrion tech lists were kind of going to
• 37:30
  be in this episode, that's where their family bloodline curse
• 37:34
  originates is this was the fight that their ancestor had to pull
• 37:37
  the sword to win and they. Got a goddamn blood curse?
• 37:40
  Yep, right, that's. Rough.
• 37:45
  So you know what? You thought you had to do it,
• 37:46
  and maybe. Yeah, right.
• 37:47
  But yeah. Damn right.
• 37:51
  So there's like I said, Bellacour is just kind of in
• 37:54
  everyone stuff. And so like even though.
• 37:58
  Enough mischief that he got in everyone's stuff.
• 37:59
  Yeah, exactly. Like, even though Tyrion tech
• 38:01
  list don't have like, a lot of personal beef with Bellacour,
• 38:04
  like he's kind of responsible for their, like, blood curse
• 38:08
  that haunts their family. So yeah, we're going to see a
• 38:11
  lot of that, honestly. So Bellicore gets pulled back
• 38:14
  into the realm of Chaos. And in the realm of Chaos, he
• 38:16
  can no longer like, escape the grip of the chaos gods.
• 38:20
  Like, that's their domain. They have full power over it.
• 38:22
  Yeah, and they basically trap him and just like, keep him
• 38:26
  under heel. They're like like I'm.
• 38:29
  Pretty pissed too, it's kind of annoying.
• 38:30
  Yeah, a demon can't die permanently, so they're just
• 38:32
  going to imprison him forever, basically, and they're going to
• 38:35
  mock him and they're going to like be shitty to him because
• 38:38
  he. Rattle the cage bars and.
• 38:41
  Stick through it pretty much just.
• 38:42
  Kick it as I walk by. Pretty much.
• 38:44
  So this is the part I excluded up to this point because it's
• 38:48
  narratively important. OK, So Archaeon, right?
• 38:54
  Yeah. Ever chosen of Chaos, Grand
• 38:55
  Marshall of the Apocalypse person faded to rule the world
• 38:58
  or to destroy the world. We've talked in previous
• 39:01
  episodes that Archaeon was not the first ever chosen, right?
• 39:04
  Yeah. There are other mortals who have
• 39:06
  been given the title. Sought to destroy the world in
• 39:09
  the Chaos God's names. We just couldn't.
• 39:11
  Pull it. Off.
• 39:12
  We just couldn't pull it off. Couldn't stick the.
• 39:14
  Landing. Yes, in addition to being the
• 39:16
  first demon Prince, Bellcore was also the first ever chosen.
• 39:21
  Of course he was, but he is not the first mortal ever chosen.
• 39:26
  He was given the title when he ascended to Demon Princeton.
• 39:30
  And that fact is going to be the basis of where we see Bellacore
• 39:35
  for most of the rest of the history of the Old World.
• 39:40
  Because specifically, the punishment that the Chaos Gods
• 39:43
  inflict upon Bellacore has like, punishment for his hubris,
• 39:47
  punishment for like, thinking that he could just take their
• 39:50
  power and do what he wanted with it, is that the only time
• 39:53
  Bellacour is willingly allowed back into the world is that he
• 39:57
  is the person who sets the crown upon the head of mortal everches
• 40:02
  forevermore. Wow, what a what a great
• 40:08
  punishment. Yeah, fuck you, Bellacour.
• 40:10
  I mean, I yeah, it's so juicy. Good.
• 40:13
  Yep. It's literally just the cask
• 40:15
  gods going, hey, you have to go like, literally like subvert
• 40:21
  yourself before our new favorite and like, tell them that they're
• 40:26
  our new favorite and give them the little crown that shows that
• 40:29
  they're our new favorite. Yeah, Yeah, he does.
• 40:36
  He does it a lot. He gets his first opportunity to
• 40:41
  do so pretty soon thereafter. It's probably a couple 100
• 40:45
  years. I'm not strong on my old world.
• 40:47
  Timeline soon where thereafter for a demon.
• 40:50
  Yeah. Oh for sure for.
• 40:51
  Sure. 100 years. Feels pretty soon.
• 40:53
  Yeah, the human tribes continue to develop.
• 40:55
  Norska kind of gets his feet under it quicker because it's
• 40:59
  building off of the bones of Bellicor's old empire and the
• 41:03
  first mortal ever chosen. Morcard the Uniter, who is given
• 41:08
  the like honor of being like the human who like reestablishes and
• 41:12
  like re brings all of Norska together and like the image of
• 41:16
  like how Bellacour had done it. That's why he's Morse Car the
• 41:18
  Uniter. OK, OK.
• 41:20
  How does Belcour feel about him personally?
• 41:21
  Bad belt Belcour hates every because.
• 41:26
  Like, look, I brought the your Kingdom back together.
• 41:30
  Nah, he just took credit for his work.
• 41:33
  You just stole my homework. Belcour is prideful, Yes.
• 41:37
  He hates everyone who builds off of his foundation to get their
• 41:42
  own glory. No, certainly not.
• 41:48
  Belker crowns the first mortal ever chosen, Morkar the United
• 41:51
  united the Norskan tribes, raids South of Norska and is
• 41:55
  eventually killed by Sigmar. Yeah, Sigmar slays the first
• 42:03
  mortal ever chosen and shortly thereafter found the Empire of
• 42:08
  Sigmar. Like.
• 42:10
  After he hit Nagash so hard in the face.
• 42:13
  He before because it's before the foundation of the empire,
• 42:16
  and Nagash is after because Nagash was showing up to try and
• 42:19
  disrupt the empire as like a ground for new, like skeletons,
• 42:23
  Yeah. New skeletons, yeah, got it.
• 42:27
  So again, we have Bellacore like cuz Sigma didn't meet Bellacore
• 42:30
  at that time, but we have another intersection of like
• 42:33
  Bellacore being part of that. Yeah.
• 42:36
  Things resulted in another thing that impacts one of our players.
• 42:40
  Always behind the scenes, always in the shadows.
• 42:42
  He doesn't. Want to be he?
• 42:44
  Wants to be Interstate, he wants to be top billing.
• 42:47
  He's kind of AI actually have notes later in my like notes
• 42:50
  about this, but it is kind of a, he's kind of conflicted a little
• 42:53
  bit actually because Bellacourt is prideful.
• 42:56
  He's a glory hound. He wants to be recognized as
• 43:00
  this big important figure, but his like strategy and his like
• 43:04
  strength is scheming. It's like, clandestine and,
• 43:08
  like, subtlety. He is like the demon of shadows.
• 43:13
  Like, he always appears as this kind of billowing, shadowy,
• 43:16
  like, figure. Yeah.
• 43:17
  And he's good at, like, the espionage stuff.
• 43:19
  He's good at the, like, whispering in people's ears and,
• 43:23
  like, twisting them. But he wants the credit so bad.
• 43:27
  So he's just credit if you're being sneaky behind the scenes.
• 43:32
  So we we get that. So that's the that's basically
• 43:35
  the status quo. Bellicore in the old world is
• 43:37
  both like in the fiction and both on like a metal level.
• 43:40
  Bellicore exists as this character who is for all
• 43:42
  purposes trapped within the realm of chaos, but can still
• 43:46
  whisper to people in the mortal world that can still like
• 43:49
  influence and scheme. He's exerting as much power as
• 43:52
  he can from the realm of chaos to try and, like, twist and
• 43:55
  shape the world to get his like due basically.
• 43:59
  Right. And so like I said, at a metal
• 44:03
  level, he's just a like, he's a character that a writer can use
• 44:06
  to be like, this scheme is a little bit too put together for
• 44:10
  this, like random band of cultists.
• 44:12
  Maybe Bellacore is the hand behind the throne, right?
• 44:15
  Yeah. OK.
• 44:16
  This King's a little bit. Yeah, This King's a little bit
• 44:18
  skeevy. We don't know if we can trust
• 44:20
  him yet. Maybe he's getting whispers from
• 44:22
  the Demon of Shadows, Right. The first Prince.
• 44:25
  It's a. Handy.
• 44:27
  Literary tool, yes. It's also just nice theming that
• 44:31
  Bellacour is the first Prince, but never the first king, right?
• 44:34
  Like he is always, always the bridesmaid kind of a little bit.
• 44:37
  Like that's very much cringe. It's very Bellacour much cringe.
• 44:42
  It's very Bellacour. But that, that's the status quo
• 44:46
  for a long time in the old world.
• 44:47
  And we start to get more solid like Bellacour stuff, or more
• 44:51
  important at least our purpose is Bellacour stuff nearing the
• 44:54
  end times are in the run up to the end times, kind of the the
• 44:59
  pre end times pre. OK, I'm gonna hit you with one
• 45:02
  of those classic Warhammer names.
• 45:04
  We're gonna talk about a guy called the Necrodomo.
• 45:06
  The insane Necrodomo. Necrodomo the insane.
• 45:12
  You know, I wasn't sure about Necrodomo, but when we tacked on
• 45:15
  the insane talked tier, absolutely the Gold Star.
• 45:18
  We got him. Yep, Necrodoman the insane, not
• 45:22
  his real name. Never mind, I'm sorry.
• 45:26
  And Necrodomo might actually be his real name.
• 45:28
  I thought it was a like a name that he took, but it could be
• 45:33
  his real name for all I know. Actually.
• 45:36
  But Necrodomo is a prophet. He gets visions.
• 45:41
  That's not like a super uncommon thing in the old world.
• 45:44
  It's unclear how much of it is like Chaos God's intentionally
• 45:48
  whispering in people's ears, how much of it is just like catching
• 45:51
  stray like magic or like divine like power.
• 45:56
  There are a lot of like sanctioned prophets of Sigmar,
• 45:59
  right? Like people who are interested
• 46:00
  to interpret the will of Sigmar. And so it can come from like a
• 46:03
  lot of different places in AOS. There are still like kind of a
• 46:07
  tradition of prophets in the Mortal Realms.
• 46:09
  Oh, that's neat. And they can.
• 46:11
  Being a prophet a lot in Warhammer is less like you have
• 46:15
  a direct through line anywhere and more like your brain's a big
• 46:18
  radio antenna, like you're just picking up kind of errant
• 46:22
  signals wherever they may fly. So Necrodome is a prophet and
• 46:27
  he's on for a prophet. Because prophets in the old
• 46:30
  world tend to have pretty consistent.
• 46:32
  Either they are junk or they have tend to have pretty
• 46:35
  consistent predictions. So they're fake or real?
• 46:39
  Yeah, like, there's a lot of prestige behind being a prophet,
• 46:42
  so a lot of people try and fake it.
• 46:43
  Yeah. But generally, once a prophet
• 46:45
  has like, a proven track record, they're probably not going to
• 46:48
  have, like, misses. Yeah.
• 46:49
  So it's fake or? Real.
• 46:50
  Yeah, yeah, pretty much. But Necrodome is and.
• 46:54
  We have. Liars, yes, but Necrodome is a
• 46:56
  little bit weird because he he gets a mix of like very accurate
• 47:01
  prophecies and just like garbled nonsense, OK, And so no one's
• 47:05
  really sure how like seriously to treat him right.
• 47:09
  Interesting. OK, yeah, I get it.
• 47:11
  This is also we also start to get into like a little bit of a
• 47:14
  weird place in like Sigmar's empire.
• 47:17
  Like the closer we get to the end Times.
• 47:18
  We talked a little bit about before about how like official
• 47:22
  policy of the empires that Scaven aren't real.
• 47:23
  Yeah. And that was an attempt by,
• 47:26
  like, the Church of Sigmar to suppress like, panic, like how
• 47:30
  the empire would react if they knew at any given time there
• 47:32
  were eight rats below their floorboards.
• 47:34
  Right. And that we see that starting to
• 47:37
  creep into other parts of the empire where it gets more and
• 47:40
  more comfortable being this kind of like religious police state
• 47:45
  where there's this this sanctioned truth, Yeah.
• 47:48
  Like you can't deviate from. And so even like a decade
• 47:53
  earlier, there's a good chance that Necrodomo would have been
• 47:56
  like elevated to a position of prestige, like listen to more
• 47:58
  closely like people dedicated to trying to sift through like,
• 48:02
  what he gets right and what he gets wrong.
• 48:04
  But in this like kind of developing like, no, this is the
• 48:06
  imperial truth. Like, this is like the the Cult
• 48:10
  of Sigmar enforces this like cosmology of the world kind of
• 48:15
  thing. Necrodomo instead gets branded
• 48:18
  as a heretic. Yes.
• 48:21
  Right, someone is a. Heretic if they're not actually
• 48:23
  a heretic. Right.
• 48:26
  Earn that. He is summarily imprisoned as a
• 48:31
  heretic against the Cult of Sigmar for claiming the
• 48:34
  terrible, terrible lie that the end of the world approached.
• 48:41
  Yeah, and it's y'all's fault because you made this one kid's
• 48:43
  life so terrible. Right, I remember.
• 48:46
  That I remember that you're like these guys got to rule the world
• 48:49
  let's make this boy's life a living fucking.
• 48:50
  Hell, right? We got a theme A.
• 48:53
  Theme of stop fucking up. Right, so Necrodomo gets
• 48:57
  imprisoned. He is not treated well in prison
• 49:00
  on and we don't know the a lot of the details of what happens,
• 49:04
  but we know that on the verge of death he is visited by
• 49:08
  Bellacour. Oh shit, either.
• 49:10
  We don't know if that's like metaphor, like if he just gets
• 49:13
  whispered to Velcor. We don't know, like Belcor could
• 49:16
  have hypothetically physically shown up.
• 49:18
  There's been a couple of times where he's just like slipped the
• 49:20
  leash and like gotten back into the mortal world.
• 49:24
  But he is it's again, it's that mix of like usually any chance
• 49:27
  he gets to get back into the mortal world, he goes big too
• 49:29
  fast and like gets put down. I think Sigmor actually killed
• 49:33
  Belcor once. So they they have like yeah,
• 49:35
  they have interacted. I'm pretty sure in the past the
• 49:38
  Bellacour exclusively refers to Sigmar's the barbarian God.
• 49:41
  Cuz that's how he thinks of him right?
• 49:43
  He was just some upstart barbarian human.
• 49:45
  Like everything else is gash. Also.
• 49:47
  Right yes they both yeah cuz again, like Nagash and Bellacour
• 49:50
  were ancient when Sigmar was young right like.
• 49:55
  Bash their. Skulls in, right?
• 49:58
  Yeah. So sometimes.
• 49:59
  Sigmar has his moments. Yeah, Yeah, we like Sigmar.
• 50:01
  Yeah. We broadly, Yeah.
• 50:03
  We broadly like Sigmar, Yeah. So Belcour visits Necrodomo.
• 50:06
  On the verge of death, Necrodomo's captors die again.
• 50:10
  We don't know if that's like, Bellacour physically showed up
• 50:12
  and killed them if they were, like, laid low by chaos magic,
• 50:15
  like, we don't know really what happened.
• 50:19
  Yes. And for the next like however
• 50:22
  long when Bellacour just had Necrodomo all to himself,
• 50:26
  Bellacour either instructed him or just like wrote Necrodomo's
• 50:32
  last prophecy. Massive quadruple horned demon
• 50:37
  man just sitting on a stool. Right itself.
• 50:41
  Writing down this poor man's final words that I got just one
• 50:48
  candle that's mostly burned out. Yes, that final prophecy, the
• 50:54
  final prophecy of Necrodim of the Insane, which immediately
• 50:58
  became Imperial prop or not Imperial propaganda, but like
• 51:01
  thought crime, right? Like the the the most crackdown
• 51:04
  upon, Yeah, the most crackdown upon like piece of literature in
• 51:09
  the Empire that nevertheless managed to spread like wildfire.
• 51:12
  Like one of the Empire's biggest.
• 51:14
  Slayers. Yep, Yep, they bear for a
• 51:17
  reason. Was a prophecy of the end of the
• 51:20
  world the next ever chosen? A man named Archaeon, huh?
• 51:26
  Oh shit. Yeah.
• 51:27
  Oh, no, Yeah. Oh, no.
• 51:29
  Remember, Remember how this is the big, this is the big?
• 51:33
  Like throwing the covers off? Remember the thing you just said
• 51:37
  The thing. I just said.
• 51:38
  About how? Prophecy that this one kid was
• 51:41
  gonna fuck things up so they made this kids life living hell.
• 51:43
  So we decided, fine, I'll fuck everything up.
• 51:47
  Necrodomo did not foresee a future of the Ever Chosen.
• 51:51
  Bellacour wrote this prophecy. Bellacour put the tools in the
• 51:57
  hand of the Empire to make an Ever Chosen who could do it.
• 52:02
  What? Yeah.
• 52:04
  It's not a real prophecy. It's not a it's an instruction
• 52:08
  kit for making the Ever Chosen. It's Bellicor taking.
• 52:14
  It's Bellicor taking everything you knew about humans.
• 52:17
  Everything you knew about how we can be petty and how we can be
• 52:21
  rash. And how we can try and solve a
• 52:23
  problem by just like putting it down before it can start and
• 52:26
  weaponizing that against us. So that like Bellicor didn't
• 52:30
  have a person picked out. He didn't have like some
• 52:33
  individual he already knew would become this thing he just wrote
• 52:38
  every step he knew he needed to write for the Empire to make
• 52:43
  Archaeon. Oh my.
• 52:46
  God Velakor's greatest scheme, everybody.
• 52:49
  That is so impressive. Damn good.
• 52:53
  It's. So good like found yeah like
• 52:57
  already like a fringe like prophet with like a hit and miss
• 53:03
  thing like made sure that enemy. Of the.
• 53:07
  Yeah, made sure it was in the position to be like distributed
• 53:10
  amongst like the Church of Sigmar so that they would know
• 53:13
  to like be on watch for this supposed, like archaeon figure.
• 53:17
  Like it's so good. It's so good.
• 53:21
  Oh my, good. He laid the trap perfectly.
• 53:25
  They just walked right in and. Snapped right then.
• 53:30
  Chaos got to go numb. Yep, it's the world's right.
• 53:33
  Basically, yeah, it it I. Don't think you have explicit to
• 53:36
  say that, but I like to think they just eat them like a
• 53:39
  fucking hummus man. It it pulls all the order out of
• 53:43
  it right it like a it returns it.
• 53:45
  Awful. Sound, I'm so sorry.
• 53:47
  Like a Bulba drink. It's just like the more
• 53:50
  concentrated chaos magic you get in a place, ideas like friction
• 53:54
  stop mattering or, like, time. Right?
• 53:57
  Unravel. Yeah.
• 54:00
  Think of what would happen to a rock if all of its molecules
• 54:03
  suddenly didn't know that they were all part of the same rock.
• 54:07
  Right. Yeah.
• 54:08
  Or like how much gravity influenced something changed
• 54:13
  wildly from minute to minute in case.
• 54:14
  Just wants to do this. It doesn't.
• 54:16
  They don't get anything from doing this.
• 54:18
  It's not like they're absorbing this energy.
• 54:20
  They're not like Galactus who needs to eat a planet, right?
• 54:23
  Or like chaos that needs to create more from the No, it's
• 54:27
  just celestial, non internal. Excuse me?
• 54:29
  Yeah, it's just for funsies. Chaos just is it's.
• 54:35
  Just what they're supposed to do.
• 54:37
  Yeah, like the Chaos gods for for all the like, agency they
• 54:41
  are given in the setting, Like the Chaos gods are the drivers
• 54:43
  behind a lot of the bad things that happen in the world.
• 54:44
  But the Chaos gods are as bound to the great game as anybody
• 54:48
  else. Like the caskets couldn't decide
• 54:50
  tomorrow to not try and destroy the world.
• 54:52
  It's what they are, right? OK.
• 54:55
  Interesting. All right, yeah.
• 54:57
  Could Bellacourt decide you don't want to do it anymore?
• 54:59
  Maybe he's still a creature of chaos, but said.
• 55:03
  That he wants to rule. There's really nothing left to
• 55:05
  rule if it's destroyed every time.
• 55:07
  Yeah. So it's like, what if I just
• 55:10
  fucked you all up? Yeah, my toy and didn't let you
• 55:13
  break it this time. Yeah, it's probably a mix of
• 55:16
  that. And also just like Bellacour
• 55:19
  being aware that he's immortal, right?
• 55:21
  Like, even when the old world died, like Bellacour just went
• 55:24
  back to the realm of chaos. Yeah.
• 55:26
  He knew that there would be another world along eventually,
• 55:29
  and then he would ply his trade to there.
• 55:31
  Like, eternity is nothing to someone who is forever, right?
• 55:36
  Like, you can't even meaningfully destroy chaos
• 55:38
  because what does that mean? Right.
• 55:40
  Like, yeah. OK.
• 55:42
  So we don't know. But what you said like rings
• 55:45
  true. We don't know if Bellacour's
• 55:47
  intention was actually to destroy the world.
• 55:50
  Like we knew he wanted to create like the perfect ever chosen,
• 55:53
  like someone who could do it. But it's unclear what he would
• 55:57
  get from like an actually successful, like end times,
• 56:02
  right. It's it's a mix of my personal
• 56:05
  theory is I think it's Bellacour's pride.
• 56:08
  Like he wanted to show that he's bigger than like the ever chosen
• 56:13
  because he can just make a perfect ever chosen.
• 56:15
  Yeah. Like he can he can orchestrate
• 56:18
  the creation of not just a ever chosen, but the greatest ever
• 56:21
  chosen to ever do it. Yeah.
• 56:22
  Like that's my theory for why he did it like that.
• 56:26
  He didn't particularly care about the end of the world.
• 56:30
  He just wanted his yes, he wanted his handiwork on the
• 56:33
  weapon that did it right. It's also like Bellcore was
• 56:37
  let's slip back into the world again.
• 56:39
  When RKN started his conquest, he fought along RK on in the end
• 56:42
  times, so that could be his motivation.
• 56:44
  Just finally get never chosen. Who gets enough momentum built
• 56:47
  up that he can like, yeah, get back into the world and do his
• 56:50
  thing. Nice.
• 56:52
  OK. But ultimately, Bellacourt
• 56:55
  orchestrates this. He whispers into the minds of
• 56:56
  people to, like, help further facilitate it.
• 56:59
  The Empire does what the Empire does and, like, creates
• 57:02
  Archaeon. Yeah.
• 57:03
  Archaeon rallies the forces of chaos in the end times.
• 57:06
  Bellacourt fights along Archaeon.
• 57:08
  And as Archaeon duels Sigmar in the eye of the storm at the very
• 57:13
  end of the world, like, everything, like, is destroyed.
• 57:18
  Yeah. And Bellacourt is stuck back
• 57:20
  into the realm of chaos with all the other demons.
• 57:24
  Damn. OK.
• 57:24
  Yeah, and that's that's Bellicor in the old World.
• 57:27
  But before we before we get into Bellicor in the Mortal Realms, I
• 57:31
  do have to address the thing, OK, the the stupid thing.
• 57:36
  Yeah, because there's probably some of you that listen to me
• 57:38
  talking about like Bellicor and Archaeon and you went, that's
• 57:41
  not the the thing I heard. Because this gets repeated a lot
• 57:45
  because it's a very catchy thing.
• 57:49
  If you, I'm not gonna say it's bad.
• 57:53
  I've already called it the stupid thing, so I am gonna say
• 57:55
  it's bad. I think it's worse than what we
• 57:58
  have. OK.
• 58:00
  So there is a book about like Bella Corn Archaeon that came
• 58:06
  out like before the end times when the setting as a whole was
• 58:10
  very much in that kind of like like move fast break roles, like
• 58:13
  just whatever is Canon is like whatever feeling where we get a
• 58:20
  book where it's not just that Bellacourt orchestrated the
• 58:25
  creation of the ever chosen, but he is literally physically
• 58:30
  Archaeon's dad, right? And like, no, I get it.
• 58:36
  Star Wars is cool but like. Star Wars is.
• 58:39
  Cool. But like, yeah.
• 58:41
  Do do you get what I mean? Like, I'm, I'm not fundamentally
• 58:44
  opposed to like, oh, this character is this character's
• 58:47
  father. Like, interesting character
• 58:49
  dynamic. Because they don't have that
• 58:50
  dynamic. Yeah.
• 58:51
  Bellacour and Archaeon don't get along.
• 58:53
  Like, Bellacour sees Archaeon, like, as an upstart at best.
• 58:56
  He sees him as his own project that got out from under his
• 58:58
  thumb. Like, to be clear, like in the
• 59:01
  Mortal Realms, Bellacour hates Archaeon.
• 59:04
  He hates him maybe more than anything in the whole world.
• 59:07
  So funny because because he made Archaeon as his like, again,
• 59:12
  like as the the crown jewel in his own like accomplishments.
• 59:16
  And then Archaeon so outperformed him in every
• 59:20
  conceivable way that Bellicor is now second fiddle to this person
• 59:25
  that he, like, orchestrated the existence of.
• 59:27
  That's right. Funny, right?
• 59:28
  Yeah. So absolutely.
• 59:29
  So like he way funnier, right? More interesting.
• 59:33
  Than and he's. His dad.
• 59:34
  I'm like right for some. Reason that just feels.
• 59:36
  Gross. Yeah, right.
• 59:37
  It's it's Archaeon is not archaeon because he is
• 59:39
  physically the child of a demon. Yeah, it is also that it like,
• 59:43
  undermines everything about Archaeon and the inherent
• 59:46
  tragedy of his story and his motivation if he's also
• 59:50
  literally born. Evil.
• 59:51
  Yes, exactly exactly like Archaeon's story is not a story
• 59:55
  of like someone who was faded on this path.
• 59:58
  It's explicitly not a story of someone who is faded on this
• 1:00:01
  path, right. It is a fake prophecy that.
• 1:00:04
  Like the adherence to by people who should have known better was
• 1:00:08
  what led to the tragedy of Archaeon, right?
• 1:00:12
  Like that is such a more interesting story than like he's
• 1:00:17
  he's the son of evil, right? Like.
• 1:00:20
  Reading it because I heard it once and it sounds.
• 1:00:22
  Yes exactly. It's been retcon for ages.
• 1:00:24
  Yes, it's like how people will still say that Wanda and Pietro
• 1:00:29
  Maximoff are Magneto's kids, right?
• 1:00:32
  They're not, and they actually haven't been since before the.
• 1:00:35
  Age of the. Movie came out that they
• 1:00:37
  reconned a chunk of time yes, before the characters were
• 1:00:40
  adapted onto the big screen so and it was such a brief period
• 1:00:45
  of. Time, right, right.
• 1:00:46
  So. It's like, yeah, that was
• 1:00:48
  interesting when it was, but it's not that anymore and it
• 1:00:50
  hasn't been for a long time and technically never was.
• 1:00:52
  It was always a lie. There's someone listening to the
• 1:00:54
  podcast right now who's like, what the fuck do you mean?
• 1:00:57
  Someone did theatro? Aren't those kids?
• 1:00:59
  But yeah, like, look it up. They haven't been for years.
• 1:01:02
  Yeah. Before.
• 1:01:04
  Yeah, yeah. Which is when it.
• 1:01:05
  Became the big thing in, like, the general fan space to know
• 1:01:09
  about it. Yes, people would make jokes
• 1:01:11
  about, well, Magneto would just show up.
• 1:01:12
  Ultron wouldn't be a problem, right?
• 1:01:13
  Yeah. Well, Magneto's not here.
• 1:01:15
  No, Yeah, there's no. Business being.
• 1:01:17
  Here right? So why don't you go sit down and
• 1:01:20
  read the entire Scarlet Witch mission like I?
• 1:01:26
  Did real 17? Everybody knows real comic book
• 1:01:28
  fans don't read comic books anyways.
• 1:01:30
  Yeah. No, I was not a jab at you.
• 1:01:33
  I was making fun. Ever.
• 1:01:34
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:01:35
  I'm like, yeah, I don't remember the last time I bought a comic.
• 1:01:39
  I'm this freak out of potato. Stuff.
• 1:01:42
  I was the that was last weekend. My my car had trouble.
• 1:01:46
  Right. Damn, knocked out of my mind.
• 1:01:48
  And then Saturday morning I didn't have a car.
• 1:01:50
  Damn. So I didn't even even if when I
• 1:01:52
  my good buddy Tim reminded me on.
• 1:01:55
  Discord. It's today.
• 1:01:56
  I'm like fuck. Oh well, maybe next year.
• 1:02:02
  I just pulled all my Deadpool omnibuses out of storage because
• 1:02:05
  I'm real pretentious about those movies in a way.
• 1:02:07
  I'm not gonna get into cut. I don't wanna get yelled at a
• 1:02:09
  lot on the Internet. Anyways, I just had.
• 1:02:11
  Opinions about comics and Scarlet Witch?
• 1:02:13
  It Yeah. So we should get back on track.
• 1:02:15
  So I don't know if there's ever been an official GW statement
• 1:02:19
  where they're like this isn't Canon.
• 1:02:21
  But even the most recent, there's a series where I get a
• 1:02:24
  lot of my research for this like podcast on Warhammer's dedicated
• 1:02:30
  streaming platform called Warhammer.
• 1:02:32
  Plus they have a series called Loremasters where they do like
• 1:02:35
  deep dives into like lore stuff. And on their episode about Bella
• 1:02:39
  core, which came out like relatively recently to like us
• 1:02:43
  recording this episode or at least me writing these notes.
• 1:02:45
  Even there they like bring up the dad thing but they say that
• 1:02:49
  it is a rumor spread by people to try and like link Bellacourt
• 1:02:55
  to Archaeon or to like lessen Archaeon's prestige.
• 1:02:59
  Right. It's exclusively like framed as
• 1:03:01
  a in universe rumor. So like it.
• 1:03:04
  Could be. True, right.
• 1:03:06
  But I think not. In my mind, that's GW saying we
• 1:03:10
  don't want to come out and say that this is bad because like a
• 1:03:14
  lot of people read that book and have like internalized it, but
• 1:03:18
  we are going to hint that it's not.
• 1:03:20
  Fake. Yeah, This is not a real, if
• 1:03:22
  you're gonna listen facts about the character, this should not
• 1:03:25
  be one of them. Yes, you say.
• 1:03:26
  There is a rumor that yes, this is not technically a Canon
• 1:03:31
  thing. So let's talk about Bellicor in
• 1:03:32
  the Mortal Realms. Bellacourt arrives during the
• 1:03:35
  Age of Chaos with all the other demons.
• 1:03:37
  He doesn't make a big show of it.
• 1:03:40
  His thing is subtlety. His thing is espionage.
• 1:03:43
  He very quickly entrenches himself in OLGU.
• 1:03:46
  Yeah. Realm of Shadows, good at
• 1:03:48
  keeping secrets. Chaos as a whole has a really
• 1:03:50
  hard time getting into OLGU, mostly because Chaos, like,
• 1:03:53
  operates kind of as a baseline with, like, marching big armies
• 1:03:56
  into places. And OLGU will fucking mulch that
• 1:03:59
  shit. Like, you can't March an army
• 1:04:01
  through OLGU. It's all gonna end up in
• 1:04:03
  different places. Yeah, you're just going to have
• 1:04:06
  everyone marching in lines and then you're going to stop moving
• 1:04:08
  and they're going to be on different continents, like
• 1:04:10
  that's just what Olgu is. But Bellacour's craftier than
• 1:04:13
  that. Bellacour knows how to.
• 1:04:15
  Yeah, he knows how to operate. We'll.
• 1:04:16
  Accept him being there because it's just kind of jammed to.
• 1:04:19
  Begin. Absolutely.
• 1:04:20
  Yeah. Bellacour is the OR.
• 1:04:22
  Bellacour is the realm. Olgu is the realm of secrets.
• 1:04:26
  It is the realm of shadows. It is the realm of keeping
• 1:04:29
  things from people and obscuring the truth.
• 1:04:32
  And Bellacor is absolutely, perfectly, wonderfully at home
• 1:04:36
  there. Yikes.
• 1:04:37
  He found a like fortress and Olgu called Mordechar.
• 1:04:43
  Yeah, too good. Strong consonants, right?
• 1:04:46
  Mordechar. It is a fortress, but it's also
• 1:04:48
  a labyrinth. Yep.
• 1:04:50
  Just, I guess just goes, yeah, we will just tear it apart.
• 1:04:53
  Exactly. He knows how to navigate it.
• 1:04:54
  Those loyal to him can navigate it, but it's an excellent guard
• 1:04:58
  against, let's be real, the daughters of Cain, who, yeah,
• 1:05:02
  also operate out of OLGU and are also extremely good at
• 1:05:06
  navigating it and would have found it and gotten to Bellacour
• 1:05:09
  a long time ago if he didn't live inside a labyrinth.
• 1:05:13
  This is another one of those. Like, this isn't a huge, like
• 1:05:16
  point, but it's one of my, like, names.
• 1:05:17
  I hate. We talked about them a little
• 1:05:19
  bit in the OLGU episode. OLGU has a race of, like, native
• 1:05:22
  spirits that get called the shadow demons.
• 1:05:25
  OK, They're not demons, Not demons, no.
• 1:05:27
  And. That's kind of important.
• 1:05:28
  Yeah, cuz demon is like an established thing.
• 1:05:30
  Yeah. Like they're not made of magic.
• 1:05:31
  They are just like spirits basically that emerge from the
• 1:05:35
  mists of OLGU. But to complicate matters
• 1:05:38
  further, Bellacor works with shadow demons like he just like
• 1:05:42
  contracts them. Basically I.
• 1:05:45
  Guess yeah. Yeah, mortals do that shit all
• 1:05:47
  the time. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:05:49
  Notably, Shadow Demons also work with Malarian and Marathi I
• 1:05:53
  feel. Like Malarian and Marathi would
• 1:05:55
  not be super cool with shadow demons.
• 1:05:57
  Also working for Bellacor. It's unknown if any of them
• 1:06:00
  know. Like the the shadow demons are
• 1:06:02
  just kind of just that good. Yeah.
• 1:06:04
  Selling to all sides? Yeah, like.
• 1:06:05
  Malacor did. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:06:08
  They're very, they're all of a kind, right.
• 1:06:10
  That's that's a big theme in OLGU is everybody's tricking
• 1:06:12
  everybody. Like there's no, there's no
• 1:06:14
  allegiances. Like, yeah, OK, even even
• 1:06:17
  Marathi and Malarion don't really get along.
• 1:06:19
  Yeah, no, certainly not. And we don't like, there's not a
• 1:06:24
  ton, a ton of stuff about Belcour.
• 1:06:25
  For a long time, he just kind of didn't do much.
• 1:06:27
  Like he was around. He had a model.
• 1:06:29
  You could play him in your army and he was just chilling.
• 1:06:33
  He was hanging out for a long time.
• 1:06:34
  You could add him to any other chaos army because he's, he's
• 1:06:37
  scheming, he's in the background.
• 1:06:39
  He, he showed up to this fight because it's important for his
• 1:06:41
  own ends, right? Is the idea.
• 1:06:43
  He's not really part of your army, He's just, he's just here
• 1:06:46
  to influence stuff. He's not part of the cast, he
• 1:06:48
  just made a guest star. Yes, but we know his big goal.
• 1:06:51
  I mentioned how much he hates RK on.
• 1:06:53
  We know his big goal is to usurp RK on.
• 1:06:57
  OK again he he sees everything that has happened with RK on
• 1:07:03
  post. Like basically him becoming the
• 1:07:05
  ever chosen as him. Like upstaging him.
• 1:07:08
  Yes, which he did. Yes, he absolutely did.
• 1:07:10
  No, Yeah, you don't get the title.
• 1:07:12
  Grand Marshall of the Apocalypse for sleeping on the job.
• 1:07:15
  Yeah, absolutely. And this is where I have my
• 1:07:19
  note, like I said, about Belle Core's kind of weird compulsion,
• 1:07:23
  because he's a schemer. He's a trickster, but he's a
• 1:07:26
  glory hound, and he's very proud.
• 1:07:28
  And so in the early, like, Age of Chaos and stuff, when
• 1:07:32
  Archaeon is like, riding out and conquering the realms and like,
• 1:07:36
  even like the big Battle of Burning Skies, Belcour is
• 1:07:40
  letting Archaeon do all these big dangerous fights, right?
• 1:07:44
  He's hoping that Archaeon is going to get injured or he's
• 1:07:46
  going to get caught off guard and Belcour can like swoop in
• 1:07:49
  and like, take power. So he's being smart, he's being
• 1:07:52
  tactical and like letting Archaeon take all the risks.
• 1:07:55
  And he is fucking seething every time that Archaeon takes the big
• 1:08:01
  risk and gets the big win and everyone goes, yay, Archaeon.
• 1:08:05
  Like, he's just, like I said, he's got this weird like kind of
• 1:08:09
  compulsion where he both wants to play it safe and he wants to
• 1:08:13
  like do the sneaky strategic, tactical thing and let our hand
• 1:08:17
  burn himself out. And he also wants the credits so
• 1:08:19
  fucking bad. He wants to be the big champion
• 1:08:22
  of chaos, right? Like.
• 1:08:24
  Damn, yeah, that's you. Those are conflicting, right?
• 1:08:27
  You literally cannot have both. Right, so we have basically two
• 1:08:31
  major events that we get like an in person showing for Bellacorin
• 1:08:34
  in the lore and one's like super minor.
• 1:08:36
  So we're just gonna kind of go over real quick.
• 1:08:39
  There's a thing in the lore that we haven't talked about yet.
• 1:08:40
  We're gonna talk about it more probably later called the Battle
• 1:08:43
  of the Eight Points. OK, this happens during the Age
• 1:08:46
  of Sigmar. So this is post return of
• 1:08:48
  Stormcast Eternals posts like humans from Azir coming back out
• 1:08:53
  into the realms, like founding cities and stuff.
• 1:08:56
  The return of this is, and this is after the realm gate wars,
• 1:09:00
  which is when Stormcast first came down, they started
• 1:09:02
  capturing realm gates. They started closing permanently
• 1:09:05
  the ones that they could. And most importantly, they start
• 1:09:08
  securing the ones that lead back to Azir.
• 1:09:10
  They're they're opening the the safe routes for people to leave
• 1:09:14
  Azir and go back into the realms is the idea.
• 1:09:16
  So it's kind of on the tail end of the realm Gate wars,
• 1:09:19
  basically. While Stormcaster doing that,
• 1:09:22
  it's putting a lot of pressure on the armies of Chaos to like
• 1:09:25
  respond. And the gash of all people sees
• 1:09:29
  it as an opening to make his own play for power.
• 1:09:31
  God damn it. Yeah, always, of course, this
• 1:09:35
  bitch, yes, but he doesn't make a play because, like, Sigmar is
• 1:09:40
  not the target right now. Sigmar is like barely tipping
• 1:09:43
  his dipping his toes back into the realms to get his own
• 1:09:45
  foothold. So while Chaos is distracted,
• 1:09:48
  Nagash makes a play for the all points.
• 1:09:51
  Yes, he tries to take RK on seat of power.
• 1:09:54
  Basically yes. The end gate, the huge gate in
• 1:09:59
  the all points that leads to Shyish, the realm of death gets
• 1:10:02
  absolutely flooded with undead. Nagash personally, well, he
• 1:10:06
  doesn't personally show up because he's like woven his soul
• 1:10:08
  into the fabric of Shyish at this point.
• 1:10:12
  Can't leave Shaish anymore. He is Shaish.
• 1:10:15
  Yeah, it's bad, but skeletons pour through.
• 1:10:18
  Chaos is divided onto 2 fronts. Arcane has to like return from
• 1:10:21
  the field to defend the all points.
• 1:10:23
  I also keep saying all points and the eight points
• 1:10:25
  interchangeably. That's because yeah, all points
• 1:10:27
  is what they were called beforehand.
• 1:10:29
  Arcane renamed them to the eight points because 8 is the number
• 1:10:32
  of chaos. Ah, this best.
• 1:10:33
  Yeah. OK.
• 1:10:35
  Thank you I. Was I was.
• 1:10:36
  So yeah. But they're just both right?
• 1:10:39
  Like it's still the all points, but basically Nagash's push is
• 1:10:42
  successful enough that Archaeon has to return to the field from
• 1:10:45
  the field to defend the all points, and Bellacour has to
• 1:10:48
  personally show up to defend the all points.
• 1:10:51
  Because even though this is a good opportunity for like
• 1:10:53
  Archaeon to go down, if Nagash succeeded in this, it would like
• 1:10:56
  uproot all of the like control Chaos has over the realms in
• 1:11:00
  general. Like it would also deny
• 1:11:02
  Bellacour his opportunity to like seize power that was
• 1:11:05
  certainly not. And this very much is just a
• 1:11:07
  like, hey, it's been like an addition and a half, and we
• 1:11:11
  haven't heard anything about a character a lot of people like
• 1:11:14
  from the old World. We're gonna have Bellacour show
• 1:11:16
  up at this big fight. Cool.
• 1:11:18
  Like, before. We have, like, something real
• 1:11:20
  meaningful for him to do. The first big solo thing that
• 1:11:23
  Bellacour does in the lore actually ties into Marathi.
• 1:11:27
  Yeah. It was relevant.
• 1:11:30
  Yeah. So when we talked about
• 1:11:33
  Marathi's ascension, we remember that when she took Anvilgard,
• 1:11:37
  all of her assassins were under strict orders to just, like,
• 1:11:40
  paralyze and tie up any Stormcast they found.
• 1:11:43
  They didn't want Stormcast dying and returning to Azir.
• 1:11:46
  Yes. And letting Sigmar what was up.
• 1:11:48
  Eventually, the word gets out. And like, Stormcast do show up
• 1:11:51
  to try and liberate the city of Anvilgard.
• 1:11:52
  And how word gets out is Bellacor.
• 1:11:56
  What? Yes.
• 1:11:57
  Bellacor's trying to sew Discord in, like, the Grand Alliance of
• 1:12:01
  Order. He's trying to turn Morathi and
• 1:12:03
  Sigmar against each other. And if he can also put a crimp
• 1:12:06
  in Morathi's ascension at the same time, like, the more the
• 1:12:09
  merrier. So he frees one of those storm
• 1:12:12
  cast Eternals that Morathi had captured.
• 1:12:15
  And we don't actually know, like, the details of that.
• 1:12:17
  It's he probably just, like, killed one.
• 1:12:20
  Yeah, like him. Personally.
• 1:12:23
  Or did he whisper and. Like right.
• 1:12:25
  Like did he just show up and like.
• 1:12:27
  I dab him. I don't think he would show up
• 1:12:29
  in Anvilgar like that. That's my, I think he probably
• 1:12:31
  like sent a demon to do it or like, yeah, like used chaos
• 1:12:35
  magic to like kill one or something.
• 1:12:37
  Yeah. But basically we know that he
• 1:12:39
  got the word out to Sigmar to, to send more storm cast to
• 1:12:43
  liberate the city to 'cause that like, conflict which didn't end
• 1:12:47
  up working, right. Yes, yes.
• 1:12:49
  Marathi. Yep.
• 1:12:51
  Marathi still ascended. Sigmar still like recognized
• 1:12:56
  that it was more important to have Marathi as an ally then to
• 1:12:59
  punish her for like what she had done.
• 1:13:01
  Yes, Yep, Yep. Like it's just not a alliance we
• 1:13:05
  can afford to lose right now, right.
• 1:13:07
  And so like technically that Bellacore scheme failed.
• 1:13:10
  Like it's certainly things are certainly tense in like the
• 1:13:14
  grand alliance of order right now, but it didn't like crumble
• 1:13:16
  like he was hoping that that would make it right after those
• 1:13:19
  things. Those are like first kind of
• 1:13:21
  like little like Bellacore things.
• 1:13:24
  And technically the Marathi thing happens around the same
• 1:13:26
  time as the thing that we're about to discuss.
• 1:13:30
  All of Marathi and another one that I've I'll fucking Cragnose.
• 1:13:37
  We'll have to talk about him eventually, but I hate him, hate
• 1:13:39
  him and he sucks. But Marathi and Cragnose and
• 1:13:42
  Bellacor all were part of like a a series of like narrative
• 1:13:46
  focused books that all said like gameplay rules, like Games
• 1:13:51
  Workshop likes to do that about like a big events that happened
• 1:13:53
  in the lore called the Broken Realms event.
• 1:13:55
  That's pretty. Cool.
• 1:13:57
  Yeah, where we just we got like 3 or 4 books I wanna say that
• 1:14:01
  were like following like these changes in story.
• 1:14:04
  Like one of them was Broken Realms Marathi and that was
• 1:14:07
  about her ascension. And it had like a layout where
• 1:14:11
  you could play the siege of Anvilgard or you could like
• 1:14:14
  bring your little storm, cast Eternals army and play against
• 1:14:16
  the Daughters of Kane army like at the seas and has like special
• 1:14:19
  roles for and stuff. Yeah.
• 1:14:20
  It's great. Like I love shit like that.
• 1:14:22
  That's why we like Age of Sigmar.
• 1:14:24
  Yeah. And so after that is what we get
• 1:14:27
  the first real big thing that which happens in Broken Realms
• 1:14:32
  Bellicor, which is called the Cursed Skies event.
• 1:14:37
  Yeah, so Cursed skies, so great name.
• 1:14:43
  Yes, little bit of background. So let's talk a little bit about
• 1:14:45
  something known as a Silver tower.
• 1:14:48
  So anyone who's been in Warhammer for a little bit, or
• 1:14:50
  even newcomers might recognize the term Silver Tower.
• 1:14:54
  Silver Towers are unique, like cosmological structures.
• 1:15:01
  We don't know a ton about them. They're associated with Zinch,
• 1:15:06
  and each one is overseen by a demon called a Gaunt Summoner.
• 1:15:11
  We talked about Gaunt Summoners in the Zinch episode.
• 1:15:13
  Yeah. Silver towers are these just
• 1:15:16
  like mega structures that exist outside of realm space.
• 1:15:22
  Like, they're not in the Mortal Realms, they're not in the Realm
• 1:15:24
  of Chaos. They're just kind of their own
• 1:15:26
  little pockets. Yes.
• 1:15:29
  And Zinch and the Gaunt Summoners overwhelmingly use
• 1:15:32
  them as like a Risen slash staging ground.
• 1:15:37
  Did they make them? We don't no interesting.
• 1:15:41
  It's they probably. Didn't.
• 1:15:45
  But they could have just Co opted them, we're not sure.
• 1:15:48
  Yeah. Like it could just be something
• 1:15:50
  they like found. Yeah, yeah, some.
• 1:15:53
  Spooky mystery spot. Yeah, they've got kind of that.
• 1:15:55
  Like there's the implication because there's a limited,
• 1:15:57
  there's 9 silver towers, there's a fixed number of them, and
• 1:16:00
  there's kind of the implication that if they could make more,
• 1:16:03
  they probably would because they're super useful.
• 1:16:06
  Or if they did make them, they would have only made 8.
• 1:16:08
  Right. Nine.
• 1:16:09
  Well, nine's the number. Zinch, that's the other.
• 1:16:11
  Yeah, right. OK.
• 1:16:12
  So that's a point for like, maybe they did make them
• 1:16:14
  because, yeah. Specifically, Zinch's.
• 1:16:16
  Number, yes, yeah. OK, interesting.
• 1:16:18
  Yeah, silver towers. Like there's 9 silver towers.
• 1:16:20
  Chaos uses them as like prison slash staging ground.
• 1:16:25
  Like if you fuck with Cass and they don't like you, they might
• 1:16:27
  just put you in a silver tower and leave you forever.
• 1:16:30
  Yep and also like big demonic invasions or like even invasions
• 1:16:35
  of mortals might get like organized on a silver tower and
• 1:16:38
  then the Gaunt Summoner, true to their name, will just open a
• 1:16:41
  port. It's a lot easier to open a
• 1:16:42
  portal between a silver tower because they're not in the Realm
• 1:16:44
  of Chaos. It's a lot easier to open a
• 1:16:46
  portal from a silver tower into realm space, that is to open
• 1:16:49
  directly from the Realm of Chaos.
• 1:16:51
  OK, yeah, that makes sense. So super useful.
• 1:16:54
  Yes, so Zinch uses them, but then also many of the gone
• 1:16:57
  summoners have been like press ganged into service by Archaeon
• 1:17:00
  and so it's a lot easier for Archaeon to lead his invasions
• 1:17:03
  by just like opening a portal and disgorging chaos nights
• 1:17:06
  right? Like the worst sounds.
• 1:17:09
  Like a really bad. Day yeah, you don't want sudden
• 1:17:11
  chaos nights it's bad. So silver towers are a problem
• 1:17:16
  for lots of reasons. And so forces of order are like
• 1:17:19
  genuinely trying to like find a way to get around them during
• 1:17:22
  this time and the Seraphon come with a like potential solution
• 1:17:26
  like they figured out potentially a way to destroy a
• 1:17:29
  silver tower it their methods are arcane and like kind of
• 1:17:34
  unknowable. Again, Seraphon are like a
• 1:17:36
  little bit alien like lizard people, but we don't have like a
• 1:17:41
  ton of details. But basically we know that
• 1:17:43
  whatever their plan is a it works and B Bellacour
• 1:17:49
  orchestrated it yes, he either gave them the means or he like
• 1:17:55
  made sure everything would go right but Bellacour has a plan
• 1:17:59
  that involves the destruction of a silver tower and at first that
• 1:18:04
  was kind of an obvious like oh OK, that was one of the ones in
• 1:18:06
  service to archaeon. He's he's just trying to get one
• 1:18:09
  under archaeon. Yes, but it's not so how silver
• 1:18:15
  towers work. And this both like lends and
• 1:18:19
  takes away from the idea that like chaos created them.
• 1:18:21
  In my mind, how silver towers work is basically each one is
• 1:18:26
  linked to a bunch of realm gates and they siphon power off those
• 1:18:32
  realm gates to be able to open their own portals.
• 1:18:36
  Basically, if realm gates are like I said, realm gates are
• 1:18:38
  like tessers. They're just these naturally
• 1:18:40
  occurring like weak points in space where like the realms
• 1:18:43
  connect to each other. Silver towers are taking it's
• 1:18:46
  like if Realmgate is like a geyser, then a silver tower is
• 1:18:50
  just taking all that water pressure and redirecting it to a
• 1:18:52
  dam, right? Like, yeah, it's them siphoning
• 1:18:55
  off that energy to be able to open yes, to be able to open
• 1:18:57
  portals where we need them, not just be like fixed locations,
• 1:19:01
  right. So Bella core orchestrates you
• 1:19:04
  get see like tricks or like helps guide the Seraphon into
• 1:19:08
  destroying the silver Tower. And when that silver tower is
• 1:19:12
  destroyed, it like warps into real space.
• 1:19:17
  Something about its own like power is what keeps it outside
• 1:19:21
  of real space. And so it appears over the skies
• 1:19:24
  of Shaman and physically crashes into the plane of Shaman.
• 1:19:29
  Yeah. Are there any people there?
• 1:19:31
  Oh yeah, lots of people die. It's real bad.
• 1:19:33
  It's real bad. Silver towers are massive, too.
• 1:19:38
  It's like the Empire. Yeah.
• 1:19:40
  It's like the Manhattan landing on Shaman.
• 1:19:43
  It's bad. Bad.
• 1:19:44
  Like, yes, the crap tower crashes into Shaman.
• 1:19:49
  And all of the realm gates that were linked to the Silver tower
• 1:19:53
  there was drawing energy from the, like, sudden act of its
• 1:19:57
  destruction and the fact that it, like, collided with a realm
• 1:20:00
  and, like, bombastically was destroyed.
• 1:20:04
  Right. It's just it says exactly what
• 1:20:07
  you. Mean right love it.
• 1:20:08
  It's a very good word. That connection like suffers A
• 1:20:12
  blowback right? Like this power is being
• 1:20:14
  siphoned away from this realm gate and suddenly the thing it's
• 1:20:17
  like being siphoned to isn't there anymore and more than that
• 1:20:20
  is like spectacularly destroyed. That power just like goes
• 1:20:24
  rushing back down that connection like.
• 1:20:27
  When you have a kink in the host and it builds and builds and
• 1:20:29
  builds act like that. But when you release the kink in
• 1:20:32
  the hose and it just. Goes yeah, yes.
• 1:20:33
  Just to keep with the water metaphor.
• 1:20:34
  Yeah, 100%. It's like it's the.
• 1:20:37
  Dam and you take the dam away and it.
• 1:20:38
  Just goes, yeah, it's like if you had a bunch of hoses all
• 1:20:40
  connected to the same water balloon and then you just like
• 1:20:43
  stamped on that water balloon, that power is just gonna go like
• 1:20:47
  back into those hoses and it's gonna cause a buildup and you
• 1:20:49
  might even like rupture a hose, right?
• 1:20:51
  Yes, it's kind of a yes. And So what happens is all of
• 1:20:55
  those realm gates, they don't. It's like Chaos's ultimate goal,
• 1:20:59
  right, is to corrupt realm gates.
• 1:21:01
  It's to make them lead to the realm of Chaos and eventually
• 1:21:04
  like pull the whole mortal realms into the realm of Chaos.
• 1:21:08
  So it doesn't like a link the realm gates to the realm of
• 1:21:10
  Chaos. But because the silver towers
• 1:21:13
  are themselves like full of like chaos magic and stuff, it starts
• 1:21:17
  to it like inverses that relationship and says instead of
• 1:21:21
  power being siphoned from the realm gate into the silver
• 1:21:23
  tower, all of these realm gates start leaking pure chaos magic.
• 1:21:28
  Yes. It's really, really bad.
• 1:21:32
  So all these realmgates just kind of immediately become like
• 1:21:34
  no man's land, like chaos magic is mutative.
• 1:21:37
  It's like anathema to life. If it doesn't kill you, it turns
• 1:21:42
  you into a like a horrible givering monster.
• 1:21:44
  Like lots of realmgates are like a lot of lots of cities are
• 1:21:48
  built around realm gates, like, so you just have very suddenly
• 1:21:52
  these like cities and townships and like little settlements get
• 1:21:55
  turned into these horrifying, like warped, mutated, like
• 1:21:59
  disaster zones. Yeah, it's, it's just like a
• 1:22:03
  like, it's like a Chernobyl event, basically.
• 1:22:06
  Yeah, Yeah, just real bad, real fast.
• 1:22:10
  But that is not by any means the beyond end all of Bellacour's
• 1:22:14
  plan, OK. It's just.
• 1:22:16
  Part 1 Yes, Step A if. You will, absolutely.
• 1:22:19
  So Bellacour orchestrates this direction of the Silver Tower,
• 1:22:22
  knowing that it is going to cause problems with these realm
• 1:22:24
  gates, knowing that it's going to cause them to start leaking
• 1:22:27
  chaos magic. That's not his end goal.
• 1:22:30
  That's the diversion, yes. Just a distraction.
• 1:22:35
  It's a terrorist attack fundamentally is what it is.
• 1:22:37
  It's you're hitting a bunch of civilian populations with a bad
• 1:22:40
  thing, right? And so, so you can enact your
• 1:22:42
  actual like thing you want to do.
• 1:22:45
  So it's not the only part of the like distraction though.
• 1:22:49
  So simultaneously cities. About all this.
• 1:22:52
  Bad. I mean, they're they're
• 1:22:54
  successfully destroy a silver tower, which is a thing they
• 1:22:56
  want to do anyways. It's just that again, because of
• 1:22:59
  like details of the plan or because like how they managed to
• 1:23:01
  accomplish it, they got got like Bellacour absolutely tricked him
• 1:23:04
  into like enacting part of his plan and they're very mad about
• 1:23:08
  it. I would.
• 1:23:09
  Be too. They're they're real going off
• 1:23:11
  on Bellacour. Bellcore was helping with the
• 1:23:13
  plan before. It went wrong.
• 1:23:14
  Certainly not no. OK, good.
• 1:23:16
  Seraphone would never, ever work with chaos.
• 1:23:18
  Yeah, the. Space Dinos from beyond the
• 1:23:19
  start would. Never do.
• 1:23:20
  Certainly not. OK, so simultaneously, like
• 1:23:23
  these realm gates are leaking chaos magic, these towns are
• 1:23:25
  getting hit really hard, like stormcaster organizing like
• 1:23:28
  people to go in there and try and like evacuate civilians and
• 1:23:31
  stuff. So simultaneously Bellicore
• 1:23:34
  orchestrates a series of attacks by demons and by like a group we
• 1:23:40
  haven't talked about yet, but we have to talk about them because
• 1:23:41
  they're part of this. Bellicore orchestrates a series
• 1:23:44
  of attacks on like settlements again just as like a diversion
• 1:23:47
  tactic by demons and by ghosts by.
• 1:23:52
  Ghosts. Why that type of?
• 1:23:54
  Ghosts. We're we're going to they're,
• 1:23:59
  they're definitely getting their own episode 'cause they're
• 1:24:01
  fascinating. I love how AOS does it's like
• 1:24:03
  ghosts, but the the like ghost faction in Age of Sigmar are
• 1:24:08
  called Night Hunt. They are led by the prestigious
• 1:24:11
  Lady Olinder. Great.
• 1:24:14
  Name. Yeah, great names is episode
• 1:24:16
  right. Not a single miss.
• 1:24:18
  All of all of all of Nagash's generals are called his
• 1:24:21
  mortarks. Literally just Mort as in death
• 1:24:24
  arc as in power. That one sounds bad.
• 1:24:27
  Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of mortar.
• 1:24:29
  I'm not a great. Names all up hood line mortar
• 1:24:33
  sounds bad. Lady Linda is the mortar of
• 1:24:36
  grief shit. Yeah, she's a big cool ghost
• 1:24:41
  lady. I love her a lot, but so
• 1:24:44
  Bellacore basically because he knows he's not going to be able
• 1:24:47
  to like muster enough demons to make this a meaningful
• 1:24:50
  distraction on his own. He basically performs some like
• 1:24:53
  shotgun diplomacy with Lady Olender where he infiltrates the
• 1:24:57
  seat of Lady Olender's power and manages to capture her mortal
• 1:25:01
  remains. Yes Yep.
• 1:25:05
  It's literally just to like help me with this like plan aren't
• 1:25:09
  going to destroy your mortal remains.
• 1:25:11
  And salt and burn. Your bones?
• 1:25:13
  Yep, Yep, 100% that's how. You get rid of ghosts another
• 1:25:17
  slice. Of life and fights yeah unclear
• 1:25:20
  if it that specifically would work with night hunt and lady
• 1:25:23
  Olender certainly doesn't want to remains destroyed, but it
• 1:25:25
  might just like make her crazy. We don't actually know it's it's
• 1:25:28
  bad. It's bad for night haunt.
• 1:25:29
  We know for sure. But so Lady Olender orchestrates
• 1:25:34
  the night haunt in this plan basically just out of self
• 1:25:37
  preservation. Velcor has demons attack other
• 1:25:40
  realm gates, other settlements just so chaos as wide as
• 1:25:44
  possible. Yeah, try and like don't.
• 1:25:46
  Let anyone get on, keep them on their back foot.
• 1:25:48
  Yes, his explicit goal is to pull as many storm cast as he
• 1:25:55
  can to the field. Oh, no, no, no.
• 1:25:57
  Yes. Yes.
• 1:25:58
  Yes. Oh no.
• 1:26:00
  Yep, All of the attacks are widely dispersed.
• 1:26:03
  It's not like one huge army of demons and ghosts like attacking
• 1:26:06
  a single city. It's like, yes, it's like we
• 1:26:09
  have one way the hell over here, We have one way the hell over
• 1:26:12
  here. All of the attacks are on Shaman
• 1:26:16
  where the tower crashed. It's like.
• 1:26:19
  Already bad there and now they're getting.
• 1:26:20
  Worse. Exactly.
• 1:26:22
  Again, like Bellicor wants the biggest response he can get, he
• 1:26:26
  wants as many Storm cast to field as he can get.
• 1:26:31
  Hey y'all, I'm so scared right now.
• 1:26:32
  I'm so scared right now. And it's not just because there
• 1:26:36
  are ghosts. No ghosts.
• 1:26:39
  One of the one of the gates that was made unstable by that silver
• 1:26:43
  tower crashing is called the gate of white gold.
• 1:26:45
  It surrounds a settlement. It's very important because it
• 1:26:47
  leads back to Azir. So that's a very important yes,
• 1:26:50
  very important to defend. So a whole storm cast host like
• 1:26:54
  an entire storm cast chapter gets deployed just to defend the
• 1:26:58
  gate of white gold. It is under heavy attack like
• 1:27:00
  it's the only one that both got destabilized and is getting
• 1:27:03
  ghosts on it. Yeah, so no, that host is
• 1:27:08
  deployed to defend the gate of white gold.
• 1:27:12
  They think that like bellacourse plan is just to hit these realm
• 1:27:16
  gates and redirect them to the realm of chaos.
• 1:27:17
  That's been chaos as I mow this whole like war so far, and so
• 1:27:21
  they are trying to defend it from that.
• 1:27:23
  They have their like, backs against the gate, defending all
• 1:27:26
  oncomers, but but unbeknownst to the forces of order.
• 1:27:33
  So Seraphon attack Silver Tower managed to bring it down like
• 1:27:38
  warps into the real space. Yeah, yes, destabilizes all
• 1:27:43
  these gates. That's real bad.
• 1:27:44
  But they knew that that was part of the plan.
• 1:27:46
  Like the Seraphon shared that plan with Sigmar.
• 1:27:48
  Like everyone knew that this was the big like, let's blow up a
• 1:27:50
  Silver Tower operation. It just didn't.
• 1:27:53
  Know what was going to. Happen.
• 1:27:54
  Yes, exactly. It went good until it went bad.
• 1:27:57
  Unbeknownst to everybody, Bellacour also influences and
• 1:28:03
  gives secrets to Clan Eschen of the Scaven on how to destroy a
• 1:28:08
  silver tower. The Scaven have no particular
• 1:28:13
  love of archaeon either. And also Clan Eschen are like
• 1:28:17
  mercenaries by nature. They all do.
• 1:28:19
  Yeah, exactly. There are ninja rats if you
• 1:28:21
  remember. Yeah, Yep.
• 1:28:23
  And so as all this is going on as like storm casts have
• 1:28:26
  deployed to the field and they are defending the gate of white
• 1:28:28
  gold, Etchin detonates a massive warp stone bomb in a second
• 1:28:35
  silver tower. Damn it.
• 1:28:36
  It does not crash into real space.
• 1:28:38
  Like the the means was just like different for whatever reason.
• 1:28:42
  We it this kind of implied that because like it was a warp stone
• 1:28:45
  bomb, warp stone's pure like hardened chaos magic, that it
• 1:28:48
  might have just like warped into the Chaos realm and crashed
• 1:28:50
  there instead. Yeah, but it has a similar
• 1:28:55
  effect like all the gates. Yes, all the gates it was
• 1:28:58
  connected to get more unstable. And one gate in particular was
• 1:29:04
  connected to both of the towers that just went down.
• 1:29:07
  Interesting is that is the gate of white gold.
• 1:29:10
  It is the gate of white gold. So the gate of white gold fully
• 1:29:14
  inverts. It does the thing that like it.
• 1:29:19
  It doesn't even lead to the realm of chaos.
• 1:29:22
  It just starts disgorging pure unfiltered chaos meant like if
• 1:29:27
  if the others were like a radiation leak where it was
• 1:29:30
  like, oh, this is a bad thing, but we might be able to like
• 1:29:32
  patch this and like this is the entire manhole getting ripped
• 1:29:37
  off of like a pure fountain of chaos magic.
• 1:29:40
  It is capital B bad. Yeah, Chaos magic just
• 1:29:45
  completely pouring into the world and through some weird
• 1:29:50
  interaction with this specific Realmgate, Bellacourt's
• 1:29:53
  influence, because we know this is what he wanted to happen, or
• 1:29:56
  because it was like the Silver Tower, like doing it.
• 1:29:59
  All of that magic disgorges and congeals and starts to leak into
• 1:30:06
  the sky above Shaman. Yeah, it becomes this like
• 1:30:11
  hanging ethereal storm cloud that covers at first the gate of
• 1:30:18
  white gold, but it is coming in like a gallons, right?
• 1:30:22
  It is pouring out more and more and more every minute.
• 1:30:26
  And it's not Yes, and it's not long for this huge swirling veil
• 1:30:33
  of pure chaos magic has just covered all of shaman.
• 1:30:38
  Nope. Oh.
• 1:30:39
  Bad, Yeah. Just an impermeable cloud of
• 1:30:44
  pure chaos magic. Big.
• 1:30:46
  Yikes. And that has a couple of
• 1:30:48
  effects. So like, we know this was
• 1:30:49
  Bellacour's intent. Like this is what he wanted to
• 1:30:51
  happen. This was the whole reason for
• 1:30:53
  orchestrating all of this. And the reason he wanted to lure
• 1:30:57
  so many storm casts to Shimon before this happened is because
• 1:31:02
  that's what the Cursed Skies is, is this veil of like
• 1:31:06
  uncompromising chaos magic over the Shimon.
• 1:31:09
  It is such dense and they can't get back.
• 1:31:15
  It's a snare. It's a net.
• 1:31:18
  Like not only can, like Stormcast can't get through it.
• 1:31:22
  So like all like Stormcast can't deploy to shaman anymore.
• 1:31:26
  Like their lightning just can't punch through it.
• 1:31:28
  If a Stormcast dies on Shaman, their soul tries to go back to
• 1:31:33
  the anvil and it can't get there.
• 1:31:36
  It gets caught. It gets caught in the cursed
• 1:31:38
  skies. Oh my God, that's so scary.
• 1:31:41
  It's so bad because they like it doesn't kill them, it can't kill
• 1:31:46
  them. They're eternal.
• 1:31:47
  They're just stuck. That's.
• 1:31:50
  Horrible. It's real bad.
• 1:31:53
  It's real bad. It was a real fucking escalation
• 1:31:55
  of the stakes. What had happened.
• 1:31:56
  Let me tell you like the the host deployed to the gate of
• 1:32:00
  white gold, they get overwhelmed as like chaos magic pours out
• 1:32:04
  from the gate and knocks them off guard.
• 1:32:05
  They are killed to a man and they are trapped in the cursed
• 1:32:08
  skies. Like that host is obliterated in
• 1:32:12
  moments. I think that up to this point,
• 1:32:15
  no, no one. This is like the moment when
• 1:32:18
  Stormcast come again to like, fear death because like.
• 1:32:22
  That's worse than. Yes right, like you're not
• 1:32:25
  reforging from that like it's not like someone can go in and
• 1:32:29
  get you it's pure chaos magic like no one can withstand it
• 1:32:34
  except storm cast and they're just going to get trapped in it
• 1:32:37
  right so they're. Not so.
• 1:32:38
  It can't corrupt them, no, But they can't get.
• 1:32:42
  Out, yes. They're just trapped, like
• 1:32:44
  forever. As like lightning bound souls in
• 1:32:48
  the storm of the cursed skies. Nightmarish, yeah.
• 1:32:52
  I already find Stormcast so sad. Right, right.
• 1:32:59
  So that's, that's Bellacour's plan.
• 1:33:03
  He creates the first like he creates Chaos's answer to
• 1:33:06
  Stormcast. Like how do you, how do you find
• 1:33:09
  an opponent that can't die forever?
• 1:33:11
  You trap them, you don't kill them like.
• 1:33:14
  Damn. That's really smart, right?
• 1:33:16
  Fuck. But it's not the end of
• 1:33:17
  Bellacour's plan yet. What?
• 1:33:20
  Right, there's more. So on Shimon is a city called
• 1:33:25
  the Vindicarium. It's a it guards another huge
• 1:33:29
  realm gate to his ear. It's a cornerstone of like
• 1:33:32
  Sigmar's efforts to like push into Shimon and like reclaim
• 1:33:36
  parts of it and is the home of the celestial Vindicator storm
• 1:33:41
  host. It is one of the cities that is
• 1:33:44
  like big enough and important enough that an entire host of
• 1:33:47
  the storm cast just live there full time.
• 1:33:49
  OK, Like, if they die, they reforge on Azir and then they
• 1:33:52
  just immediately take the gate back.
• 1:33:53
  Like they're a standing army, which is like super uncommon for
• 1:33:56
  storm cast because they can dip like being able to deploy
• 1:33:59
  anywhere as part of their strength.
• 1:34:01
  Yeah, like you sacrifice a lot of by having them be on site all
• 1:34:04
  the time, But it's it's just that important.
• 1:34:07
  OK Celestial vindicators are already there ready to defend it
• 1:34:12
  while this is going on and when the the fighting started with
• 1:34:16
  the night hunt and with the demons.
• 1:34:17
  The hallowed Knights are good good anti chaos boys get
• 1:34:22
  deployed there as well specifically to counter the
• 1:34:24
  chaos threat. Yeah, Hallowed Knights are
• 1:34:26
  particularly good at combating chaos corruption.
• 1:34:28
  They were extremely instrumental in like reclaiming huge chunks
• 1:34:31
  of guy ran from Nergel. Super duper helpful.
• 1:34:35
  My boy Gardas is a hollowed knight.
• 1:34:37
  Yes, he's super uncorrupted. So they are in the vindicarium
• 1:34:43
  when the cursed skies happen. And big Oh no, my boy goddess is
• 1:34:49
  in the vindicarium when the cursed skies happen.
• 1:34:54
  They they immediately clock what's like happening.
• 1:34:57
  Like they see the souls like try and shoot back to his ear and
• 1:35:01
  get snared. And as fighting reaches the
• 1:35:04
  vindicarium, they watch as even like the people they're fighting
• 1:35:07
  alongside like Stormcast get killed and their souls get
• 1:35:10
  trapped in the skies above them. Like so they are.
• 1:35:14
  It's not a good vibe. We have one of our first.
• 1:35:18
  So this this was all the end of the second edition of the game
• 1:35:21
  was like the the Broken realms event.
• 1:35:24
  And so we don't have like a ton of like ongoing lore like
• 1:35:27
  building up to this point, but we actually have one of our
• 1:35:29
  first big impactful character deaths in the setting.
• 1:35:34
  Gardice got a lot of the earliest like Stormcast focused
• 1:35:36
  books because he's great and I love him.
• 1:35:38
  One of his oldest companions was a storm cast called Lord
• 1:35:41
  Castilian Grim. Who?
• 1:35:44
  Yes, fortunately he dies at the Vindicarium and he is trapped in
• 1:35:49
  the cursed disguise. Goddess, my man, my main boy.
• 1:35:52
  Like he knows the mission. He was fully prepared to like
• 1:35:56
  fight to defend the Vidicarium even if it meant losing himself.
• 1:36:00
  Like that's just who fundamentally who goddess is a
• 1:36:03
  character. Bellicor's coming for the
• 1:36:05
  Vidicarium. Like Bellicor personally shows
• 1:36:08
  up to lead the siege of the Vidicarium.
• 1:36:12
  We still don't fully know what specifically he want for the
• 1:36:15
  vindicarium. My guess is just because it's a
• 1:36:17
  realm gate that leads to his ear like he wanted to be.
• 1:36:20
  Good thing to have. Yes, it's it would be Chaos's
• 1:36:23
  first foothold in his ear, and that's a huge, like feather in
• 1:36:27
  his cap. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:36:29
  He would be. Again, it would be a thing he
• 1:36:31
  has over Archaeon, which is important to him.
• 1:36:34
  You don't have the foothold in his ear badge.
• 1:36:37
  Well, I have the. Foothold, yes.
• 1:36:40
  So Bellacour personally shows up to the Vindicarium and like, not
• 1:36:44
  wanting anyone else to risk the threat of like being killed.
• 1:36:49
  Gardas personally fights Bellacour on the walls of the
• 1:36:54
  Vindicarium. They fight for a while.
• 1:36:58
  It is like, I mean, it's a big punch up.
• 1:36:59
  Again, Gardas has kind of the advantage here.
• 1:37:02
  He is uniquely good at fighting chaos.
• 1:37:04
  Like he's incorruptible. And for all of Bellacour's
• 1:37:08
  strengths, he's not a good fighter.
• 1:37:11
  Like he's a yeah, but that's not really what.
• 1:37:14
  He. Does he's a manipulator?
• 1:37:15
  Yeah, he's. Other people do the.
• 1:37:17
  Fighting yes exactly so he's he's capable.
• 1:37:20
  He's still a demon Prince, but they are pretty evenly matched.
• 1:37:23
  But Gardas has dwindling numbers of storm cast and Bellacour has
• 1:37:29
  lots and lots of demons, and so this fight starts to turn
• 1:37:34
  against the assembled storm cast like we lose more of them.
• 1:37:38
  The celestial vindicators like focus prioritize like protecting
• 1:37:43
  the realm gate, while the hollowed Knights who are better
• 1:37:45
  at like dealing with chaos corruption, like push the fight
• 1:37:47
  to like keep demons outside the walls, like tactics and trying
• 1:37:52
  to like isolate this down to a moment where there's potentially
• 1:37:55
  still like a victory condition here for this term cast, even
• 1:37:58
  though they're like very quickly losing numbers And right when
• 1:38:03
  everything seems like it is going to go absolutely bad, like
• 1:38:08
  Bellicor gets the upper hand over Gardas and we are staring
• 1:38:13
  down the like idea that Bellicor might like get that first
• 1:38:17
  foothold like the events called broken realms.
• 1:38:21
  Everybody like might get that first foothold into his ear.
• 1:38:24
  Bellicor has to like, full on, like, duck and cover as just a
• 1:38:30
  fully unloaded barrage of gunfire, like, clips his wings.
• 1:38:35
  The carriage runner. The carriage runner here are
• 1:38:40
  mercenary capitalist sky pirate dwarves.
• 1:38:43
  They originate from Shimon. And they have been keeping it,
• 1:38:46
  like, doing their best to, like, keep a lock on it throughout the
• 1:38:50
  entire Age of Chaos. Yeah, like a lot of the other
• 1:38:54
  like a lot of the dwarven clans fled shaman.
• 1:38:56
  It's like super inhospitable. The carriage on adapted.
• 1:38:58
  They built their like yeah, their huge flying sky fortresses
• 1:39:01
  so they never had to like land in one place and become easy
• 1:39:04
  targets. They built their like sky ships
• 1:39:06
  and have been like taking the fight to Zinch who is like the
• 1:39:09
  most present chaos force in Shaman like using their air
• 1:39:13
  superiority to like push back against like Zinchian forces
• 1:39:17
  like the carriage on have been here like.
• 1:39:20
  Damn, yeah, they didn't. They've never left, yeah.
• 1:39:23
  And like this far into like past the age of Chaos and into the
• 1:39:27
  age of Sigmar and stuff, the carriage on have kind of settled
• 1:39:29
  into like an uneasy like normalcy.
• 1:39:32
  Like they still fight chaos, but they are focused on kind of that
• 1:39:35
  like trade and commerce thing that that has become like their
• 1:39:37
  mainstay. But such a huge like, threat
• 1:39:41
  directly to Shimon. Yeah, that's a big.
• 1:39:43
  Problem. Yeah, like they rally the
• 1:39:45
  Caradron allegiance and we get all of the big Barracron and
• 1:39:49
  Barracnar and like all these big like Caradron like sky ports who
• 1:39:55
  are taking their like sky realm gates back into Shimon to like
• 1:39:59
  rally the clans and like get everybody to right.
• 1:40:02
  It rules. We give a lot of shit to the
• 1:40:05
  Caradron because they invented capitalism, but like, they know
• 1:40:07
  when to show up. Yeah.
• 1:40:09
  Yeah. So like Bellicore has to like
• 1:40:11
  like he misses the like killing blow on Gardus basically by like
• 1:40:15
  the carriage on intervention, he has to back off a little bit.
• 1:40:18
  But initially he's unimpressed. It's like I've got an endless
• 1:40:21
  legion of demons. We're already on the upper foot.
• 1:40:23
  What is like, like these dwarves are going to come in and like
• 1:40:26
  wreck shit, But like we can win before that becomes like a huge
• 1:40:29
  factor here. And like here, I'm going to
• 1:40:31
  like, I'm going to pull more demons from like the realm of
• 1:40:35
  chaos to like fight these airships.
• 1:40:37
  Like this is minor complication. Like they denied me my victory
• 1:40:42
  in this moment and they'll pay for that.
• 1:40:44
  But I'm not like like it's fine. Like it's fine, but his tune
• 1:40:54
  changes. He surveys the ships coming in
• 1:40:57
  and it is just like sky blotting out with ships, right?
• 1:41:00
  Surveys the ships coming in. Yep, Yep, and 1.
• 1:41:05
  He spots someone on one of the ships that gives him pause.
• 1:41:09
  Pause. Yes, standing at the front of
• 1:41:12
  one of the ships is a white haired dwarf beard in like long
• 1:41:19
  flowing white beard and like kind of wild like hair flowing
• 1:41:24
  behind him, standing out on the prow of the ship where
• 1:41:27
  Bellacourt can't so that Bellacourt can't see him.
• 1:41:31
  Just like making an entrance, basically saying that I am here
• 1:41:37
  now and this is over. And that person, dear listeners,
• 1:41:46
  it's not who you fucking think it is.
• 1:41:47
  This is gonna be another weird life.
• 1:41:49
  Yeah, great. I mean, I don't know who it is
• 1:41:51
  at all. Yeah, I'm glad the listeners are
• 1:41:52
  at least wrong. This is gonna be OK.
• 1:41:54
  So who that person? Sorry to take the air out of
• 1:41:57
  this moment, by the way, but who that person is is Grumney.
• 1:42:01
  It's the maker. God is the last surviving dwarf
• 1:42:05
  and ancestor. God.
• 1:42:06
  Yeah, Yeah. Remember, like, went to his ear
• 1:42:09
  to service, service to like, service debt to Sigmar.
• 1:42:12
  Like helped create the envelope of apocryosis.
• 1:42:14
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:42:16
  Like, he's been around. He's been making stuff.
• 1:42:18
  And in this moment, he decides to like so many of the dwarven
• 1:42:23
  clans, like the Caradron and the fire slayers and like the
• 1:42:26
  dispossessed, like the other like dwarven clans, all have
• 1:42:30
  been operating off this normalcy of like our gods are dead or
• 1:42:33
  abandoned us like we are no longer like a people of the gods
• 1:42:37
  like. And Grunny chooses this moment
• 1:42:40
  to like join like the caradron rally, like basically be like,
• 1:42:44
  I've I've not been around for you.
• 1:42:46
  I have not like been part of your like collective, but I am
• 1:42:50
  still the maker God. I am still like here to make
• 1:42:54
  something of like these disparate dwarven clams like
• 1:42:57
  this could all be like great again like this could be
• 1:43:02
  something that we like work together to achieve.
• 1:43:06
  OK. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:43:07
  And so he rides into this siege of the Vindicarium on the front
• 1:43:13
  of this carriage run ship, just in the flesh, like as he was
• 1:43:16
  like Sigmar, all the dwarven gods are ascendant.
• 1:43:20
  They were mortals at one time. But unlike Sigmar, dwarven gods
• 1:43:23
  just ascend to godhood by like, being remembered by the dwarven
• 1:43:27
  people, basically. Yeah, their ancestor gods.
• 1:43:30
  And so Grogni appears as he was in life, like he's just a dwarf
• 1:43:35
  on the front of the ship, but he exudes such like divine power in
• 1:43:40
  that moment. Bellicore, like clocks him like
• 1:43:45
  he could have won this fight. Still, with just like the
• 1:43:48
  character on Legion showing up, he's not strong enough to go toe
• 1:43:50
  to Joe with a God. Certainly unprepared.
• 1:43:52
  Yes, certainly unprepared. And so he dips.
• 1:43:57
  He's just like, I got the cursed skies.
• 1:43:59
  I got most of what I wanted. I don't get this feather in my
• 1:44:02
  cap, but I'm out. KO and Stormcast together
• 1:44:06
  managed to mop up the last of the demons.
• 1:44:08
  No longer under threat. Lady Olinda just recalls the
• 1:44:10
  Night Haunt, and that's the end of the siege of the Vindicarium.
• 1:44:15
  Holy shit. Yeah.
• 1:44:17
  That was awesome. Yeah, right.
• 1:44:18
  And now to to talk about the thing that I alluded to earlier,
• 1:44:21
  dear listeners. So I, I got into Sigmar right
• 1:44:24
  around the end of 2nd edition. Like by all accounts, like the
• 1:44:27
  Broken Realms event is kind of what like permanently sealed my
• 1:44:31
  life to Warhammer, basically where I was like, hey, this is a
• 1:44:34
  cool like board game. Like I'm enjoying playing this
• 1:44:37
  board game and like I'm expressing myself through
• 1:44:40
  painting and oh, wow, there's like story happening in these
• 1:44:44
  books that I can play out on the tabletop.
• 1:44:46
  And like, there's there's developments happening that, you
• 1:44:49
  know, yeah. Like seriously, like that was a
• 1:44:51
  huge broken realms is like a huge, huge part of my like
• 1:44:56
  developmental brain, like what I associate with like the best
• 1:44:58
  times of age of Sigmar like and some of that's nostalgia, but
• 1:45:01
  it's also was just really cool and fun.
• 1:45:05
  But dear listeners, if you like me, were around for like the
• 1:45:09
  broken realms and like the cursed skies event in that book
• 1:45:13
  in like broken realms Bellcore, when all this happens, we don't
• 1:45:16
  get the name of the dwarf on the front of that ship.
• 1:45:19
  We don't get told it's grung me and even if you weren't around
• 1:45:23
  for that listeners and you heard me giving the description of
• 1:45:27
  that dwarf like from that book. There's a dwarf in Warhammer
• 1:45:33
  lore called the White Dwarf. OK.
• 1:45:38
  Who's like has like like he doesn't braid his beard and he
• 1:45:42
  lets his hair be unkempt for like lore reasons.
• 1:45:47
  And that was like super clearly who it was.
• 1:45:49
  And they just. Changed their mind.
• 1:45:51
  Yeah, like, like, it's so obvious.
• 1:45:54
  So the White Door's real name is Grum Brindle.
• 1:45:56
  OK, Yeah, it's a good name. And like it's.
• 1:45:58
  A fun name. Going back and reading it now,
• 1:46:00
  even, like, it's so clear that the intent was to like
• 1:46:03
  foreshadow. Like because Grum Brindle has
• 1:46:06
  been wholly absent from Major Sigma, He is like, we also don't
• 1:46:11
  like Grummindle's weird because he's not like a recognized
• 1:46:17
  ancestor God. OK, but he's definitely an
• 1:46:20
  ancestor God. Basically.
• 1:46:22
  Like he's not like honored amongst the pantheon.
• 1:46:24
  He doesn't have like shrines and temples and stuff, but he shows
• 1:46:27
  up all the time. Like he's either an ancestor God
• 1:46:30
  or he's just like a spirit that like guides the dwarf in people
• 1:46:34
  I like. The second one, yeah, right.
• 1:46:36
  Like the second one? Yeah, he's cool.
• 1:46:38
  I like Grimm Brindle a lot. Both.
• 1:46:40
  Are good, but yeah, the second one feels.
• 1:46:42
  Good. Yeah, it feels different in
• 1:46:43
  like, in a really interesting way, but he's been like, totally
• 1:46:46
  absent from Major Sigmar up to this point.
• 1:46:48
  Like this felt in the moment, like everyone was just like, OK,
• 1:46:52
  cool. Like Grim Brindle's back, like
• 1:46:54
  he was gone for a while, but he's here again to guide the
• 1:46:56
  dwarven people in their time of need.
• 1:46:58
  Yeah, like that it feels. Exactly when he'd show.
• 1:47:00
  Up I was going to say exactly like narratively it makes so
• 1:47:03
  much sense that he would show up in this moment to like help
• 1:47:05
  guide the carriage run towards like doing the right thing.
• 1:47:08
  Yeah. It makes so much sense that it
• 1:47:09
  would be like this is a unifying thing that we can do because
• 1:47:12
  that's Grum Brindle's like thing.
• 1:47:14
  Yeah, it is like the voice of the collective dwarven people,
• 1:47:18
  like the diaspora of like dwarven people.
• 1:47:20
  And then it's just like, not like, why Do we know why?
• 1:47:23
  I don't know. Come.
• 1:47:25
  Back in some other. Way no, like we just decide no,
• 1:47:28
  I think so I think that's got to be it.
• 1:47:30
  Is that like, so it's no secret that the, the print time
• 1:47:34
  between, like the time between like we wrote a Warhammer like
• 1:47:38
  thing and then we put it to print is over a year time.
• 1:47:42
  Yes. And usually that's because of
• 1:47:43
  like rule stuff, right? Like you got to rules, you got
• 1:47:46
  to play test rules, you got to send them to the printer, you
• 1:47:48
  got to print a bajillion copies and ship them to stores all over
• 1:47:52
  the world, right? Yeah.
• 1:47:55
  And so we know it's a long development time.
• 1:47:57
  I like, we don't have any way of knowing.
• 1:47:59
  Like we'll probably never know because the official line is
• 1:48:02
  Yep, that was grunny. It was always grunny, like right
• 1:48:04
  bullshit, right? But it's not.
• 1:48:06
  It was grim Brindle. And my, my thought is, I think
• 1:48:08
  at some point someone decided like this was going to be the
• 1:48:11
  reintroduction of Grim Brindle, someone like higher up the chain
• 1:48:14
  of command or like in a different like creative industry
• 1:48:17
  said like we don't have any like plans for that.
• 1:48:21
  We don't really want to like pull Grumbrindle back in right
• 1:48:24
  now, but we do want to do more stuff with Grumny right now.
• 1:48:27
  And it just got like changed post hoc to like, no, it was
• 1:48:32
  Grumny and now we're going to tell more stories about Grumny.
• 1:48:35
  Like I I could see somewhere in a creative pipeline someone
• 1:48:38
  being like, we don't need to bring Grumbrindle back because
• 1:48:41
  we already have this like other important dwarven character that
• 1:48:44
  we're not really doing anything with and we should focus on them
• 1:48:47
  first. Yeah, I guess, right?
• 1:48:50
  Isn't like he was pretty well set.
• 1:48:52
  But no, it doesn't sound like anyone was asking, hey, what's
• 1:48:54
  he doing? Yeah, we knew what he.
• 1:48:55
  Was doing he's making shit. Yeah, he's making shit, he's
• 1:48:57
  helping, but that's all speculation.
• 1:49:00
  You, I don't know. You don't know.
• 1:49:02
  Nobody knows. Someone in GW knows, but they're
• 1:49:04
  not going to tell. Yep.
• 1:49:06
  Bellcore got his ass beat, yes. Yeah.
• 1:49:09
  And Bellcore got driven back. Yes, Bellcore gets driven back,
• 1:49:13
  retreats to Olgu, Siege is broken, the rest of the strong
• 1:49:17
  cast take realm gates home because they can't get back to
• 1:49:20
  the cursed skies and for the foreseeable future I thought.
• 1:49:25
  You meant they took them home with?
• 1:49:27
  Them Oh no like. They physically put them in the
• 1:49:29
  suitcase. Oh no, Oh no.
• 1:49:34
  Skull for the skull throttle but Yep storm cast retreat.
• 1:49:40
  The celestial vindicators stay in the city helps are rebuilding
• 1:49:44
  it as their city to like watch and Grunny like sets about like
• 1:49:49
  helping like start slaying those roots for like getting more like
• 1:49:53
  inter dwarven cooperation going. But he does take a quick detour
• 1:49:57
  back to Azir. He's got a new project he needs
• 1:50:01
  to work on. So next part of my notes is
• 1:50:03
  called development sense. Like the curse guys event is
• 1:50:05
  kind of Bellicor's big thing that he's done in age of Sigmar
• 1:50:08
  so far. Like he he put real stakes
• 1:50:10
  behind Stormcast, right, because the curse guys don't just stay
• 1:50:15
  on shaman. Oh shit, over the next little
• 1:50:18
  while the curse skies just kind of spread everywhere.
• 1:50:22
  Yeah, it becomes a real problem there for a while.
• 1:50:25
  There's a there's we have a brief like I wanna say era cuz
• 1:50:28
  that makes it seem too long. We have like a chunk there where
• 1:50:31
  storm cast effectiveness is like drastically reduced to get
• 1:50:34
  anywhere. They just have to take realm
• 1:50:36
  gates like everybody else. And like, because of the efforts
• 1:50:38
  made by, like, the Realmgate words, they have better access
• 1:50:42
  to Realmgates than a lot of people.
• 1:50:43
  But that's still a hell of a lot different than descending on
• 1:50:46
  bolts of lightning. Yeah, 100%.
• 1:50:48
  So one of the things that happens pretty quick.
• 1:50:51
  And there's another one that's like, I wish they'd given this a
• 1:50:54
  little bit more time for narrative reasons, but I
• 1:50:56
  understand why they didn't because it's where narrative
• 1:50:59
  intersects with like, business stuff.
• 1:51:02
  Listeners, if you've seen Stormcast, you've probably seen
• 1:51:04
  like, older Stormcast models, like, especially when Stormcast
• 1:51:08
  were first coming out. They're kind of bulky.
• 1:51:09
  They're kind of blocky. Yeah.
• 1:51:11
  Our our buddy Dave Warhammer here on Darien Shelf I think.
• 1:51:16
  The cat's knocked him down. He might.
• 1:51:17
  Even he's he's down here by your own.
• 1:51:19
  Yeah. By your Laura Olympus books.
• 1:51:20
  Yeah, yeah. He's got kind of like a chunky
• 1:51:23
  frame. Early Stormcast models were very
• 1:51:26
  much meant to emulate that kind of like Space Marine aesthetic.
• 1:51:30
  They were for product reasons. They are Space Marines, right?
• 1:51:33
  They have big flat panels. They're easy to paint, and they
• 1:51:36
  share an aesthetic with a thing that we already know sells well.
• 1:51:39
  Right. Like, that's the original
• 1:51:40
  Stormcast. By this time, GW is more
• 1:51:43
  confident in Stormcast as their own thing that they want to
• 1:51:46
  differentiate them. Yeah, They want to differentiate
• 1:51:48
  them a little bit visually from like the Storm or from the Space
• 1:51:52
  Marine mold specifically because like storm cast aren't Space
• 1:51:57
  Marines. They're not like biologically
• 1:51:59
  augmented. They're not full of machine
• 1:52:00
  parts and weird growth hormone. They're just people.
• 1:52:04
  They're they're big people. They're, they're reborn from
• 1:52:07
  their souls. So they're their souls have.
• 1:52:09
  Been re crafted. Yeah.
• 1:52:11
  Yeah. Confused with lightning but
• 1:52:13
  they're allowed to have like more normal proportions.
• 1:52:16
  I'll I'll say it all Space Marine people look like Duplo
• 1:52:18
  people. And like.
• 1:52:20
  And like that's fine. They feel a good product role
• 1:52:22
  and they're trying to emulate like back when injection plastic
• 1:52:25
  molding was worse and so you couldn't get like the fine
• 1:52:27
  detail you can now. It's fine.
• 1:52:29
  Space Marines look fine. They're not my thing, but they
• 1:52:31
  look fine. So on the product end of it, GW
• 1:52:34
  is like, OK, we want to make more storm cast that just kind
• 1:52:37
  of look more like proportioned. We want them to have more like,
• 1:52:42
  kind of knight in armor proportions because that's what
• 1:52:45
  people playing the fantasy game want.
• 1:52:48
  Like they want them to look, yeah, they want Knights.
• 1:52:50
  Like, they want kind of standard proportion Knights.
• 1:52:52
  And so in narrative, what happens to justify that
• 1:52:55
  basically is that we have a period of darkness where the
• 1:53:00
  storm casts effectiveness is greatly reduced.
• 1:53:02
  Grumny has returned to his ear and he's working on a project in
• 1:53:05
  secret. And when he reveals it with like
• 1:53:08
  the aid of Sigmar, he has developed new armor for storm
• 1:53:12
  casts. It's called Thunderstrike armor.
• 1:53:15
  It has like, more Sigmar's lightning and fused into it.
• 1:53:20
  And it makes it so that when a Stormcast dies, their soul
• 1:53:25
  explodes it. It's fine.
• 1:53:28
  Let me be clear. Yeah, their soul doesn't.
• 1:53:31
  Yeah, their soul doesn't, like get hurt.
• 1:53:34
  But it when a stormcast dies, their soul, like the lightning
• 1:53:37
  in their soul, reacts with the lightning in the armor, and it
• 1:53:40
  causes the armor to detonate, which propels the storm cast
• 1:53:45
  upward with enough force that it's not foolproof.
• 1:53:49
  But more often than not, they can punch through the cursed
• 1:53:52
  skies and get back. Yeah.
• 1:53:55
  So there's still it still introduces a little bit of
• 1:53:57
  threat, still introduces a little bit of stakes.
• 1:53:59
  Like I said, it's not 100%. There's always the chance that
• 1:54:02
  Western cast dies. Now their soul might get snared
• 1:54:04
  in the cursed skies still. Like the armor just doesn't go
• 1:54:06
  off right, or it doesn't get enough force behind it, or
• 1:54:09
  they're somewhere where it's thicker it.
• 1:54:12
  Could happen. But a little bit, yeah, kind of
• 1:54:15
  it. It gives us a little bit more of
• 1:54:17
  a thread of stakes on like Storm cast.
• 1:54:20
  Dying is kind of beyond, just like the reforging sickness,
• 1:54:23
  right? Which was already pretty bad.
• 1:54:25
  Yeah, no, for sure like that. Felt pretty stinky.
• 1:54:28
  For sure that. Felt pretty medium rare stake.
• 1:54:31
  To me I I I have a mixed opinion on the curse guys.
• 1:54:34
  I like it as like a narrative of like, Chaos isn't just being
• 1:54:38
  idle while Stormcast, like, hit them.
• 1:54:40
  Yeah, they're yeah. They're trying to find chaos, is
• 1:54:42
  looking for ways to target and just just disempower Stormcast
• 1:54:47
  specifically, which is very interesting.
• 1:54:49
  It was like immediately we were like, don't worry about that.
• 1:54:52
  It could still, it's not foolproof.
• 1:54:54
  It could still happen, yes, and probably only happens.
• 1:54:57
  We want a narrative gut punch. Yes, you've hit on it exactly.
• 1:55:00
  I would have preferred. And like I said, there's
• 1:55:02
  business reasons for why this didn't happen.
• 1:55:05
  Like the reason we get Thunderstrike armor is because
• 1:55:07
  Thunderstrike armor is sleeker and it's like that more like new
• 1:55:10
  aesthetic story reason. I mean, I guess I feel like it
• 1:55:17
  could have just had cool new armor.
• 1:55:20
  Right, right. But now it's cool don't get me
• 1:55:24
  wrong, but I feel like if the solution wasn't just they got
• 1:55:28
  rid of the cursed skies then this just feels like a weird
• 1:55:31
  work around that it's still there but sometimes it'll bother
• 1:55:33
  you. But only if you want to write a
• 1:55:34
  story that makes you sad. Yes, even if you would like I
• 1:55:38
  think the preferable like narrative thing that should have
• 1:55:42
  happened is like we did the cursed skies and we go like a
• 1:55:45
  full edition even like an addition usually last like 3
• 1:55:48
  years. We go a full edition where storm
• 1:55:51
  cast have to foot slog everywhere and it is dark and it
• 1:55:53
  is dour and like things are bad and then you can pop the next
• 1:55:58
  edition with like new storm cast models.
• 1:56:01
  We finally figured out Thunder Strike armor and it just works.
• 1:56:04
  That's like this is. Yes.
• 1:56:05
  Mad like if it just worked I'd be.
• 1:56:07
  Fine with that. Exactly.
• 1:56:09
  And it's just the tragedy of like the Storm cast that were
• 1:56:12
  lost here. They aren't lost anymore, but we
• 1:56:14
  can't save them. The fact that it's not
• 1:56:16
  foolproof, I think it's some bullshit.
• 1:56:18
  Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, if.
• 1:56:20
  There's not a mechanical end game where your storm cast dies.
• 1:56:22
  Now you roll a dice just like they're.
• 1:56:23
  Fine. Like is that it?
• 1:56:25
  No, that doesn't happen. No, Yeah.
• 1:56:28
  Here's what to make me say when you write a.
• 1:56:29
  Book, yes, yeah, it it's a, it's a big like it's one of those
• 1:56:34
  things that would have been written better if not for
• 1:56:36
  business reasons and isn't that just like how Warhammer goes
• 1:56:39
  sometimes, like. That's so.
• 1:56:42
  Weird, right? Whatever.
• 1:56:45
  Fine, right? Yeah, New.
• 1:56:46
  Designs are cool. Yeah, they're cool.
• 1:56:48
  Yeah, yeah. So I actually went and grabbed
• 1:56:51
  your listeners, one of the like, Thundercat or Thunderstrike
• 1:56:55
  Storm cast out of my room so that Darian can see the Yeah,
• 1:56:58
  she's not painted, but yeah. Oh, she's much cooler.
• 1:57:02
  Right. Much, much cooler than Guy
• 1:57:04
  Warhammer over here. I like her much better.
• 1:57:07
  Yeah, like I said, she's got a more.
• 1:57:09
  Yeah, exactly. And she's they're like both for
• 1:57:12
  people in the know. Guy Warhammer's a sequitur and
• 1:57:17
  our our new lady Thunderstrike. Stormcast is one of the
• 1:57:21
  Thunderstrike liberators from the Skave and Tide set.
• 1:57:24
  Cool. Shame mail, Right?
• 1:57:26
  You can. See her OK, she's got like a
• 1:57:28
  more like fluid dynamic. Yes.
• 1:57:31
  Yep, Yep, Yep. Yeah, she's tired as hell.
• 1:57:33
  Right. And again, like her proportions
• 1:57:35
  are a little bit more normal. She's still got like shoulder
• 1:57:37
  plates, but they're not like bigger than her head delay.
• 1:57:40
  Yeah, yeah, this guy looks. Crazy, right?
• 1:57:44
  And again, like early storm casts are just trying to emulate
• 1:57:46
  Space Marines. That's fine.
• 1:57:48
  You know, it sells like whatever.
• 1:57:49
  But like, this is the reason like Cursed Guys happened in the
• 1:57:53
  kind of rushed way that it did. If they'd spent some time for it
• 1:57:56
  to like ruminate and had more impact, then that would be one
• 1:58:00
  thing. But like in real lifetime as
• 1:58:02
  well. It's kind of like Broken Realms
• 1:58:04
  Belcour came out and then Broken Realms Cragnose came out, which
• 1:58:07
  is the last one in that run. And I hate Cragnose, so I don't
• 1:58:09
  want to talk about him. And then like right after that
• 1:58:12
  we got like the announcement for 3rd edition and that's when the
• 1:58:14
  first like set of Thunder strike armor happened.
• 1:58:17
  So like in narrative there was like a period of darkness and
• 1:58:20
  like, it was bad for a while like in fiction, but in real
• 1:58:24
  lifetime there was like 2 months where Stormcast couldn't get
• 1:58:27
  back to the Anvil. Like, it's bad.
• 1:58:31
  Yeah, again it's handled bad. And again.
• 1:58:34
  The reason I don't like it is because it doesn't always.
• 1:58:36
  Yeah, man, if you just. Want to make this story to OK
• 1:58:41
  and now we have cool new models. Yep, yeah, it's just a weird
• 1:58:46
  intersection, especially with Games Workshop.
• 1:58:48
  Like any 40K people listening to our podcast right now are
• 1:58:52
  pointing at the screen going like because they did the same
• 1:58:55
  thing to Space Marines. Yeah.
• 1:58:58
  I don't think Space Marines redesign look is good, but
• 1:59:01
  again, I'm biased. I don't like how Space Marines
• 1:59:03
  look, but they, yeah, they took a little bit of the Duplo
• 1:59:05
  proportions away from Space Marines and made them a little
• 1:59:06
  bit more like finesse, made them a little a bit more like normal
• 1:59:09
  human proportion. Sorry.
• 1:59:11
  That seems pretty cool. Yeah, but they they, I gained it
• 1:59:14
  in a stupid way. Oh, I'm sorry.
• 1:59:15
  Yeah. There, there.
• 1:59:16
  There's a guy in 40K named Belisarius Call who's a tech
• 1:59:23
  priest OK of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
• 1:59:27
  You just keep saying more words. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:59:29
  He, he's, he's a robot priest. Who?
• 1:59:32
  No, you say more words. He's a robot priest who helps
• 1:59:34
  the Imperium and he in secret did a bunch of experiments to
• 1:59:40
  perfect the process by which Space Marines are made.
• 1:59:44
  And then that all just got revealed at one time.
• 1:59:46
  It was he. He made a bunch of them and then
• 1:59:48
  he went to surprise and that was their version.
• 1:59:51
  So like at least we got it better than 40K is my like there
• 1:59:56
  was. Someone ordered a clone army for
• 1:59:58
  the Republican. I mean, you basically, yeah.
• 2:00:00
  It's like he had like, 'cause bells.
• 2:00:01
  Arias has no reason to, like, hide that he was making
• 2:00:04
  improvements to the process. He has no.
• 2:00:06
  Reason to make a bunch of them before telling anyone.
• 2:00:09
  Like it was literally just like we need to start selling these
• 2:00:15
  better looking models. Call did it.
• 2:00:19
  You better call call call. All right, fine, whatever.
• 2:00:24
  Sometimes it'd be that way. Models though they do get the
• 2:00:28
  better verb because getting moved to Thunderstrike armor is
• 2:00:32
  getting thunderstruck. But being the new version of
• 2:00:36
  Space Marines are called Primaris OK and becoming a
• 2:00:40
  Primaris Marine is crossing the Rubicon.
• 2:00:44
  Crossing the Rubicon does sound pretty cool, right?
• 2:00:45
  I'll give you all that. Thunderstruck getting
• 2:00:46
  thunderstruck. That's yeah, crashing.
• 2:00:48
  The Rubicon has. Yeah, it's got implications
• 2:00:54
  because again, like the Imperium is a fascist dictatorship and
• 2:00:57
  their current leader is like Roman themed.
• 2:00:59
  It's a Rubuta Gilliman. Yeah, Robot, Gorilla Man and
• 2:01:07
  famously Crossing the real History Listen in this episode
• 2:01:09
  of the Bad Moons Orbit. We're not talking about 40K,
• 2:01:12
  we're talking. About history, yeah, Rubicon is
• 2:01:14
  the the river in Rome that Caesar famously crossed when he
• 2:01:18
  turned on Rome. Like that was his coup where he
• 2:01:21
  took control. He of Rome like became dictator,
• 2:01:27
  yes. So crossing the Rubicon is like,
• 2:01:30
  oh, that's got some heft behind it, but it's also like, what is
• 2:01:34
  this like dark thing that we are accomplishing?
• 2:01:37
  Right? Like that's interesting.
• 2:01:39
  It's got some. I don't know how well they've
• 2:01:40
  explored those implications without a 40K podcast, but I
• 2:01:44
  like it better. So anyways.
• 2:01:45
  But yeah, the story was worse anyways.
• 2:01:49
  Curse guys happen, growing the Thunder strikes armor to help
• 2:01:54
  get past it. OK.
• 2:01:56
  We've got some more kind of like Bellacourse stuff that's
• 2:02:00
  happened in the interim, nothing like big, but we get a little
• 2:02:03
  bit more of Bellacourse influence on the realms.
• 2:02:06
  So Bellacourse has mostly been operating from the shadows all
• 2:02:09
  this time. He employs like the shadow
• 2:02:10
  demons, but he hasn't really had any mortals drawn to his 'cause
• 2:02:13
  after the cursed guys, he has made enough of an impact that he
• 2:02:17
  starts to draw mortal followers from within archaeons like camp.
• 2:02:23
  Bad news. Yes, Yeah.
• 2:02:25
  So Bellicar catches the attention of like a lot of cast
• 2:02:28
  warriors who see like the cursed guys event happen.
• 2:02:30
  They see, Yeah, there's another, like, big player in the game of,
• 2:02:35
  like, mortal, like followers of Chaos.
• 2:02:38
  And so Bellicore is not flashy still like, he wants to be
• 2:02:41
  subtle. And so he starts to attract what
• 2:02:44
  traditionally in, like, the hierarchy of Chaos warriors are
• 2:02:49
  the people at the bottom of the ladder.
• 2:02:51
  Like Archaeon's forces largely recruit, like, via fighting pit,
• 2:02:54
  basically. Like, they just hold these huge,
• 2:02:56
  like, gladiatorial arenas. And congratulations, you
• 2:02:59
  survived. You get to try and be a Chaos
• 2:03:01
  warrior now. Yeah, Bellacourse starts
• 2:03:04
  targeting not like the inducted Chaos warriors, but the
• 2:03:08
  legionaries, the gladiators who are already at the bottom of the
• 2:03:13
  rung. And they're not going to have
• 2:03:14
  eyes on them to for doing like they're allowed in Chaos camps,
• 2:03:18
  but they're not going to have like chains of command to answer
• 2:03:21
  to yet. So they can kind of operate
• 2:03:24
  clandestinely and enact Bellacourse will.
• 2:03:28
  Like I said, most Chaos legionaries are just like the
• 2:03:30
  earliest step on the path towards being a proper Chaos
• 2:03:32
  warrior. And for a lot of them, that's
• 2:03:33
  still the case. But Bellicar gets their hooks in
• 2:03:36
  them early. And so if they do make it to
• 2:03:38
  being Chaos warriors or Chaos Knights or God forbid, Chosen,
• 2:03:42
  now you've got this squad of eight chosen, and maybe five of
• 2:03:46
  them are secretly loyal to Bellicore, right?
• 2:03:51
  Yeah, right. He's great.
• 2:03:53
  Some like full warriors and Knights defect.
• 2:03:55
  Like I said, Chaos is nothing if not in substantial and some of
• 2:03:58
  them just see a new game in town and then watch play their hand.
• 2:04:03
  So he does attract some like properly already, like fully
• 2:04:06
  inducted, like chaos warriors and chaos Knights.
• 2:04:09
  Also for the for the record, the only difference between a chaos
• 2:04:12
  warrior and a chaos knight is the Knights are on horses.
• 2:04:14
  Like that's that's genuinely like the the word knight.
• 2:04:18
  The word for knight in most languages on earth means man on
• 2:04:21
  horse. Like that's what a knight is.
• 2:04:27
  I suddenly feel the need to reassess a big part of the lore
• 2:04:32
  in my dress. No damn.
• 2:04:38
  It. Circle back knight just means
• 2:04:41
  horse boy. The original horse girls, yeah,
• 2:04:47
  but the the most impactful defection in the aftermath of
• 2:04:51
  the cursed skies. We talked about them a little
• 2:04:53
  bit before Archaeon's Chosen Knights, the highest orders of
• 2:04:58
  his, like personal retinue. Yeah, these are the kids that he
• 2:05:01
  got to take with them. Yeah, yeah, some of them he's
• 2:05:04
  recruited more since then, but some of them are the originals,
• 2:05:07
  the Vanguard. Yes, there are.
• 2:05:12
  Vanguard are organized into circles.
• 2:05:14
  That's they're like both like squad and job basically.
• 2:05:19
  And there are 8 circles naturally, because both hell and
• 2:05:22
  chaos. Yeah.
• 2:05:25
  And I think there's nine circles of hell actually, I'll probably
• 2:05:27
  edit that out. Moving on.
• 2:05:30
  Yeah but all the all the circles have different jobs.
• 2:05:32
  So like the 1st circle of Barrengard or Archaeans personal
• 2:05:35
  bodyguard they never leave aside.
• 2:05:37
  They charge into battle alongside him no matter what.
• 2:05:41
  The second are independent from Bellacour.
• 2:05:44
  They are free to go and sew discord how they see fit.
• 2:05:49
  Like their job is just to run through a town and raise it to
• 2:05:52
  the ground and cause terror. Yeah, but yeah, etcetera,
• 2:05:56
  etcetera. I don't have all the the
• 2:05:58
  Varigard in my notes, but they'll have like different
• 2:06:00
  jobs, specialized roles forever. The 8th circle of Varngard has
• 2:06:04
  been secret. Nobody knows what their job is.
• 2:06:07
  Yeah. Nobody knows.
• 2:06:09
  Nobody in Archaeon's like structure knows what their job
• 2:06:11
  is. We don't even know if Archaeon
• 2:06:13
  knows what their job is. Archaeon that.
• 2:06:16
  Can't be right now we know what their job is because the entire
• 2:06:20
  8th circle of Varncard turns traitor.
• 2:06:24
  Yeah. Oh no, they were already like
• 2:06:29
  the Super secret circle and now they have like squad fully Yeah,
• 2:06:34
  they so. Not.
• 2:06:35
  Squad, they've fully renounced Archaeon and they are
• 2:06:39
  Bellacore's circle of Varangard. Oh my God, it's wild yeah and a
• 2:06:48
  lot of these things like like all this is really cool like
• 2:06:51
  some of it's like motivated by like gameplay stuff.
• 2:06:54
  This is the part like if you're playing a like Chaos Undivided
• 2:06:59
  army and you like, bring Bellacour, this is your like, in
• 2:07:02
  universe justification to be able to field Bellacour and
• 2:07:05
  Varengard in the same list, like that kind of thing.
• 2:07:08
  But it's also very cool. Like we see the Varengard for
• 2:07:11
  the first time, like split with RK on.
• 2:07:13
  We get a sense that they are their own people that aren't
• 2:07:15
  just, like, fully committed. Yeah, exactly.
• 2:07:18
  Like they can make decisions like that on their own.
• 2:07:20
  And who knows, we might lose more Farengard in the future,
• 2:07:23
  especially if Bellacourt keeps doing well, right?
• 2:07:27
  For the first time. We, we've been talking about
• 2:07:30
  this since the end of 2nd edition and we, we get hints at
• 2:07:33
  it here and there. But what the community can't
• 2:07:36
  tends to refer to this kind of like brewing like hostility
• 2:07:40
  between Bellacour and Archaeon. More out in the open than kind
• 2:07:43
  of the shadow War that Bellacour was trying to like pick at
• 2:07:46
  Archaeon before is that we keep getting these hints that we are
• 2:07:50
  looking at a full on like Chaos undivided civil war, like
• 2:07:55
  Bellicorn Arcan actually openly fighting each other for control
• 2:07:59
  of Chaos. Yeah, super interesting.
• 2:08:02
  I'm hyped. I think it's going to be neat.
• 2:08:04
  If and when did it happen? So we don't know when or if
• 2:08:07
  it'll it might be they have in the back pocket.
• 2:08:09
  We'll see it eventually. That's kind of the the SAS quo
• 2:08:13
  as we are now. Bellcore continues to pull like
• 2:08:15
  aspirants from Archaeon, strengthen his own forces, work
• 2:08:19
  behind the shadows. Archaeon continues to like,
• 2:08:21
  fulfill his mission, corrupt chaos gates while still keeping
• 2:08:25
  in his head like his. Archaeon hates gods.
• 2:08:27
  Like that's Archaeon's driving motivation.
• 2:08:29
  He wants to kill Sigmar. He wants to kill the rest of the
• 2:08:31
  gods, and then he wants to turn on the chaos gods.
• 2:08:34
  Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Arcan's a victim of fate, and he
• 2:08:40
  is going to take fate by the neck and, like, cease it to be
• 2:08:45
  his. Issue with gods is they play
• 2:08:46
  games like this with people's lives.
• 2:08:49
  Like, yeah, I. Like.
• 2:08:51
  Arcan, right? I mean, he's a good character.
• 2:08:53
  He's he's history's greatest monster, but he's a great
• 2:08:56
  character. But before we conclude the
• 2:08:58
  episode, it's a long one. I knew it was going to be a long
• 2:09:00
  one. But before we conclude the
• 2:09:02
  episode, we have a famous face to talk about.
• 2:09:05
  Just just one. The whole episode's been about
• 2:09:07
  one famous face, our boy Bellacour.
• 2:09:09
  But we have a like Bellacour aligned character that I also
• 2:09:13
  want to mention. We don't have a ton on him.
• 2:09:14
  He's pretty new, right? You were saying he doesn't have
• 2:09:17
  any good arts You're gonna show. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say I
• 2:09:19
  don't have a good art for him, so I'm just gonna show you his
• 2:09:21
  mini. But first I'm gonna give you his
• 2:09:23
  name. Our famous face for this episode
• 2:09:25
  is Eternus, the Blade of the First Prince.
• 2:09:30
  There it is, Eternus, the blade of the first Prince.
• 2:09:32
  Like I said, Eternus. OK, pretty, pretty strong.
• 2:09:35
  Blade of the First Prince. We've elevated it.
• 2:09:38
  I got us in an S tier. That's as mini.
• 2:09:41
  A lot going on. Right.
• 2:09:43
  Oh, he's got a lot of armor bits.
• 2:09:45
  Yeah, and he's got a chain full of skulls.
• 2:09:48
  Yeah, and. He's got a big old demon Unicorn
• 2:09:52
  that's very good. You gotta have your chain full
• 2:09:54
  of skulls have. Your chain full of skulls, Yeah.
• 2:09:57
  Fucking never leave the house without it.
• 2:09:59
  Yeah, I mean it's. Life like life advice, never.
• 2:10:04
  He's Chain. Full of skulls?
• 2:10:05
  Yep, Yep, you got a a dice knot for cats.
• 2:10:10
  Take care of your back. Never leave your house without
• 2:10:13
  your chain. Full of skulls.
• 2:10:14
  Cake. For breakfast, cake for
• 2:10:15
  breakfast sometimes. Yeah.
• 2:10:16
  That's all. Your advice for this episode you
• 2:10:17
  don't get anymore. So Eternis was a Varrengard of
• 2:10:22
  the 8th Circle. So he was one of those.
• 2:10:25
  Yeah, he's one of those Varrengard that turned on RK on.
• 2:10:28
  This is one of the and this is saying something for Warhammer
• 2:10:31
  lore where we so often get a like it is rumored or it's said
• 2:10:34
  amongst the like or scholars tend to say.
• 2:10:37
  This is one of the vaguest fucking statements I've ever
• 2:10:40
  read for Warhammer lore. Eternus turned on Archaeon, and
• 2:10:44
  then Eternus was thrust into the cursed skies.
• 2:10:49
  Grab them by his throat and just eat in.
• 2:10:51
  It we we don't know, we don't have like an operative person in
• 2:10:54
  that sentence. Like there's nothing to indicate
• 2:10:56
  that Archaeon put over the cursed sky.
• 2:10:58
  Please accept that he turned on him.
• 2:11:00
  But like the rest of the circle also turned out Archaeon, he
• 2:11:03
  didn't do anything to them. So like, like I choose to
• 2:11:06
  believe that yeah, like Archaeon just flew him up there and put
• 2:11:08
  him there personally as like A to like send a message, but we
• 2:11:12
  don't actually know. Like he just happened to get
• 2:11:15
  thrust into the cursed disguise. But like, that sucks.
• 2:11:20
  Like obviously Eternus is a Varangard.
• 2:11:22
  He's already seeped in chaos magic and so the cursed guys
• 2:11:26
  didn't kill him, but that's a lot of pure chaos magic.
• 2:11:30
  Like even for someone who is as like down the path as Eternus
• 2:11:35
  was already like he cannot take that much chaos magic.
• 2:11:39
  He is trapped in the cursed skies and it fries him it, just
• 2:11:45
  like now is. He also trapped in his.
• 2:11:49
  Armor kind of OK. So not the same way as.
• 2:11:52
  No, yes, chaos magic, like I said, basically Fry's body, it
• 2:11:59
  reduces him to like uselessness where he can't like move.
• 2:12:02
  It is only the fact that he's a vanguard and like already like
• 2:12:06
  completely suffused with chaos magic that he doesn't just
• 2:12:09
  outright die, right? Like he's already inoculated at
• 2:12:14
  some point, like some time passes and Bellacourt finds him
• 2:12:19
  in the cursed skies. He it's probably like the other
• 2:12:23
  vanguard told him he was there. It's unclear.
• 2:12:26
  It's possible that Bellacour can just like monitor the cursed
• 2:12:28
  skies. That seems like a thing he would
• 2:12:30
  like set up for him to be able to do.
• 2:12:34
  But Bellacour finds him in the cursed skies.
• 2:12:36
  He like feels his resentment towards Archaeon.
• 2:12:42
  He like he pulls him from the curse skies and he communicates
• 2:12:45
  with him and he gets like his hatred for Archaeon, his like
• 2:12:48
  betrayal and Bellacore sees fit to reward him.
• 2:12:54
  He he finds a kindred spirit in his like hatred of Archaeon.
• 2:12:58
  Yeah, so they turn on Archaeon before they were aligned with
• 2:13:01
  Bellacore. No, this is part of that.
• 2:13:03
  Like I said, the the timeline's kind of screwy, but like I think
• 2:13:08
  Eternus's intent was to join Bellacour when he turned on, but
• 2:13:10
  he got put in the curse skies beforehand.
• 2:13:13
  So like attorneys probably was intending to like get rescued by
• 2:13:16
  Bellacour and then he would just gone and been like an 8th circle
• 2:13:18
  Baron guard under Bellacour. But Bellcour finds in him a
• 2:13:21
  kindred spirit. He says you I need like a second
• 2:13:25
  in command, basically someone who will help like if this is
• 2:13:29
  going to start escalating towards a real like war, I'm
• 2:13:32
  going to need like another general in the field real.
• 2:13:36
  Fucking quick up in here. And I don't want to entrust that
• 2:13:40
  to something as frail as immortal.
• 2:13:44
  And so Bellacour does not possess the power to put other
• 2:13:48
  people through dark apotheosis. Like he can't turn him into a
• 2:13:51
  demon. He probably would have if it was
• 2:13:52
  something he was capable of, but he just does not have that
• 2:13:55
  power. So instead Velcor pulls
• 2:13:59
  Eternus's remains like from the cursed skies.
• 2:14:03
  I say remains. Eternus is still alive, he's
• 2:14:04
  just fucking fried. He pulls Eternus from the cursed
• 2:14:08
  skies and he just takes a huge like talent hand and pulls like
• 2:14:16
  partially disintegrated like messed up like warped remains of
• 2:14:23
  storm cast soul and and be used them into Eternus.
• 2:14:32
  We gotta kill this guy. The second part, we gotta kill
• 2:14:34
  this guy. Bellacour supercharges Eternus
• 2:14:41
  with reforged souls. He basically reforges Eternus.
• 2:14:49
  He gives him storm cast immortality.
• 2:14:53
  We gotta kill this guy, but permanently.
• 2:14:57
  I'm sure someone can figure it out.
• 2:14:59
  Eternis is now immortal in the same way that storm a similar
• 2:15:03
  way to a storm cast is. The thing is that it's
• 2:15:05
  predicated on like being intermingled with those storm
• 2:15:10
  cast souls. Like we have the implication
• 2:15:12
  that if he chose to, Bellacourt could take that away from
• 2:15:15
  Eternis again. And he he does like dangle that
• 2:15:18
  over him as motivator because he sucks because he's Bellicore.
• 2:15:21
  Like he's master manipulator. But like for all intents and
• 2:15:25
  purposes when Eternis falls in battle he reforges in the same
• 2:15:30
  way that a storm cast does. Where does he go?
• 2:15:32
  Same place. He doesn't travel anywhere.
• 2:15:35
  The souls just bring him back. Yeah, he dies.
• 2:15:39
  His body goes down and he is reborn in a burst of black
• 2:15:43
  lightning. Yeah, it's so good.
• 2:15:48
  Yeah. Reformed in a strike of black
• 2:15:51
  lightning. So his his body goes down and
• 2:15:53
  just and he's back. Frankenstein, right?
• 2:16:00
  Right. It's wild.
• 2:16:02
  And we haven't seen him like do much since then, but he is
• 2:16:07
  around and he is like working on behalf of Belcour and he's
• 2:16:10
  readying Belcour's forces for like this potentially proper war
• 2:16:13
  that's going to come. And that that's where we'll
• 2:16:16
  leave Bellicore for now. Like he's always scheming.
• 2:16:20
  He's always plotting. I'm sure he's going to, yeah,
• 2:16:22
  I'm sure he's going to make an appearance again soon.
• 2:16:26
  He's always scheming behind that.
• 2:16:27
  Like I said, we'll get that chaos civil war at some point.
• 2:16:30
  I'm sure that sounds right. But for now, you'll see him on a
• 2:16:33
  lot of table tops because his rules are bullshit.
• 2:16:36
  That's my that's my rule advice for the episode.
• 2:16:40
  We have exactly twice where I've given like gameplay advice on
• 2:16:43
  this podcast. And it's always evaluate a unit
• 2:16:46
  by how quickly it can move because the game is based around
• 2:16:48
  movement. And if you see a Bellacour on
• 2:16:50
  the other side of the table, resign, No, that's a joke.
• 2:16:53
  That's a joke. You shouldn't do that.
• 2:16:55
  It's very rude. But yeah, Bellacour is just very
• 2:16:57
  strong. He's a good, he's a good unit in
• 2:16:59
  the game right now. Bellacour once per game at the
• 2:17:01
  start of any turn, can pick a unit on on the enemy team.
• 2:17:06
  And that can be anything from like a squad of guys to like
• 2:17:09
  your big impressive, like centerpiece person.
• 2:17:12
  And he enacts the plan he set up before the game on them.
• 2:17:16
  And so for the rest of that turn in 10, they try and do anything,
• 2:17:18
  whether it's move or charge or shoot their gun or fight a guy
• 2:17:23
  or like use any special abilities.
• 2:17:25
  Bellacour rolls a dice. And if he gets a four or better,
• 2:17:27
  they don't do that thing because they were caught in Bellacour's
• 2:17:31
  plan 6. Sided dice.
• 2:17:33
  Yeah, Yep. So it's a 5050 and like that's
• 2:17:38
  he's. Like.
• 2:17:39
  Bullshit, right? What the fuck?
• 2:17:40
  It's very thematic. Bellacour caught you in his
• 2:17:42
  trap. But it's so it sucks so bad to
• 2:17:46
  play. Yeah, but tight as.
• 2:17:51
  Hell. Though, right?
• 2:17:52
  It's very cool. Or yeah, if you play with a
• 2:17:56
  Turnus's model, after he dies, at the start of every subsequent
• 2:18:00
  turn, you roll a dice and on a four up he comes back.
• 2:18:03
  Because, yeah, Reborn and Strike of Black Lightning.
• 2:18:06
  Yeah, that's cool. It's very good.
• 2:18:09
  But that's all we've got for you this episode.
• 2:18:13
  Like I said, thank you all for tuning in and listening again.
• 2:18:17
  I know it's been awhile since our last episode with the hiatus
• 2:18:21
  and everything. Take care of your back.
• 2:18:23
  So it sounds. Like it hasn't been awhile since
• 2:18:26
  our last. Episode that's true, that's true
• 2:18:28
  it's. Been a while since our last
• 2:18:30
  episode at this moment in time where we're recording, but by
• 2:18:32
  the time listeners listen to this, the last episode was
• 2:18:35
  probably 2 weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, you'll, you'll
• 2:18:37
  probably be hearing this after the Seraphone episode.
• 2:18:39
  And but yeah, this is the first time we're recording since the
• 2:18:42
  hiatus started. So I just wanted to throw in an
• 2:18:44
  extra like if if you've been hanging out and waiting for us
• 2:18:46
  to come back, listen to this episode.
• 2:18:48
  Huge thank you to all y'all. Like we super appreciate you
• 2:18:50
  listening to us. We're so glad that you you've
• 2:18:52
  stuck around through our being absent and we're super excited
• 2:18:56
  to have more episodes coming for you again very soon.
• 2:18:59
  But until then, until the moon comes back around again, I have
• 2:19:02
  been your shadow in the Earth, the Dalton Montgomery, and I'm.
• 2:19:05
  Darren Smart and you can call me or beat me if you want to reach
• 2:19:07
  me, but you should probably just message the Instagram and talk
• 2:19:10
  to Dalton. We'll see you next time.
• 2:19:13
  Bye.