40k Lore, The Unification Wars

[Music] greetings and salutations friends and welcome back to more warhammer 40k lore or to be more precise this is going to be 30k lore it's a time that we start establishing some of the 30k universe and the natural place to start would of course be the unification wars originally i had some ideas around doing a lore video based entirely on the events of old night and the golden age of technology that went before it now known as the dark age of technology but we have so little information that can be relied upon about that particular period that i'll probably work that into a larger lore video on the emperor himself as he was most certainly bumping around even back then and in fact the reason why i'm doing this video is because i started writing the video about the emperor and realized there's about a dozen subjects i have to cover before i can actually talk about the big e himself so the unification wars what were they and perhaps equally importantly which lore will i be using because this is a bit of an oddity you see before we had the horus heresy series we had very very little information about 30k virtually nothing in all the honesty the emperor was some amalgamation of dead human psyches or shamans because back then psyches were not yet a quantified fact so the lord then stating that there were supposedly thousands of them in old earth yet we have a very little to no knowledge of them in fact psyches weren't really a known entity within human empire the early human empire that is what was known as the early human federation of planets wasn't even confirmed to be a thing before the 20th millennia so there's a lot of self-contradictory stuff in the old lore specifically because it was the old lore it was very very slapdash as it was essentially just thrown together to be a mysterious backstory to the 41st millennium rather than its own history so i will mostly be using lore drawn from the various horus heresy books which is far from complete because well there's another six or seven years left until the horus heresy series is done but i don't have the [ __ ] patience for that and there are a few other lore inconsistencies that we will be running into when it comes to 30k lore like the primarks for example but they'll get their own video soon enough i hope at least sometimes in the next three years at the very least sometimes during that time period but i'll pick up on those various inconsistencies when i get to them and explain my reasoning behind it so let's get back to the point of this video though the unification wars now you might think that the unification wars would be the name of the emperor's campaign to unify terror this is in part true but the unification war period is a far lengthier period than the emperor's own campaigns you can kind of break them into two there's the age of strife which is everything from the collapse of the old human federation up until the emperor taking power that being then the era of the great crusades and the unification wars the unification wars took place somewhere between 27th millennium to 30th millennium whereas the age of strife started somewhere around the 25th millennium and again lasted up until the emperor took control sometime in the 31st millennium essentially the age of strife involves the entirety of the ex-human federation when it collapsed in upon itself due to various reasons at the beginning of the 25th millennium whereas the unification wars refer specifically to the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of armed conflicts that ravaged old terror up until the emperor and his army of pet genetic monstrosities known as thunder warriors rolled out of hiding and subjugated everybody before that though terror was divided into dozens of warring states some of which were based on more or less the historical states we know today like for example germany was a j were based round about the area that modern-day germany is in the united states of america america is also well in america and so on some of these states we have a fair bit of information on from the old law and the horus heresy books some we have virtually no information on and some a handful we actually have fairly extensive knowledge about usually from the horus heritage books taking place on old terror or earth usually from the perspective of the legion custodies but until games workshop goes out and releases a full-on source book for the various factions and nations that existed back then most of the information we have is a little bit sketchy so take it all with a grain of salt at least until either a the horus heresy series ends and we get a full picture in which case i'll probably go through the entirety of the series once more and see if i find any major inconsistencies or if games workshop starts releasing a series of background source books which i really wish they would i mean just imagine a nice big fat imperial armor sized book just detailing everything about the unification of wars oh yes please get into workshop make it [ __ ] happen until then though the official explanation for why we have solid information about this particular period is that a lot of the knowledge has been lost over the years which considering all of the knowledge lost between 30th millennium to the 41st that is a fairly reasonable excuse and secondly because the imperium did like its good old fashioned propaganda even back then and well if you can simply say that every single other state in all terror was a bunch of techno barbarian savages then that makes the idea of the imperium sound a lot sweeter indeed does it not in fact there is some lovely wording from the official lore that states and i'm quoting here this was a dark period for the people of old earth when they were dominated by brutal rulers and despotic tyrants it was against this a backdrop of oppression violence and casual brutality that the emperor of mankind first revealed himself to the people of terror goebbels would be [ __ ] proud first and foremost it basically says that everyone was oppressed and had it terrible back then and then the emperor came and saved everyone and replaced the old oppressive brutal and violently non-democratic regime with another violently undemocratic oppressive and brutal regime as you can see the two are entirely different i do love a bit of false spin now don't get me wrong i'm not saying that all terror was a bloody rose garden before the coming of the emperor quite on the contrary in fact it was an absolute hell hole with the various tribes and nation states fighting tooth nail claw nuclear and biological against each other blasting the landscape with radiation various poisons and generally being a right proper bunch of douchebags to the civilian population and the emperor taking over the entirety of the planet improved most people's lives if for no other reason than the simple fact that they no longer had nukes dropped on their heads at regular intervals because of course it wasn't enough that the world was now populated entirely by various barbarian states that primarily conducted their diplomacy at the end of heavy blunt objects they also had access to all kinds of very very powerful technology from the golden age of tekkor as it was now known the dark age of technology including as i mentioned chemical and biological weapons along with nuclear weapons and other things like automatic weapons plasma guns heavy artillery etc you know the kind of [ __ ] that makes battles a little bit more interesting for those involved in it and as an added bonus the bigger the bang the better the chance of getting in some bonus points with some collateral damage say what you will about earth's dark ages at least back then we were firing at each other with trebuchets and catapults at the worst and maybe some severed cow heads the reunification wars were pretty much like that when it came to brutality and savagery except there were way more people around therefore way more people to kill and they were lugging around stuff like plasma guns flamethrowers tactical nukes tactical bombers heavy artillery tanks etc and due to this rather peculiar mix of extreme savagery brutalism and highly technological firepower the various states nations confederations or even individual city-states etc were all known as techno barbarians however it does seem relatively likely the one that came up with the common name of techno barbarians was someone in the emperor's employ seeing as it is a wonderful name to kind of sweepingly generalize all of the other nations as barbarians as savages you know as we will come to see a bit later some of these nation states were actually fairly organized and were relatively civilized or at least as civilized as you can get when you are surrounded on all sides by enemies because there were plenty of proper techno barbarians as well nation states that gave pretty much no [ __ ] whatsoever in anything except their own interests and well those interests usually involved a murder [ __ ] the [ __ ] out of anything that got within a hundred yards so let's take a look at some of these various techno barbarian states shall we starting with the acumenid empire of south west asia this miniature empire was located round about the area of where persia would have been in our old history and was not so much a single nation state as it was a loose confederacy of various wealthy tribes most of these tribes very early on made the fairly wise decision to not fight the big ass [ __ ] in the golden plate armor leading an army of superhumans and rather decided to align themselves with the rising empire of man early on in the empress conquests thereby avoiding the unpleasantness of getting invaded by an army of batshit insane thunder warriors as an added bonus this area had gotten out of the unification awards relatively unscathed which is a bit of an irony considering the hotbed of conflict it has been for pretty much as long as there has been humans in our own history in the unification awards it avoided the majority of the conflicts leaving the people there unscarred by various nuclear and biological warfare methods which meant that many of the people living in this area were of a purer human genome than various other races who had been contaminated by biological or chemical or nuclear warfare this relative purity made them excellent candidates for recruitment into the adopters astati's legion after the unification awards then we have alabia or albanian sometimes called old albia now this one is a little bit of an interesting one because it says that it was located somewhere near the borders of the northern atlan which is the name for the northern atlantic ocean which at this point had essentially entirely dried up during the various nuclear wars and stuff had vaporized most of the water which is a little bit odd because it is known mostly for its various border skirmishes and grievances with the pan-pacific empire which assuming these guys are indeed bordering the northern atlantic that would put them on the opposite side of the world essentially from the pan pacific empire which was naturally located in and around the pacific around japan korea and australia in that area it is possible that they might have been around the region of panama for example but even that feels like a little bit of a stretch but possibly regardless this particular nation was actually an ally of the imperium of man for quite some time while they were both fighting the pan-pacific empire eventually however time came for the emperor to take over alabia as well and the people there were not too keen at bending a knee even to this uh former ally and the people of alibia had been able to keep hold of quite a lot of technology from old night and were able to face the thunder warriors in the field with their own power armored troops as well as proto-dreadnoughts and all manners of nazis the war ground on with no clear victor in sight until the emperor used some of his diplomatic know-how to call a bit of a pow-wow with the various leaders of albia once they met the emperor face to face he somehow managed to convince them that he was not like the tyrants of previous ages and after that they quite happily subjected themselves to his rule impressed by their warrior spirit the emperor forgave them and let them join the empire without any further bloodshed this proved to be a wise move as the people of albia became staunch supporters of the empire and provided much of the initial recruiting stock for the 14th legion astartes then known as the dusk raiders later known as the death guard then we have albion not to be confused with the recent albia albion was well the british isles as the name kind of suggests we have less information about this area all we really know is that the emperor invaded it to overthrow the tyrannical rule of uliam the red a rather fanciful fella that had a nasty habit of eating his subjects and drinking their blood he was thrown into the rather considerably sized imperial dungeon of kangaba marvux in the himalayas a massive prison complex built specifically to house the more problematic inhabitants of the burgeoning imperium something like you know especially powerful psyches crazy dictators or later on adept as astartes but the emperor wasn't always a hard ass in fact he could be downright reasonable and even somewhat gentle as long as it didn't cost him anything the nation of boeshia is a wonderful example of this this was a relatively wealthy and relatively small area with a heavy concentration of industry blasia had for a very long period of time already recognized the imperium's supremacy or the terror essentially for the last 150 odd years they had said yeah we're going to join the imperium but we need to check out some things first you know i need to run this by my accountant i need to ask my wife why our wife is out at the moment he has a headache can't ask her now maybe next week oh and by the way i have to ask my plumber and my rabbi and blabber dear blah blah for 150 [ __ ] years until finally the emperor got sick of this nonsense invaded the place with the imperial army and the thousand-sun space marine legion which crushed the rebellious state in a matter of days not big e's fault naturally he had been a very very patient demigod but you can only push the embodiment of humanity so long before he starts getting a bit impatient and when the emperor gets impatient jets get real dangerous real fast such leniency was not always possible although the emperor tried to convince most of the people of terror to join him through diplomatic means if for no other reason than it was a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to talk someone into joining you rather than invading them with a very large and relatively expensive army of thunder warriors and the emperor was a pretty damn good propagandist as well he managed to overthrow several smaller nations simply just by his image as the savior of humanity one of the nations overthrown and later integrated into the imperium in this manner was the indonesia block located somewhere around the area of modern day indonesia this particular area of terror was ran by a tyrannical ethanol the head of a rather fascinating little church who had figured that humanity's woes all came down to technology we were a little bit too much of an upstart species we had to limit our technological pursuits and seek back to a more pure age this would be achieved by first and foremost taking care of all of that pesky technology preferably by burning it and anyone who invented it as such scientists and mathematicians were burned on massive bonfires right alongside their theories and their machines the tyrant atronach also sought to purify the human species by forced breeding programs where only those suitable were allowed to have children and those people judged to be undesirable were either sterilized if the local government was feeling particularly kind and generous that particular day or just flat out murdered if they felt a little bit more aggressive unsurprisingly this tyrannical regime was not particularly popular amongst the peasantry and they revolted against the administration and rejoined the empire after disposing of the tyrannical despot through a remarkable show of self-constraint the tyrant was not outright murdered by the hordes of people banging at his door and was indeed sent to a prison colony where well it didn't take long before the prisoners found out who he was and ripped in peace from peace but still pretty damn remarkable act of um restraint not simply of murdered him in the first place it would take quite a while yet before the indonesia block was fully integrated into the burgeoning imperium of man but from this point onwards they were essentially a staunch ally of the emperor but of course not all conquests would prove quite this simple one of the examples of this for a less than entirely obvious reason was ursh now ursh was the largest and most powerful of the techno barbarian empires on terror before the emperor started showing some muscle it consisted of pretty much all of modern day russia along with considerable parts of asia and possibly parts of china now ursh was not as technologically advanced as many other of the nations around at the time but it was absolutely gargantuan and had a massive population available to it it is important to remember that back at this time hive cities were quite common already on terror they would become a hell of a lot more common over the course of the imperium's growth but already billions upon billions upon billions of people would call these hive cities home and while at first it might seem that this would be a fairly natural thing for them to do to resist the imperium i mean however it's not just the simple fact that this was a large empire and therefore would be rather unwilling to bend the knee to some upstart emperor there are also fairly significant hints suggesting that ursh was if not entirely under the direct control of the forces of the ruinous powers then at the very least the leaders of ursh were heavily influenced by the war they were amongst other things known to use what the chronicles of ursh called magic which in all due likelihood was the psychic powers of various powerful psyches in fact the people of urush themselves referred to these powerful psyches as wrath singers the question all due reality then becomes were they simply just using the warp as many other nations would have done as a form of sorcery essentially the human population would be using the warp and considering it to be magic basically they would not understand from whence it came they would certainly not understand what or who the ruinous powers were because they had no idea that they were using chaos powers as far as they were concerned their abilities were simply just magical or did the people of ursh know a little bit more about where this power came from well seeing as the emperor did not wipe the people of urge off the map we can relatively surely assume that the people themselves were at the very least not directly worshiping the ruinous powers it is unclear whether or not the higher echelons of ursh command were however all of us leadership were warlords of one stripe or another you simply could not rise to the top of ursian society without being the leader of a reputable war band since it was a very very brutal society that valued strength and brutality above pretty much anything now this does sound like a society that corn would most definitely approve of but again there are no signs of overt chaos corruption we're not talking about mutated people here with horns or anything but then again the powers of chaos were at a relatively low ebb during this period of history so it is entirely possible that the people of ursh were affected by the chaotic deities but not in such a way that it was immediately visible shall we say not overtly affected they were just beginning to be slowly affected by the powers of chaos which might also explain why the extremely relatively speaking peaceful nation of decided to declare war on not just anyone like the pan pacific empire but one of their closest trading partners the north africa conclaves which seems like a highly irrational decision but it would definitely be something that someone influenced by corn would think of doing again we can't be entirely sure either way but seeing as the nation of ursh was invaded by the empire and they didn't wipe out every single last man woman and child we can be fairly certain that if there were chaos corruption in ursh it was relatively limited and make no mistake the reason why the people of earth were not wiped out were not because the emperor was somehow a little bit of a softy and valued human life oh absolutely not let me tell you the story of the hive city of oreok urryak was a considerably sized hive city located inside a hollowed out glacier located somewhere in the south pole this uh to put it mildly isolated position meant that its people had not suffered anywhere near as much as most during the age of strife and due to this they began to consider themselves to be just a little bit special they considered themselves to be the chosen people protected by an unknown pantheon of gods hailing back to terror's pre-federation times the emperor as we all know at this point was not particularly fond of religion and he couldn't just leave a major hive city like that located there because he had plans for the southern ice caps big plans and they did not involve the people of warioc and what do you send to chastise azalet why an army of super-powered zealots obviously the emperor dispatched the 17th legion then known as the imperial heralds later to be known as the word bearers to pacify the people of oreok with their usual zeal the imperial heralds gave the people of oreok a very simple ultimatum they would bend to the emperor's will or they would all burn the religious leadership of oryok however did not give the imperial heralds a chance to even present their ultimatum as they shot down their transport while it was inbound to the city unsurprisingly the imperial heralds did not take this as a show of good faith and promptly invaded the city oryok being a hive city of course had a fair bit of defenses but it had never been tested the way that many heim cities on terror had as such the defenses were woefully inadequate to stop a proto-legion of adapters astartes small though it may have been at this time it was overwhelming force compared to the defenses of oreok within three hours the city's defenses had all been neutralized the city was essentially in the imperial herald's hands what remained of the civilian population had all been herded into the lower civilian levels and possessed in all the honesty absolutely no threat whatsoever to the adeptus astartes however the imperial heralds had made their ultimatum whether or not it had been heard it was entirely inconsequential once the last of the civilian population was confirmed to have entered the depths of the city the heralds simply blew the city to kingdom come detonating its plasma reactors and flooding what was left of the city in plasma it is impossible to estimate how many people would have lived in this city but it would almost certainly be in the high millions to low billions all murdered in the space of three hours simply because they refused to bend the knee the emperor could be merciful in fact on several occasions he was extremely merciful he was more than willing to explore diplomatic options to resolve the various conflicts of interest that his overall leadership would inevitably create for example as in the case of he brazil a powerful techno barbarian state centered in the area around what is modern day brazil this nation was defeated by the emperor's forces in the field but having a long and proud history hebrasil was allowed to retain some of its independence including its own independent police force and its own army known as the dracos however he was also under absolutely no illusions whatsoever that to rule the entirety of humanity required a stern hand and occasionally a merciless one and the people of urryok and the people of vogneri served excellently as examples of just this as for veneri by the way that is something i'm going to be saving for the nightlords video suffice to say it was a rebellious movement created on old earth after the emperor had left the planet to pursue his goals in the galaxy he understood however that internal strife on terror could not be accepted and as such he resolved the rebellion led by a group calling themselves the crimson walkers by uttering one simple sentence send in the eighth the crimson walker rebellion was quashed by the next morning this all makes the unifications war sound somewhat simple though it's been mostly cakewalks for the imperial forces so far hasn't it well not really the thing is most of these campaigns are fairly low on details in fact we know virtually nothing about most of them as such i can pretty much only tell you the outcome and that inevitably ends an imperial victory because you know they took over the planet and stuff the only campaign we have proper detailed knowledge of is the campaign into the caucasus waste carried out by the 18th legion later to be known as the salamanders and that epic confrontation is going in the salamanders law video suffice to say 20 000 salamanders went in only a thousand came back out again the last battle of the unification wars took place at mount ararat against the techno barbarian state of urartu the technobarbarian forces were heavily fortified all the way up the mountains and during the resulting conflict the last of the emperor's thunder warriors were all slain to a man while reaching the summit the legendary thunder warrior eric taranis known as the lightning bearer was the last man alive that reached the summit and planted the lightning banner on top of mount arat signaling the end of the unification wars with this last heroic action the thunder warriors finally united terror beneath the lightning banner of the emperor or so at least the story goes in reality we now know that the lightning bearer survived the battle and not only did he survive the battle against the urartu he survived the subsequent culling of the thunder warriors you see the thunder warriors were not wiped out by the urartu the last remaining thunder warriors were culled presumably by the legio custodies as they were the only fighting force at the time not only capable of matching the thunder warriors in battle but also that could be relied upon 100 to never again speak of that action the emperor needed to get rid of the thunder warriors as they were never meant to last for as long as they did their genetic makeup was meant to self-destruct except the emperor was too darn good at his job and it didn't go quite the way he had planned on the other hand the thunder warriors were dangerously unstable they were brutish creatures extremely violent creatures they were not the soldiers the emperor needed to conquer and then more importantly pacify and police the galaxy and what's better final use of the thunder warriors than have them all die to the last man in one last glorious actions to buy the very unification that they had sought so long to achieve with the final drop of their blood what warrior culture could ask for a more glorious ending and so the unification wars came to an end even after the unification wars there were still considerable amounts of unrest on holy terror there was many uprisings there were several rebellions but they were never ever again a true threat to the emperor's domain over terror the closest they ever came were the crimson walkers and the eighth took care of them most rebellions were extremely local in nature covering very small parts of terror and usually amounting to no more than 40 50 000 men tops poorly armed and poorly trained militia usually repressed by local imperial army forces without the need to call in the adaptive societies or the legion custodies speaking of the legion custodies they took on their role as guardians of terror both in an outright and overt military capacity and they also served as a form of secret police force hunting down rebellious elements before they were able to organize and euthanizing certain problematic political and religious figures before they could gain any real traction tasks such as these were later on delegated to other various imperial officers like the officio assassinarium and the adept as arbites but for now after several thousand years of near-constant warfare between the various techno-barbarian tribes between various city-states hive cities and nations the planet of terror was finally united underneath one single banner namely that of the emperor the age of strife had passed now we entered into the age of the great crusade and that will have to be a topic for another day until then i have been arch thank you very much for listening and i hope to see you all again soon have a good day

Channel: Arch

Views: 461,588

Keywords: 40k, Lore, Warhammer, The unification wars, 30k, The Emperor, Warhammer 40k

Id: iHJ4pE1DgQA

Length: 33min 59sec (2039 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2016