Sanctus Reach - The Red WAAAGH!

Warhammer 40k Lore to Sleep To

This episode chronicles the devastating invasion of the Sanctament Reach by the Red WAAAGH!, led initially by the brutal Warboss Grukk Face-rippa. The

Key takeaways

• The Obsidian Glaive Space Marine Chapter was effectively annihilated during the initial defense of Absteria.
• Warboss Grukk Face-rippa's fleet, including the flagship Wrath of Gork, utilized blood-stained hulls to signify the 'Red WAAAGH!'.
• Castellan Jacryn Stine implemented 'Stein's Anvil' at the Boiling River to funnel orc forces into killing zones.
• The ancient knight Garantius emerged from Sacred Mountain to provide much-needed support to the Imperial defenders.
• Big Mek Maulgrok utilized a tractor weapon to redirect the Frozen Comet toward Alaric Prime, causing catastrophic structural damage.

Main topics

• The Red WAAAGH! Invasion
• The Fall of Absteria
• The Defense of Alaric Prime

Notable quotes

Red vehicles went faster.

Conclusion

A gripping saga demonstrating that while overwhelming numbers can shat

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Obsturia was a world of black stone and radiation. Solar flares from Sanctus, the star at the heart of the Reach, regularly battered its surface. Its barren crust was heartily welcoming, even by the standards of the Imperium. But the world possessed one distinction that made it considerably more important than its appearance suggested. Sleep well, and enjoy part one of the war for Sanctus Reach. But before we continue, I just wanted to briefly direct you towards another project of mine. If you enjoy the atmosphere here, I think you'll really enjoy my Sleepy Scriptorium channel, where instead of 40k, Elder Scrolls, or Trench Crusade lore, it's non-fiction history. I would love it if you gave it a try and subscribe over there. I think there will be something for everyone, from ancient Egypt to wide earth, Robert the Bruce to the Kamakura period, and Vikings to World War II. I'll put the link in the description and comments below. I appreciate you all. Now back to your regularly scheduled sleep content. Obsteria was the home of the Obsidian Glaive Space Marine Chapter. And when Wah-Gruk came crashing into the Sanctus Reach, Absteria was the first world to stand directly in its path. The Obsidian Glaives mobilized the majority of their chapter against the invasion. Hundreds of thousands of orcs were killed after making planetfall. For almost any other invading army, losses on that scale might have represented catastrophe. Speaker 1 (1:55) But for an orc war, they barely qualified as discouragement. Millions of more greenskins descended upon Absteria every day. The defenders killed them by the hundred thousand, but the war replaced them by the million. Eventually, there were no obsidian glaives left to continue the exchange. This was how Grok Face Ripper entered the Sanctus Reach. Not with a carefully constructed campaign plan, or a grand political objective, or some ideological crusade. Wa-Grak was an enormous migration of violence, a teeming fleet of orcs smashing its way across the system because its leader had developed precisely the sort of reputation that made other orcs want to follow him. Grock himself stood nearly ten feet tall, an enormous mass of scarred muscle with a temper that required very little encouragement. As a younger orc, he had seized command of his tribe by killing its previous warboss, Krug the Tyrant. Speaker 1 (3:16) Leadership disputes were hardly unusual among orcs. The particular brutality with which Grock ended this one was enough to earn him the name by which he would become famous. Face Ripper. It was not an especially metaphorical title. Grock carried an enormous power claw fitted with a crude buzzsaw. and he had apparently considered the nickname less an embarrassing incident from his youth than a professional obligation at the slaughter of black gulch he tore open a malfunctioning space marine drop pod and killed all ten warriors trapped inside A subsequent revenge strike managed to badly wound him, covering his body in thick scars, but failed in the considerably more important task of actually killing him. If anything, surviving only made the legend larger. Grook possessed the kind of absolute self-confidence that works particularly well when attached to an orc large enough to murder anyone inclined to challenge it. He had led his own charges regardless of the odds and made examples of subordinates who questioned him. His followers claimed that he had never lost a fight. Whether every part of that reputation was true mattered somewhat less than the fact that other orcs believed it. Among the greenskins, success attracts more success. A warboss who wins battles draws warriors eager to join the next one. More warriors means larger victories. Larger victories attract still more orcs, and so what began as the rise of one particularly violent chieftain can become something capable of consuming worlds. By the time Grokk reached Sanctus Reach, that process was already well underway. At the center of his growing armada lumbered the Wrath of Gork. Calling it a spacecraft perhaps gives the wrong impression of deliberate engineering. It was a gigantic mass of scrap metal, subsequently reinforced with enormous slabs of obsidian ripped from the crust of the world whose defenders Grock had just exterminated. Even the name eventually attached to the invasion came from a distinctly orcish combination of superstition, practicality, and gratuitous violence. Grok had at some point been informed of an ancient orc wisdom that red vehicles went faster. Speaker 1 (6:17) Unfortunately, acquiring enough actual red paint required bartering, and Grokk regarded time spent bartering as time that could instead be spent killing someone. His followers arrived at an alternative. After battle, the orcs smeared their vessels with the still bleeding remains of their enemies. Thus, the enormous fleet following Grok through the stars became coated in gore as its victories accumulated, and the campaign carving its way across Sanctus Reach acquired a fitting name, the Red Wa. Obsturia had demonstrated what happened when a world tried to stop it by force. The Hive World, Ghoul Jensen, demonstrated what happened when one tried to save only part of itself. The Hive world was home to more than 200 billion people. Faced with the approaching war, its planetary governor ordered the local defense forces to abandon their wider responsibilities and concentrate upon his own capital, Hive Jensen. Speaker 1 (7:33) The order worked, technically. The capital survived for three days longer than the rest of the planet. By then, everything outside it had already been ransacked. Elsewhere, there was not always even a battle to record. At the rogue trading post of Maligai Morka, merchants with sufficiently good connections received enough warning to flee before the greenskins arrived. Grux warriors found nobody worth fighting and simply stripped the abandoned world bare. Squire's Rest had suffered orc raids even before the main fleet arrived. Crude vessels bearing the jolly orc symbol striking the otherwise peaceful agri-world. Imperial observers suspected that these raiders had been the outriders of Grux Wa. The first scattered indication that something much larger was following behind them. World by world, the pattern became difficult to ignore. The Red Wa was not raiding Sanctus Reach. It was moving through it. And directly ahead of it lay a Loric Prime. Speaker 1 (8:53) Alaric was no ordinary imperial world. More than 400 million people lived there, scattered across a planet ruled by ancient noble houses whose warriors piloted imperial knights. These towering war machines had defended Alaric for generations, and now their rulers were preparing for warfare on a scale none of them had ever witnessed. Speaker 1 (9:20) Imperial reinforcements were already on their way. The Lords of Alaric, however, were not convinced that they would arrive in sufficient numbers, or in time. That fear was not unreasonable. Somewhere behind them was Absteria, where a space marine chapter had thrown nearly everything it possessed into the path of the Wall and vanished beneath it. There was Gul Jensen, where 200 billion Imperial citizens had discovered how little three additional days could mean. There were stripped worlds, shattered settlements, and an orc fleet whose flagship now carried pieces of a dead chapter's homeworld bolted directly onto its hull. And at the center of that fleet was Grok Face Ripper. Every victory brought him more warriors. Every enemy strong enough to resist him promised a better fight. Lark Prime was gathering its armies, fortifying its cities, awakening its knights, and calling desperately for aid. From the Imperial perspective, these preparations were necessary for survival. From Grock's perspective, they were an advertisement. The greatest fight in Sanctus Reach was waiting for him. The Red War was coming to collect. The first warning came in the middle of the night. On the vernal equinox of 998 M41, the twin astropaths of House Kestrin awoke from the same nightmare. Both had seen something coming. Both had heard a billion bestial voices joined together in a single, endless war cry, and both began vomiting green ectoplasm. Barefoot and shaking, they ran through the halls of Castle Kestrin to the chambers of their master, Lord Galmort. Their words tumbled over one another as they tried to explain what they had witnessed. Then the seizures worsened and the twins collapsed into fever dreams. But Galmort understood enough. An orc invasion was approaching Alaric Prime. Not a raiding force, not a scattered band of pirates, but a war. Before morning, messenger skulls had been dispatched to every major night house upon the planet. Almost every one of them was ignored. That reaction said quite a bit about Alaric Prime. The world Gruk was approaching was powerful. Its rulers possessed imperial knights, ancient engines of war, capable of carrying a single noble warrior into battle inside of a walking fortress of armor and weaponry. But what Alaric Prime did not possess was unity. Speaker 1 (12:42) Its knightly houses had feuded for generations. Ancient rivalries, political grudges, and the accumulated weight of tradition had produced repeated civil wars across the planet. When House Kestrin warned that an orc war was approaching, most of its rivals did not immediately begin preparing for invasion. They assumed Kestrin was lying. The warning they reasoned might be an attempt to distract competing houses while Galmort increases his own influence. Only one lord took the warning seriously. Neru de Gallion had encountered orcs before. His knight had fought the greenskin pirates raiding Squire's Rest, and he had no illusions about what a much larger force might accomplish. If the Red Wall had been powerful enough to overwhelm the obsidian claves, then the scattered houses of Alarg Prime could not simply assume that their knights would save them. Nehru's own astropath had also gone mad shortly before Kestrin's messenger arrived, and that was confirmation enough for him. at dawn lord de galio gathered his most trusted nobles and proposed something that by the standards of alaric prime bordered on sacrilege they would break into sacred mountain Speaker 1 (14:16) Sacred Mountain was older than the political order surrounding it. The relics inside dated back to the founding of Alaric's nighthouses more than 10,000 years before, and local law expressly forbade breaching its holy ground. Legends claimed that the sealed gates themselves were cursed. Bruce Chamberlain's reminded him of all of this. Neru's answer was essentially that a curse mattered considerably less if everyone was about to be killed by orcs. Across the planet, astropaths were already collapsing into fugue states, tearing at their own skin and speaking of green tides. Even if every night howl somehow put aside centuries of hostility and gathered its strength, Neru did not believe they could defeat Wa-Grak alone. Speaker 1 (15:16) But Sacred Mountain might contain something capable of summoning help. And if it did, they needed it now. That willingness to violate ten thousand years of law was especially remarkable on Alaric Prime, because law was something the planet possessed in almost comical abundance. No law enacted upon Alaric had ever been repealed, and as the centuries accumulated, so had the rules. It was illegal to yawn during daylight hours. It was illegal to speak while a noble was talking within earshot. It was illegal to point at the stars. The result was a society in which roughly two-thirds of the population had at some point been incarcerated or exiled by the justiciars serving the various night houses. Speaker 1 (16:16) Many of Alaric's smaller inhabited islands had consequently become enormous penal colonies, populated as much by victims of obsolete legislation as by actual criminals. Geography had shaped the world almost as strongly as law. Most of Alaric Prime's surface was covered not by ordinary oceans, but by thick sulfuric liquid. Its principal landmass was Sacred Isle, while the surrounding islands belonged to the individual night houses. Among the most powerful of those houses was De Gallio. House De Gallio had built its influence through an old alliance with the Adeptus Mechanicus, but also through something unusually practical for an Alaric and noble family. It could move. Centuries of seafaring had transformed the house from the owner of a single night into the master of several dozen. Its greatest possession was not a castle at all, but Isle de Gallio, a vast fusion-powered structure assembled originally from prison holes and gradually covered over by accumulated soil until it resembled a small artificial landmass. Cities stood upon it, industries operated across it, and when war came, the entire island moved. Its accompanying fleets would bombard an enemy coastline while the island itself closed with the shore. Bridges would extend from mobile landmass, and the Galio's knights would march directly from sea to battlefield. Speaker 1 (18:11) Neru de Galio had therefore spent much of his life ruling