The Legacy of the Thunder Warriors (Warhammer 40,000 & Horus Heresy Lore) 

Guilliman: Historitor I am having an awful day, regale me with some history. Oculus: So here's the time your dad made some guys who were better than you but they all went nuts so he had your nephews secretly murder them. Guilliman: ...

"with no end of test subjects because humanlife was the cheapest of resources " oh man thank goodness the imperium in any way changed on that front

‘Is it dead?’ I asked, sunk to my knees and leaning heavily on the pommel of my sword. The Custodian looked at me and I felt the weighing of judgement in his wary gaze. At length, he nodded. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes. You have my thanks…’ ‘Heruk,’ I said, recognising the pause as an invitation, ‘Dahren Heruk.’ ‘Thunder Legion?’ It was my turn to nod. ‘I thought your kind were all dead.’ ‘We are. Near enough.’ ‘Tagiomalchian. I am in your debt, Dahren Heruk. Terra is in your debt.’ ‘Then I have one favour to ask of you,’ I said, raising my hand to stop Tagiomalchian from sheathing his sword. He looked at me, that impassive mask as unreadable as a statue, but then I saw the slightest nod. As the grip of mortality closed about me, I felt the dream. Smell and taste at first, but then I began to hear the cheers of victory as the Lightning Banner was lifted into the sky. I stood upon the slopes of Mount Ararat, Kabe and Gairok and Vezulah at my side. Reality grew fleeting though I heard the soft clank of Tagiomalchian’s armour as he came to stand behind me, and the scrape of his blade as he brought it aloft. ‘Give me the honoured death,’ I said, and the cheers rose louder. Unity! Unity! Unity! I closed my eyes as tears of joy flowed down my face, and whispered. ‘For Unity…’ And heard the blade fall. "Dreams of Unity" by Nick Kyme

An out of the way touch I really like is that on the White Scars flagship, there were Thunder Armour suits made in honour of them. That sort of understated "I remember you, though the world is unjust" is very 30k. Nothing is in vain. It is bleak, and brutal, and grimdark; but how you live always matters.

The Legio Cataegis is my favorite part of the lore. Supposedly stronger than the best Astartes, unstable, but they believed entirely in the emperor. They were rabid dogs, but loyal to their core. The fact they went berserk around mutation and chaos suggests they might have been fine tuned too well to terminate the emperor's true foes.

Im sure the thunder warriors were given many honours and allowed to retire in peace after achieving victory in the unification wars right? Right?

Unification War content is always very welcome. I honestly wish we'd learn more about pre-unification Terra than whatever random chapter they're trying to push on a given day.

Bit random but one of my favorite bits of in-character quirks about Oculus is the emphasis of the words "He" and "His" when speaking of the Emperor. It's like a verbal representation of the capital H in the Emperor's pronouns.

That ending about them being fundamentally human is beautiful

Interesting point Arik Taranis holds no ill will towards the emperor for whatever happened neither does another survivor: Dahren Heruk who still considers himself loyal to the Emperor. Endryd Haar also stayed loyal to the emperor if we are to believe that he really is a thunder warrior.

There's nothing like the little serotonin boost I get upon hearing that opening chime of our favorite Historator's cogitator booting up. Each record is a masterclass of eloquent storytelling and incredible voice acting, and does great honor to our most holy Emperor.

I think there are still a few Thunder Warriors out there in the galaxy somewhere other than Trazyn's collection. I hope they aren't all soured to the Imperium though.

Gather ‘round, children. Another tale unfolds. For The Oculus!

The Thunder Warriors are just so cool! Great characters. For me the World Eaters are the closest Astartes we had to the Thunder Warriors. No wonder they’re my favourite legion. Great video. Thanks for uploading.

I have similar issues with the handling of the Thunder Warriors as the handling of Angrons rebels both in universe and just in general storytelling, objectively useful if dangerous assets that are recklessly discarded in the most callous sense and men who deserved far better than what they received causing obvious and avoidable problems down the line by any objective measure. Even if they are rapidly destabilizing you could do as they do with Eversor assassins, leave them in cold storage until the need arises and unleash them upon an enemy or even at least offer them the choice to be given a merciful death at the end of unity, be contained in cryo until the Emperor calls upon them or seek exile among the stars. Imagine the Emperor unleashing a demi legion of Thunder Warriors into the Siege of the Imperial Palace straight into the traitor lines. Loyalty is a two way street and while the Emperor should not be perfect, he too often waxes from unreasonable callousness to outright self destructive foolishness.

The True Heroes of the Unification Wars! Them, the Custodes, and the Exertus Imperialis were the real army of the Emperor, the ones who unified Terra in his name. The Thunder Warriors were heroes, even when cut down to the last by those they trusted. May their sacrifice be not forgotten, nor left in vain. We must crush the alien, purge the mutant, and cleanse the taint of Chaos. Not for us, but for them. For the Thunder Warriors. Ave Imperium! For the Emperor! For the Heroes of the Unification Wars!

Transmission received, praise be to the Omnissiah and the Emperor alike.

A Unification Wars series of books with Chris Wraight and Guy Haley as writers for the Custodes and Emperor. With others allowed to write about the Thunder Warriors and the Unification Wars would be amazing.

The Legio Cataegis is one of the great examples of the harsh moral ambiguity in anything done by the Emperor, how part of you wants to believe that he’s the arch protagonist but you can’t deny the fucked up things he did. Maybe the Thunder Warriors were a brutal necessity to end an era of unimaginable nightmares on Terra, and maybe in the end it wasn’t feasible to allow them to live, but god damn… massacring them at the end of all their hard fought labors was cold.

I was just wondering what 40k thing I wanted to watch, and then this is published! Praise the Emperor, hail Oculus!

We all know Big E just make the Thunder Warriors drink nothing but Brawnado, it got what plants crave!

Mount Ararat was an inside Job 🥺

GW would never do this. But I would love if they made a rule book for the Unification Wars much like the original 1E Rogue Trader rule book. In that it would be a book with some basic lore, factions and rules that expected the players to fill in a lot of the blanks and to bend the rules as needed. I would want them to make very few, possibly no models (heh yeah right) and instead show examples of how you could kitbash various GW kits to make Thunder Warriors, Techno Barbarians, early Imperial Army, Rogue AI and Crazed Chaos Psykers. Granted we can already do this with existing systems and just flavoring stuff differently for the setting, and 3D print artists have made a bunch of Unification Wars inspired models. But having an official book put out, would act as something for everyone to gather around, find each other and help get more people into the idea.

Always loved the idea of the Thunder Warriors, in my own head-cannon I posited that in the final days they weren't so much exterminated as they were so reduced in number as to be utterly combat ineffective as a fighting force again. And in that aftermath the survivors are then split up and deposited in the nascent Legiones Astartes formations, a diamond hard veteran corp to guide, train and be the spear tip in the war to secure the rest of the Solar System. By the time of the Great Crusade proper there's only a handful of them left at all, either isolated warriors, entombed dreadnoughts, senior officers or just total cripples gasping their last in medical confinement as they lose all sanity and physical control. Just a legionnary legend of the bad old days before reason, justice, and civilisation took back its rightful place in the galaxy.

The Biggest Baddest Warriors, I wonder if Trayzan has one? Want to see one fight a Primaris.

I always felt for the Thunder Warriors. The initial tools of the Imperium

Woke up randomly in the middle of the night to find the oculus has blessed US with another lore bit. Also crazy how many patreons Show their continued Support, just goes to Show how greatly we all value your work! May this comment please the holy algorithm

The thunder Warriors deserve so much more attention, they are a massive fav of mine their vulnerability juxtaposed with their brutality is awesome

Hell yeah I love me some Unification Wars!

You know as fucked up as the betrayal at Mount Ararat was, at least the Emperor permitted them to be recorded as the glorious unifiers of Terra who planted the final banner that signaled the end of Unification. In a way their wish to simply be remembered was granted, which is better than Legio II and XI got.

This is honestly a beautiful peice you've created for us. Thank you so much for the love and attention you put into your craft.

Uwoma Kanadwire and her patronage of the Thunder Warriors is only a footnote in Imperium prehistory, but their failed coup has always loomed melancholically in my mind. She was one humanitarian dissenter of the corrupt court, rallying the ragtag discarded soldiers against the traitorous regime. 40k is not a setting where righteousness prevails against overwhelming odds. The extermination of the Thunder Warriors, the expulsion of Kanadwire... they weren't the most important heroes the Imperium ever defeated, but they were the first.

Oculus, you KILLIN' it consistently lately

I enjoy all your videos of the Unification Wars. It is such an interesting era because the Imperium was in its infancy, and their means were very humble or on par with their enemies at the time. Also, it is the foundation of so many cornerstones things that will follow during the Great Crusade.

Did the thunder warriors ever fight in the thunderdome?

You call down the Thunder Warriors, I will bring up the Whirlwinds.

there's a world eater who's mentioned as being big for an astarties and who claims to have been with the imperium since before the war hounds were a thing at all. While it is possible that that world eater simply predated the primarch project (I think letoo is a confirmed example of that, however you spell his name) he may also have been an attempt at upgrading a thunder warrior for use alongside the astarties. We know that astarties geneseed can be used to stabilize a thunder warrior as a few of the escaped thunder warriors have figured out how to do such a thing. An official process isn't outside the realm of possibility. It's possible that the process was very selective or was very expensive but there was clearly some bottleneck that prevented deployment and culling was chosen as a superior option than upgrading. Unless GW makes my dreams true and after the conclusion of the heresy series starts a unification wars series I suppose we may never know. If I can continue to theorize further though, there are a few characters who are "false astarties" Namely folks like luther who were augmented later in life to roughly astarties level and I feel that this may have been a result of an augmentation somewhat like that of a thunder warrior (although likely tempered significantly to produce more stable results) with geneseed and cybernetics used to stabilize them. Whatever barrier the thunder warrior upgrade process, and by extention the false astarties process may have had it would be likely that a primarch would easily be able to command the resources to have it performed in limited numbers to uplift their closest friends upon their reunification with the imperium. I also suspect that some of the thunder warrior creation process was used as the groundwork for the raptor project and for the primaris rubicon. In the case of the raptor project being able to quickly take an adult soldier and upgrade them to astarties level would be an excellent way to bolster the raven guard's numbers and the issues were likely a matter of stability and expediency. And the rubicon also is a case of ascension that takes place after adulthood is reached. I doubt any of this will ever be touched upon in detail but it at least seems reasonable to suspect that the emperor's genework was sophisticated enough to serve as a base for future development regardless of how the results of their use under pressure were at the time of their initial development. After all the earliest of the emperor's soldiers were the custodies and they were certainly not crude so there really is no reason to think the technology of the thunder warriors or the raven project was crude either, only that it was used under non-optimal circumstances and for crude ends.

Oculus, I treasure your videos like no other channel on this platform. I do have a request, that one of your next videos be an exploration of Tactical Dreadnought armor. Learning about it and its capabilities was largely responsible for my current fascination with Warhammer, and the technology of the Imperium of Man. It was also the field-testing of my favorite legion, the Iron Hands, that was greatly instrumental in its development and tactical applications. Sadly, there are few that have covered tactical Dreadnought armor, and none to the degree of professionalism and immersion that you put into each and every piece of content on your channel. A video about Terminator armor would be BEYOND excellent, a video to which I would refer all those curious about it. I’ve shared your channel with everyone I know who shows even a passing interest in Warhammer. Your input on tactical Dreadnought armor would be the last piece in the puzzle for me. I wish you nothing but the best, Oculus.

They gave Him the world. He gave them betrayal. Is it any wonder the traitor Primarchs felt that they too would be cast aside?

All hail the Lore Master

Fantastic. Huge fan of the Thunder Warrior lore; thank you!

ive been following since octo started out and he never ceases to astound me with his quality ,my favourite lore master by a country mile, proud to be a fellow Irishman

Just while I was painting some Votann I see this! Perfect channel to listen to while painting:D

Somehow these just keep getting better and better. Excellently, expertly done.

The Thunder Warriors deserved better.

"There is nothing more that he can take from me..."

There's a rumor that the warhounds captured a thunder warrior and into a space marine, but what do you guys think?

Can you believe it! Just two days from retirement.

Just wanna say big and clearly how much I appreciate what you do and how awesome you are at it. Gathering lore, making a manuscript and the voice acting that is extremely superb. Have recently listened to your first and earliest works (which I do enjoy!) and just wanna say that you have evolved and come a long way since then and the effort you put in really shows.

I feel like if the emperor had just gathered the LC, and been like “My warriors, the time of your need is at an end, and in respect to spare you the degeneration of your bodies and minds, I wish to allow you to choose the method of your passing” they would have gone along, and the massacre wouldn’t have been needed.

So does anyone else think that it's strange that the thunder warriors never pop up again. I get that GW wants the space Marines to be top dog, so that's why we don't see them. But lore wise why did the Emperor never try making even a handful more during the heresy. In the current times they could still be useful, not only do the high lords want their own super soldiers to counter the space Marines. Further more I could easily see a group of a hundred or so storm troopers volunteer for the changes needed just so that they could die fighting overwhelming odds against orks or nids. Not like it would be that different from what people do in 40k all the time.

Astartes: "Forgive us...but we are far more genetically stable than you." Thunder Warrior: "Which legion are you?" Astartes: "The Fifteenth." Thunder Warrior: "YOU GOT TO BE F***IN' KIDDING ME!!!!??"

Undergoing genetic enhancement with the knowledge it was imperfect at best, knowing a terrible fate of painful death by genetic catastrophe, yet still doing it, hoping to die heroically in battle on the faith that Terra will be unified and generations to come long after you are gone will reap the rewards of your sacrifice. Yeah, more human than a human.

Great Video man as usuall

commenth for the commenthgod

Ah, the Thunder Warriors. Seen as no more than tools by their Father, and thrown away like garbage when they weren't useful anymore. The same would have happened to the Astartes! Death to the False Emperor!

Love the work. Though the one thing I don't understand about the thousands of years of pre-unification Terra, is how huge populations could exist for any length of time. This also applies to Hive Cities with Billions of People- People are Resource-Intensive. If you don't have a viable Biosphere any more, where people can farm the vast majority of what they need (always to be desired), if your entire city or world and its environs are toxic, death-dealing environments, then how in the bloody hell do you provide for such enormous masses? I know GW kind of phones it in with the appalling concept of 'Corpse Starch' to fill in the gaps, but even if you *Could* create human remains that aren't ultimately toxic to humans (a very debatable point), using people to feed people will ALWAYS be a losing game. Basic physical laws insure it. Actually, the only time I saw this accounted for in any fashion in fiction, was in Jim Starlin's, "The Metamorphosis Odyssey", where one of the characters, Xan, came from a barren Moonlike world where his race was the only lifeform that existed, and that only because of a strange crystaline growth that allowed his race to grow and breed faster than they could eat each other. A truly hellish existence. Interestingly, Xan got above this by actually eating the Crystal *Directly* and discovered that it both satisfied all his nutritional needs and made him effectively Super-Powered, compared to his fellows. (The odds of thousands of generations going by with no one ELSE trying this, is not explained.)

I couldn't have clicked on anything as fast as this! Also; please narrate the story of "The tempestus Galleries" .....it got me BACK into 40k.

I get home from work. I see a new Oculus video. Life is good.

someone should write a story where the generals of the thunder warriors put forward the battle on the mountain final stand idea. they knew how their men were becoming uncontrollable. and they wanted to be remembered as heroes, not villains.

Thunder Warriors. Heresy in high volumes to follow for sure. Be careful Oculus. The Emperor's eyes are still watching.

Beautiful narration as always. I often use these to fall asleep, it’s so soothing. Though that intro gave me existential dread.

Can you do a video on Ordo Reductors?

Dare I actually say... you... you turned down the beeps in the intro! the volume is no longer deafening!

Gonna let it play a bit for the mighty algorithm and let it keep me company for my 4 am sunday morning. For tzeentch! (Coughs) i mean for the empire.

Nothing happened at Ararat. The Thunder Warriors all died on campaign. Stop asking questions.

The Thunder Legions Scribe, merely started the legacy the Astartes Legions took out into the stars for The Emperor and Mankind. The Primaris will finish it. In His name.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only the Oculus Imperia

Built to kill, born with death in mind, some even loyal after the backstabbing, truly the finest start for a army of man

Thank you for giving tomorrow a meaning. Can't wait to watch this and work on my 30 Wolf Guard Termie project.

I've always loved the idea that, as the augmented super soldiers of the Imperium became advanced, their power coming closer and closer to that of the Emperor, each successive iteration lost more of its Humanity and ability to understand us. This continues through the Primarchs all the way to the Emperor himself, who simply appears incapable of understanding the thoughts and reasoning of anything below his godhood. Even his own children were just numbers on a spreadsheet to his mind.

Weaponize my genome harder you techno-barbarian warlord!

Welcome back! Hope you had a good break. I’m looking forward to another year of awesome vids like this 👍🏼

Now I’m curious that it’s speculated that a primarch from the 11th I think, is imprisoned underneath the palace. What if it’s not a Primarch of the legio astartes but a primarch of the thunder warriors in stasis, could that be possible?

Amazing video as always keep up the good work it's all spectacular And a good listen

I wonder if dietary issues ever caused thunder runs...

"...the squat kin of the Votann." I see what you did there

"able to naught but tear at itself in lunatic terror.." I l do love your turns of phrase..

But but but, they all died to a man on mount ararat

How long do you think the unification wars lasted?

I love you for this! My life was in the toilet til I saw this! Excelsior Imperator.

Can you make a video about the Elysian drop troops? Great work, bitte more!

The thunder warriors!! Hell yeah!! Thank you lord Bal 😤🤌🤌🤌😎

Loved this! Another wonderful entry!

Ah yes the Thunder Warriors a crude and brutal tool for a crude and brutal time. They were right tool for the task at hand. And were ill suited to the task after the one they were made for.

oh man I was just looking for something to listen to

Welcome To The Unification Wars.

Unification and early 40k lore is the most interesting facet of the hobby for me. And the implications of the Votaan reintroducing Dark Age of Technology tech into the current game will hopefully provoke more insights and lore vids. Great video, I'd watch more of this.

Can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. The Emperor knew this.

I haven't been here this early since Valdor vibe-checked the Thunder Primarchs into early retirement.

You create some of the best Warhammer 40K content out there. When I think I understand some aspect of the lore, your videos come and make me feel like I understand them better, their essence, their point. Please keep it up with this quality. You’re amazing

Always love hearing about the Legio Cataegis.

Hell yeah! More quality top tier content!

4 hours since release, and almost 7K views! Oculus Imperia's content is in high demand.

Your content is awesome

Sweet zombie Omnissiah!

I've had a shit day, and this is exactly what I needed. Thank you

Hurrah!

The Thunder Warriors should have been put into stasis. Due to their power and zealousness for the Emperor, Thunder Warriors could have been used as suicidal shock troopers. Such a practice would have likely eliminated the Thunder Warriors during the Great Crusade. Thus, eliminating the need for the Emperor to betray them.

Oculus, I would love to see a breakdown of the various classes of vessels used by the imperium. Like the Gloriana class behemoths.