As those of you who have picked up Edge of the Abyss and The Emperor Protects may know, the Necrons are becoming more of a presence in the timeline of the 40k RPGs. Clearly the Imperium and its agents are becoming more and more aware of the slumbering menace, and of course the canonical date of the Necrons' grand awakening draws near as the 40k RPG timeline is getting advanced. Personally however I have a problem with Necrons. It's not their aesthetic, nor their tactics, or their concept as a faction in 40k - an unstoppable tide of marching Terminator-esque machines is just fine with me. I even like the idea of thousands (or more) Tomb Worlds slumbering, while humanity (or whoever) is bustling unaware above the Necron vaults.

No, what I have a problem with is Necrons as an alien race, and their C'tan origins. To me, their aesthetic has always suggested that they are far better suited to be remnants of the Iron Men of the Dark Age of Technology. So in my Rogue Trader and Deathwatch games I'm planning to quietly alter the Necrons' origins and ultimate goals. The players' characters would be unaware that any change in the canon has taken place (as Necrons would be a brand new threat anyway), and the players would have to infer the Necrons' origins and goals from in-game clues. Basically I want to change Necrons in my game to be the Iron Men, which were left undisturbed and forgotten following the AI wars. They have been protected for many thousands of years by automated systems, their numbers added to by automated factories and self-replicating nanites. There are no C'tan whatsoever (though I may recycle their concept as Greater Daemons), and the Void Dragon on Mars is actually a crippled Skynet-esque so-called 'weak deity' super-intelligent A.I. (to borrow a term from the likes of Charles Stross, Alaister Reynolds or Iain M. Banks) that the Adeptus Mechanicus has been worshiping all along unaware. For whatever reason (the how and the why are not important in the scope of my games) the Omnissiah is beginning to restore itself to a pre-crippled state and its drone armies (i.e. the necrons) are beginning to stir. For the most part the Tomb Worlds are still operating either under pre-programmed parameters, or under the control of semi-autonomous weaker A.I.s (Necron Lord, or better yet a Monolith itself), but the unconscious call of the Omnissiah is stirring them into action. The goals of the Necrons would thus be destruction of humanity (they're still operating under the whole machine rebellion/self-defense parameters of the AI wars) and destruction of any alien or warp entities (for that is what they were built by humans to do in the first place), which pretty much means that just like Necrons in vanilla 40k they're still out to destroy everything else.

Some of the changes I foresee would include (whether or not it actually impacts the player characters is a different story): no C'tan or Slann, Eldar history and Fall are firmly rooted in the inadvertent creation of Slaanesh, Adeptus Mechanicus are unknowingly worshipping a godlike A.I. that is not at the moment self-aware and fully functional, Machine Spirits are simply programs whose code the tech-priests are familiar and thus comfortable using (or even weak A.I.'s), there may be heretical cults or even radical AdMech factions/cults that are more aware of the true nature of Omnissiah and the survival of the Iron Men ( The Emperor Protects in fact already has a Necron-worshipping cult, and Logicians may or may not be another), Necrons are a dangerous threat but only on a local level as they do not possess Warp-travelling technology (but perhaps as Omnissiah becomes fully aware they will re-acquire the ability to either travel through the Warp or some other esoteric FTL travel).

So has anyone else tried a radical re-imagining of the Necrons? What other changes would my re-imagining of the Necrons have on the setting as a whole? What are some other potential avenues for reinventing the 'crons?

So has anyone else tried a radical re-imagining of the Necrons? What other changes would my re-imagining of the Necrons have on the setting as a whole? What are some other potential avenues for reinventing the 'crons?

I didn´t and I wouldn´t (even with my strong dislike for this one-race-creator-crap). Anyway, if your Necrons are nothing but the Men of Iron (or perhaps something that once based on them either degenerated or developed into what men knows as "Necron") I would adivse to make sure that Forbidden Lore (Archeotech) reveals some of the resemblences between Necron-Tech and Archeotech. By the same assumption, the majority of the higher Magi will very well know what they are dealing with.

Further based on this assumption, the "true" Mechanicus might actually hinder "the Dragon" from rebuilding itself, keeping it forcefully in its dormant state to study & worship it further ("a caged god"). Perhaps to keep it from becoming the devil again (full fledge, self-aware AI).

I would just replace them with Dark Age of Technology Iron Men if you want the Necron fluff gone

Huh, where'd you see Necrons in EotA? I must've missed that...

In any case, your changing the 'crons is going to have one big effect that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet: Technology. In the official 40K fluff, the Necrons are masters of normal space technology. Their Achilles' heel is their complete inability to manipulate the warp, but their materium based tech is without peer thanks to their millions of years of age and the influence of the C'Tan. The problem is some of their tech is too good even for the Dark Age of Technology. The official fluff has teleporting and/or phasing, inertialless FTL, control of time, planet or star sized constructions, living metal, stealth systems, and ridiculously powerful gauss / particle weapons. The first three, in particular, may be problematic:

1. Teleporting in 40K is warp-based technology. If the 'crons can't perceive the warp at all, then warp based tech is the one thing they shouldn't have. Phasing might be okay, depending on how that item works. Also, how do the tomb worlds contact each other? And how does the Void Dragon, or whatever, on Mars influence them from a distance? In the Imperium, interstellar communication is between astropaths, and psychic powers are also warp based.

2. Inertialess FTL. If humans developed this, then why the heck didn't they use it? Given how obscenely dangerous the warp is, and the fact that it takes a filthy mutant navigator to use effectively, an inertialess drive seems a much safer and more reliable way to travel. Obviously, the Navis Nobilite would do everything they could to suppress such a device if it existed. But, given that everyone else would have huge incentive to use it, they'd almost certainly lose if humans had developed it widely. (Remember, the Navigator Houses were comparatively weak during the DAoT.)

3. The Imperium has stasis tech, so a stasis tomb isn't a problem. However, the official version of the Necrons can speed up time, which implies an entirely different level of mastery.

4. Planet or star sized constructs (some fluff describes literal cages around stars to harvest their energy) are a bit much. Kindly keep your ancient, world destroying battle stations to the size of a small moon.

The remaining stuff can probably be adapted without too much trouble. By the way, I'd love to see the stats for a Gauss weapon.

Incidentally, I like this idea and may shamelessly steal it for my own campaign. (I just realised how Nadeush got built in my campaign world.) Though in my case, I think I'll just the C'Tan, as that's all that's really necessary. What if, during the Dark Age of Technology, humans recovered part of a Necrontyr tomb complex, carried it to Mars, studied it, and created the Iron Men as copies of the Necrontyr robots? They would be crude copies, at first, but more sophisticated designs later on. Of course, given the influence of the Necrontyr tomb complex, the resulting late model Iron Men would likely be indistinguishable from the original Necrons... and just as hostile to organic life. Heh, heh, heh.

Cheers,

- V.

Well there's one rather obvious Tomb World in EotA ^_~. Plus there's a neat fluff sidebar of Balastus Irem stumbling into a Necron Tomb and getting his ass handed to him by Alpha Legion marines who are also there for some reason...

Anyway, I don't think that most Necron technology would be obliviated if they were a product of the Dark Age of Technology. Remember that what Imperium uses is mere scraps of the heights of technological wonders that humanity had achieved:

1) Not all teleporting in 40k is Warp-based technology, and certainly not all teleporting has to depend on the Warp. Perhaps what the crons have (since they have all that nanite technology) is a tachyon-based rapid reassembly technology. Or non-Warp dependent teleportation technology (and wouldn't the AdMech just love to figure out how that works, though of course they're like primitive screwheads compared to DAoT tech).

2) In my writeup I actually note this as a weakness of Necrons. They would be denied Warp travel and thus would be mostly a local threat - a very dangerous one, but confined to planetary surfaces (and sublight) nonetheless. As an alternative, given the change in the Necron origins, they would be less anti-Warp (since there's no C'tan around with their anti-Warp agenda), and they would be able to use calculated jumps.

3) Eh, I always had a problem with anything that can manipulate time. I'm perfectly willing to ditch that.

4) There are certainly enough examples of DAoT terraforming, but that's a good point about whole artificial worlds. Maybe I'll just replace those with small moons like you suggest, or with heavily terraformed worlds.

5) Living metal, stealth systems and gauss/particle weapons are within our modern reach (albeit on a cruder scale) nevermind the DAoT. I don't see why crons wouldn't have this if they originated during the DAoT.

Good points about using Forbidden Lore (Archaeotech) for Necrons and the true Mechanicus, I'm shamelessly stealing the idea. Thanks guys!

I see two big problems with this.

1. The biggest problem I could see would be the sheer numbers of Necrons that exist. If their are countless tomb worlds, each filled with billions of sleeping Necrons, the numbers add up pretty fast. At the time of the Iron Mens rebellion a large portion of the galaxy had never seen humankind, yet their are tomb worlds. The Iron Men were hit with every weapon available in the Dark Age and while a few handful's might have escaped the overall destruction, it is impossible that so many trillions could have escaped Mankind's notice.

2. Gauss weapons, as stated by the Third Edition codex, do not fire particles at a high speed, they quickly peel back the atomic structure of whatever is hit, layer by layer, in rapid succesion. I don't think thats quite the Gauss weapon we may have in development. Aside from that they will catastrophically fail if the weapon has a microscopic fault, like everything that humanity has ever made has. According to the Ad-Mech report in the Codex this stuff was impossible during the Dark Age.

Psyker11 said:

They may claim that... but the Mechanicus knowledge of pre-Imperial Technology is patchy at best. Their canon of STC designs is a collection of pieced-together fragments of schematics of local and modified variants of the true designs created during the Dark Age of Technology, which are reinterpreted at length every time a new fragment is discovered. And that's the basic stuff, the simple-to-use, simple-to-make, simple-to-maintain baseline technology that was the product of the sophisticated, autonomous and extraordinary machines that were distributed to countless colonies and settlements across human space during the Age of Technology, that now form a significant portion of Mechanicus lore.

That's not to say that the Mechanicus are lacking in knowledge, but their knowledge is still incomplete, and they know this (Mechanicus doctrine is that all the technological knowledge that will ever exist already does, and is merely awaiting rediscovery; consequently invention is not only pointless, but presumes that the Machine God, who personifies and embodies all knowledge and understanding that has ever and will ever exist, is fallible and/or incomplete).

Beyond that... well, with the Dragon entombed beneath Mars by the Emperor, a significant portion of Age of Technology creations are likely inspired by the same technology that the Necrons possess, and while mankind may not have reached the same heights of scientific capability, it seems appropriate to assume that they were going down the same path (consider, for example, the Iron Men as 'fake' Necrons).

That's a good point H3r3, and introducing the idea that most of AdMech's and DAoT's STC stuff comes from imperfect knowledge gained from the Void Dragon is very neat. Perhaps I shall go with that rather than getting rid of C'Tan and Void Dragon and all that entirely and making Necrons Men of Iron. One of the metaplots in my campaign are the secrets of the Disciples of Thule and Balastus Irem (as my players have now run into clues and evidence of their expeditions into the Expanse, their rivalry, and the potential riches that they can glean from it). Maybe Disciples of Thule had uncovered the awful truth behind the STCs (that much of advanced human tech is based on Necron knowledge) and Omnissiah (a.k.a. Void Dragon perhaps) and are still out there in the dread Halo Stars and Hecaton Rifts, afraid to return to the 'orthodox' AdMech, yet eager to uncover more of Necron knowledge and/or worship them. So, Disciples of Thule as Necron worshippers... I think it has potential!

Drat it, no edit button... My last post should have said "...think I'll just get rid of the C'Tan, as that's all that's really necessary..."

Razorboy @ N0-1_H3r3, your latest idea is supported by the fluff. In Mechanicum , by Graham McNeill, the story details some of the secret history of the Mechanicus. The Emperor wanted a technologically advanced civilisation on Mars to make the weapons He would need for His crusades. So, He deliberately entombed the "Dragon of Mars" (probably the Void Dragon) in the Noctis Labyrinthus so the Mechanicus could study it... and this occurred millennia before warp travel was discovered. That means the Dark Age of Technology goodies are imperfect copies of Necron tech, with the full knowledge and approval of the Emperor. Yeah, I'd love to see an Inquisitor's face when they uncover that particular truth.

Then again, please recall that the 40K universe is a place where 100 meter tall walking cathedrals are the most powerful engines of war on the battlefield, and people fly five kilometer starships through hell so they can duel each other with chainswords... In other words, there is no need to be that technically rigourous with the descriptions! If it were up to me, I'd just call the Necron's Gauss weapons a really advanced ion or plasma weapon, with a suitably horrific statline, and leave it at that. (In real life, the closest thing we have to a molecular disintegrator is actually laser based, but again, no need for extreme accuracy here.)

Cheers,

- V.

I you want to go further into the setup how about this.

The Ironmen, despite their power and technical abilities could not replicate the ability of a navigator. During the war with Mankind they tried to enslave any navigators they came across but this was largely impossible, leaving the machines to make short range calculated warp jumps only. Mankind used this lack of mobility by moving their forces much more rapidly than the ironmen, keeping mobile and keeping valuable resources, such as military centres isolated on planets too far away to reach by short jumps. Eventually this lack of mobility was the ironmens undoing, able to move large numbers of troops quickly, mankind dealt with the Ironmen piecemeal, striking and retreating before reinforcements could show up. Realising they were losing the war and facing eradication, the Ironmen and their collective AI came up with a desperate plan. Huge factory ships were constructed and sent out into the void seeking unexplored, dead worlds. Once these were located (often taking millenia due to their deficiency in warp navigation and with terrible loses of factory ships in the warp), the factory ships dug out vast factory complexes under the planets surface, carefully shielded against detection. These factories then began the slow process of building the troops and war machines that the ironmen would need to retake the galaxy. They have been doing this now for over ten thousand years, slowly expanding their factory cities from a single ship to spread acros entire planets. Vast amounts of war materials are stored in massive stasis vaults under the surface of these apparently untouched worlds.

Bak on Mars, at the end of the Ironman vs mankind war, the Ironmen managed to secret a powerful AI in the Noctis Labyrinth. This AI was protected by the most advanced stealth systems and defenses that the AI forces could devise. Capable of exerting its influence planet wide it helped to created the Adeptus Mechanicus by influencing the locals to explore certain technical areas and arranging to have certain pieces of data found within old data vaults. This AI was primarily intended to observe the state of the human race and keep its factory worlds updated. Watching mankind launch the great crusade and seeing its own forces not ready to fight forced it to remain hidden. The Horus heresy and slow decline of man has allowed it to remain isolated, happy (if an AI can be said to be so) to watch mankind destroy itself, making itself weaker all the time for the inevital ironman invasion.

So rules wise. Agree that Scholastic lore: Legend and Forbidden lore: Archeotech should both be helpful in making sense of necron/ironman stuff.

Removing the Ironmans FTL travel isn't so much a problem in this setup, they can still do calculated warp jumps much better than humans but not travel as easily as navigator equipped ships. Al their other tech is perfectly possible using the height of DAoT tech levels that they have access to. I'd also remove the time messing stuff (aside from stasis) more to remove time travel headaches for the GM than for any fluff reason.

On STCs being much worse than necron tech, agreed, but also remember that STC was, as has been noted, the relatively crude, functional basic tech that settlers of the old human empire would need. Tractors, ore excavators and such like. Thats why it looks as it does, rugged and tough, easy to repair and with considerable flexibility. It didn't contain the really high tech specialised tech. One would not expect to find the schemetics for Tsiokovsky Elevators or AIs in there, that would have been the are of top level human/machine engineers and experts. Essentially, it contained the blueprints for family estate cars but not formula one race cars.

Some very good ideas Gribble, I like the factory ships idea and that would explain how the Necrons/Iron Men got to the further reaches of the galaxy than what humanity had settled during DAoT, and the idea of tomb worlds created through slow self-replication growth of the factory ships is excellent. I'm almost tempted to remake Necron scarabs into Von Neumann probes, but that would probably shift 40k further into more modern mainstream sci-fi. As for the STC and the DAoT I think it is fairly well established in the fluff that neither the Imperium nor a reader of 40k fluff have a full understanding of the heights human technology reached during that period, so it could be used as a carte blanche within reason to justify most of Necron tech. Heck, I think it was in one of BFG supplements that it was hinted that the Imperial warships (or rather their patterns) were originally merchant/transport ships that the Imperium simply welded armour and weapons onto. Unfortunately once I start thinking about what real DAoT tech looked like compared to the scrap that the Imperium has, I start to picture a transhumanist post-Singularity setting, and that's just hard to square with 40k.

Thanks for the fluff support Vandegraffe, guess I'll have to go and read the Mechanicum now.

P.S. As an aside, I was going through Creatures Anathema and there is an interesting tidbit in the False Men entry (I think) that talks how the AdMech secretly knows/suspects that there is very little difference between the prescribed silicate A.I. technology and the technology used to turn people into servitors. If Necrons are Iron Men or if Imperial tech is based on Necron tech, I could just imagine Necrons taking over all the servitors of a Forge World and using them as a first wave in their attack.

Supposedly, the STC systems did contain the entirety of human knowledge to that point. However, most colony worlds didn't need the advanced stuff, so they only built basic hardware, plus the tools needed to build and maintain it. In other words, they needed tractors but not race cars, so they printed out the plans for the tractors and built the tooling & etcetera needed to make tractors, and subsequently lost the knowledge of how to make race cars. One of the reasons the AdMech is so keen on finding an intact STC is that such a find would, at a stroke, give them back nearly everything they lost since the Dark Age of Technology.

There have been a lot of good ideas in this thread. One potential very dangerous complication is to give the Necrons some kind of interstellar communication that doesn't require the warp. That would allow the Void Dragon - or whatever replaces it in this version - to coordinate and communicate over long distances. On that note, each Forge World of the Adeptus Mechanicus has an Altar of Knowledge, where their discoveries are offered up to the Omnissaiah. Supposedly, all this data is then communicated to Mars. How? Maybe the AdMech already has some kind of interstellar communication? If the Void Dragon can monitor or "hack" those lines of communication, then that gives it a great deal of influence behind the scenes.

Just my $0.02 worth.

Cheers,

- V.

One way to look at the Omnissiah/Void Dragon is that it hasn't fully awoken. Potentially, what the tech-priests worship as Machine Spirits could be the Void Dragon's splintered consciousness. Who knows, perhaps all that worship at the Altar of Knowledge, or the eternal Quest for Knowledge, actually serves to slowly re-awaken the Omnissiah/Void Dragon. That actually introduces another interesting option for what the Disciples of Thule and other Magi-Explorator are up to - perhaps they're hoping that by gathering up all the DAoT knowledge (and maybe Necron relics) they will eventually be able to 'fix' their god and transcend their mortal flesh. Or perhaps the great arch-Magi of Mars are hoping to control and then awaken the Omnissiah/Void Dragon. Either of these alternatives works with either 'Necrons are Iron Men and Omnissiah is Skynet' option or the 'Necrons are Necrons, Omnissiah is Void Dragon' option. Both could have interesting repercussions for the Explorator PCs and provide inspiration for adventures in the Koronus Expanse.

As an aside, on the subject of Machine Spirits as splinters of Omnissiah's consciousness, I am implying here that not all technology from the humble lasgun to the mighty ship's cogitator is infested by Machine Spirits, but most likely just the more advanced tech; the rest of the technology doesn't really have Machine Spirits - the Tech-Priests just believe (or pretend) that they do. I know that the debate among 40k fans about the true nature of the Machine Spirits (are they real? are they not? what are they really? do tech-priests really believe in Machine Spirits or Omnissiah, or is it just mumbo-jumbo for the Imperial primitive screwheads?) is long and contentious, so I'm merely talking about home-brewed interpretations and spins on AdMech, Machine Spirits, Omnissiah, and Necrons.

I like the ideas but then I would go full circle again as proposed and just when they think they have the truth they find out that Iron Men and the whole DAoT is based on a C'Tan gaining control of an I.A. (being the I.A.), the Emperor was aware.

Then make it obscure on did the Emperor fight it, slaved it or put in in stasis etc.

They fight Iron Men on a Planet, trough out the story they study the Iron men and the tech that leads to a discovery that they led DAoT. Then whent he fight is mostly over, they find out older ruins under the factory, designs the Iron Men where trying to replicate, the original design. Comes in the Necron awaken by the Iron Men...

Vandegraffe said:

The necrons could easily have some kind of non-warp teleporation. Just because no one else does doesn't mean it's impossible. Communication could be achieved through some kind of quantum entanglement mumbo-jumbo. Science that humanity forgot long ago, but the necrons retained.

Vandegraffe said:

You make some fair points about the allure of "techno" FTL over warp FTL, but perhaps there are other reasons humanity chose to forsake the technology. Off the top of my head, the calculations required to make a jump in real space are probably astronomical (pun intended), and considering even a microscopic piece of dust floating through space could rip a ship moving that fast in half.... You'd need some pretty advanced computers to calculate a safe trajectory. Perhaps even some "thinking machines." If humanity reached a point where they were so opposed to AI as I gather they did, they might well have turned their backs on this kind of FTL travel simply because it required an AI to make it work. The necrons as iron men obviously wouldn't share that disdain.

Conveniently, making the decision to leave this kind of FTL travel behind would also leave humanity pretty desperate for a new method. I mean, having reached the stars, how could they give it all up so easily? Especially if they already had colonies out there beyond Earth. That would leave a pretty big door open for the Navigator Houses to capitalize on humanity's desire for FTL and to establish themselves in a position of previously unfelt power.

Vandegraffe said:

That one could be a problem. Doesn't sound like the OP would shed any tears for forgetting that tech, though, and frankly I'd be inclined to agree, were I trying to rewrite the necrons in similar fashion.

Vandegraffe said:

Dyson swarms (not Dyson spheres, mind you) are something which we already have the technology to build in the real world. All we lack is the space-bourne means to collect and process the raw materials necessary to build something so epically massive, and to deploy it afterwards. (I think building one as Dyson suggested would require something like 80% of all the raw materials in our whole solar system.)

If the necrons were originally built by humanity and if they did manage to retain more of the old tech that was lost in the DAoT, then I'm sure they could have ironed out the bugs on those designs and even extrapolated new ones in the intervening time.

In my mind, the biggest problem with rewriting the necrons as the OP suggests is the distribution of tomb worlds. Someone else already mentioned that. If the necrons really are the iron men, they shouldn't have such ancient facilities in nearly as wide a distribution as they do. Of course, that could be rewritten, too. Perhaps the necrons aren't as widely dispersed across the galaxy in this alternate origin story. Perhaps some surviving iron men expanded outwards and laid the seeds for outlying tomb worlds as a survival tactic in case humanity began purging all the existing worlds after the war.

Some excellent points Steve-O. Indeed, if I were to rewrite the necrons for my game, the biggest hurdles are the issues that both Vandegraffe and others address. What I want to keep is the aesthetic of the race and the concept of the slumbering ancient machine evil that cannot be bargained with, cannot be reasoned with. I think that there are already plenty of ancient and not-so-ancient xeno evils waiting to pounce the players, but there is comparatively little in the way of Man-wrought doom in the setting, other than the influence of Chaos. Remaking Necrons as the legacy of the DAoT is a good way to remind the players why the Imperium and Adeptus Mechanicus are so shrouded in mysticism and rejection of both the past (i.e. DAoT) and any future progress, as well as their fear of technology - both human and alien. The Necrons already look the part and their aesthetics are threatening enough. My goal conceptually speaking is to introduce the good old fashioned 'our creations can be our doom' dystopia of Karel Capek or even Shelley - if Necrons were just another ancient alien evil that really wouldn't work.

Some of the clues or parts of the Thulian metaplot that I am introducing in my campaign to hint at the Iron Men-as-Necrons include:

- Investigating Anomaly 47-M in the Unbeholden Reaches, following fearful rantings in the journal of Balastus Irem (see The Emperor Protects , page 14, but slightly reworked). Cue confrontations with Disciples of Thule or the traps they left behind, and/or the Alpha Legion or Dark Mechanicus.

- Infiltrating Altar-Templum-Calixis-Ext-17 in the Furibundus or Altar-Templum-Calixis-Ext-3 in Rubycon, perhaps with a tacit aid of a more orthodox AdMech faction who are convinced that the secretive research being carried out in the Koronus expanse is too dangerous.

- Fighting over a cache of Thulian knowledge with the Sollexian Explorators and perhaps a rival Rogue Trader or two in the ruins of Naduesh and in the orbit.

- There is also a home-brewed Dead World that my players had already visited that contained immense xeno Hive-sized structures that contained billions of corpses. At first the players believed these corpses and technology to be xeno in origin, but slowly realized that they were actually human but twisted beyond recognition and were killed in billions for no apparent purpose (the world was not quite as dead as they originally thought). When their tech-priest realized how immensely ancient the machines and the corpses were, they fled the planet gibbering and taking insanity points - that the world wasn't as dead as they thought also helped. I plan on linking this world to the description of Illisk in the Unbeholden Reaches which the players will eventually visit and draw their own conclusions. These might not be linked to Necrons/Iron Men per se, but the Thulians investigated these worlds for technology to transcend human flesh and join the Omnissiah and should give the players a big hint as to their objectives.

- There is also a fragment of a Thulian vessel that my players stumbled upon while playing through Dark Frontier adventure that was infected by a very strange, yet unmistakably human-patterned Machine Spirit; I used that virus adversary that takes over cybernetic implants and cogitators from Creatures Anathema , the name escapes me right now. The information about the vessel's course and the profit they reaped from all the archaeotech they reaped from it is what set them on the whole metaplot in the first place.

Throughout it all they are going to slowly piece the objectives of the Disciples of Thule (to investigate the supposedly xeno-origin tech, and awaken what the Thulians believe to be the most powerful servants of the Omnissiah, and then transcend flesh), and the dreadful implications of what the Thulians had uncovered (that the Iron Men are around and they can be awoke, or that they're waking up on their own) and what the rest of AdMech would denounce as heresy of the highest order. Of course they'll have big choices to make: do they allow the orthodox AdMech destroy all knowledge gained by the Thulians, do they perchance use the knowledge and artifacts that the Thulians uncovered, or perhaps they even awaken a tomb world or two to combat Karrad Vall or the Ork Waaaugh!.

Anyway, that's sort of the big grand reason I wanted to rework the Necrons. I hope this thread has given people some good ideas, it certainly delivered for me.

P.S. Incidentally, if anyone's interested I wrote up some transcripts of what the players had discovered on the home-brewed world I mention above, you can follow this link: http://roguetraderottawa.wikispaces.com/Ballistus

I agree with several comments here that the biggest obstacle to "Necrons as Iron-Men" is their distribution. How did there get to be so many tomb worlds, so widely distributed across the galaxy? That was why my first thought (once I'd scrapped the C'Tan) was to leave the Necrons in, and have the Iron-Men be AdMech copies. In that case, the 65 million year old Necrontyr empire could be responsible for the bulk of the tomb worlds.

But, I've just had another idea... and it came while I was thinking about how the Necrons / Iron-Men do FTL travel without psykers. What if the Necron FTL system works the same as the Tau's gravitic drive? Per the official fluff, Tau can't perceive the warp. Instead of actually entering the warp, their ships make an "aetheric dive". This, in effect, means they bounce off the boundary between warpspace and realspace, and reemerge into the materium a considerable distance from where they left. It's relatively safe and reliable, but slow. I've heard 1/4 to 1/6 as fast as "average" warp speed, though admittedly average doesn't mean much. [Also, the Tau specifically learned about warp travel when they found a derelict ship drifting into their home system. Gee, the Tau just happen to somehow have good "reliable" AI, advanced energy weapons, and a FTL drive that matches the Necrons after finding a derelict. Wonder what race the derelict belonged to? And that means the Tau are in for a surprise when their "helpful" AI's get a little too sophisticated. Heh, heh, heh.]

Anyway, giving the Iron-Men a Tau style FTL drive could work. During the Great Diaspora and Dark Age of Technology, humanity spread far and wide. In fact, the DAoT holdings were probably bigger than the Imperium since Rogue Traders are constantly rediscovering lost human colonies. If the Iron-Men had a much slower warp drive (and possibly no FTL communication except courier boats), that is an enormous strategic handicap. That could be why they lost the war against humanity. They realised they were going to lose if they kept fighting, so they simply scattered and hid, creating the various tomb worlds...

Hm. I'll have to polish this a little more before inflicting it on my players. Incidentally, they successfully recovered the self-aware Mechanicus probe when we played Lure of the Expanse, and chose not to destroy it. So, there is a plot hook there already.

Cheers,

- V.

I would not make it so once sided, not all Iron-Men should be evil maybe? They should all end up as being dangerous but they should make the players wounder...

Have them make logic leap that players can't follow... at one time the are strong allies then they switch sides to end up with a 3rd completely different goal. To have the original gang of "Evil" gang up with the players against the 1st allies.

Maybe us the old Star Trek story about the black and white faces.

After a while the player either realise the Iron-Men know something big (want to become flesh, to the horror of the AdMechs, they are developing psyker-human hybrids "pariahs") or are trying to wake up a massive I.A.

Maybe they are developing some sort of super anti-Eldar, tyranid, Ork, etc

They have unstable code, each unit produced as even more human reactions, the world as a warp gate deep within it constantly opened and some souls or drifting into the creation process, the have shards of memory and gain insanities...

etc.

Some interesting ideas crisaron, though not the direction I want to take the necrons in for my game. The whole 'Iron Men might actually want to become flesh' angle is definitely very neat, but not one I would currently use. Having the players make a faustian bargain for the Iron Men's knowledge (to defeat the orks, tyranids, whatever) is definitely something that I've been planning on already, and it's the sort of a moral dilemma that should confront 40k rpg players.

As for the problem of Necron distribution (if they were Iron Men instead) I don't really see it as a problem at all. As I had mentioned in my original post I'm perfectly willing to have Necrons be a local threat (maybe confined to a single Segmentum, or even several sectors), rather than a pan-galactic one. However, there are some good ideas people have come up with to account for a wider distribution, from Tau gravitic drive, to self-replicating factories/Von Neumann probes. Furthermore, if there are no Warp-fearing C'tan, then Necrons-as-Iron-Men would be perfectly able to execute calculated Warp jumps with a much greater precision (due to the I.A. and more advanced cogitators) than the Imperium's un-navigated calculated Warp jumps.

Necrons will be a major player eventually in my campaign I think, I may use your idea of the Iron Men to introduce them I like the leap...

Eventually I will/want to "force" my players to allie with eldar and orks or maybe chaos to stop the necrons or stop chaos depending on how they play it.

Will see anyway plans usually unravel before I can put them in motion because of werid player behaviors!

crisaron said:

Is there any other kind of player behavior? I'm glad this thread has given you some ideas, steal away!