I'm currently making some loose plans for a DW campaign and in which a Tyranid Splinter Fleet will play the main role as the great antagonist for the Kill-Team to defeat. Now of course from my limited understanding of the Tyranids I know that they are controlled by a Hive Mind, but do each Fleet will have a Hive Mind of its own? I understand this may be a bit confusing but I'm not in possession of much information regarding the Tyranids at present and would like to have this sorted out, as I'm thinking of making the destruction of the Hive Mind the paramount condition to defeat the Splinter Fleet. Of course the Kill-Team will not themselves actually facilitate the killing itself but they will be very important in helping an Ordo Xenos Radical Inquisitor setting the stage and putting events in motion for the Hive Mind's eradication, or more correctly, to have it beeing devoured. This would naturally include the Kill-Team keeping the Hive Mind weakend or at least off-balance to make sure that the plan works.

Secondly, is it correct to assume that the strength of a Hive Mind, if each fleet does indeed have one, is relative to the seize of the fleet itself? Meaning that a Splinter Fleet will have a Hive Mind much weaker than the primary Hive Fleets which first invaded the galaxy? A very important question is of course how vulneriable would a being like this be, and to what degree can it actually be permanently damange or at least hurt; Is it weakened or unbalanced by the destruction of several synapse creatures in a small time space to a significent degree? What other ways can there be to cause damage or at least weakend a Hive Mind? Would the destruction of a bio-ship have some manner of notiable effect?

Thank you for your time

There is only one hive mind, and it is the collective consciousness of all Tyranids (particularly Synapse creatures). Therefore, you cannot kill the hive mind unless you kill all Tyranids. It's not a singular entity.

Also, the destruction of creatures has no effect on the hive mind; it's even stated in the 4th edition codex (not sure about the current one).

The Hive Mind is the gestalt collective consciousness of the entire Tyranid race, a psychic embodiment of the Tyranid instincts and racial imperatives to devour and destroy. It is not a single mind capable of small, conscious thought the way a Human's mind works, but instead it is a grand agglomeration created from the psychic presence of untold billions of Tyranid creatures. It is a nightmarish and unfathomable intelligence that allows Tyranids to coordinate and adapt as if every Tyranid creature is merely a part of a single massive organism, one which is utterly focused on consuming all other life.

Well yes and no: while the hive mind is the Tyranid consciousness as a whole, different Hive Fleets will exhibit different characteristics, tactics and indeed different bioforms. Thus is is entirely plausible for you to develop a splinter fleet headed by a Norn Queen that has a unique agenda, character and approach.

And the local concentration of tyranid organisms does have an effect on the strength of the hive mind. A splinter fleet makes a smaller impact than something like the whole of Behemoth.

And as Lightbringer said, different fleets seem to work on different imperatives, it's why certain mutations and breeds are common among one fleet, while something different is the norm among another.

Killing off the synapse creatures breaks up the network, and can end up isolating some parts of it in a way. It's still a part of the hivemind, but the overall connection loses a lot of strength to the point where the swarm is being directed more by the will of the greatest creature rather than the hivemind itself. such as in the case of a Broodlord, or Hive Tyrant.

While the effect of destroying ships is similar to that of attacking the individual organisms themselves on the battlefield. Killing off what is effectively an escort does little, while the very core of the hivefleet, the ship housing the Norn Queen, is basically like taking out the Hive Tyrant. While the remaining ships serve the position of tyranid Warriors and such.

In fact, I seem to recall in the last but one Tyranid Codex (the one written by Andy Chambers) there was a report to the High Lords written by a senior Magos Biologis cautioning them against regarding accounts of hive fleets attacking each other as good news...because the winner would just absorb the biomass of the loser and then become even stronger.

This suggests that Tyranid hive fleets will on occasion even attack each other. This should probably be regarded as part of the natural superpredator lifecycle of the Tyranid race...but it also suggests that hive fleets will, over time, become so different as to regard each other as distinct entities. So individuality is not a totally alien concept to the tyranids.

No organism embodies the hive mind more than the Norn queen, but I have to say I don't know what they look like or even if they have a physical shell as we would imagine it.

I would say if you are imagining something like the overminds of the zerg, the tyranids aren't really like that. their group mind is more like the borg from star trek. where they all contribute to the mind, and while there is a queen, her body is not the sum of her being, so when she dies the nearby borg tend to get disoriented and confused, but she is just given a new body elsewhere in the hive

Having said that IF the norn queen is a life form on board a tyranid ship and the splinter fleet is small I could see how sneaking onto the ship and killing the queen could severely mess with the nearby fleet.

In Dawn of War 2 Retribution it is implied that different hive fleets have different commanders and stuff like that, but I think thats just so that the player feels like an individual when playing the tyranid campaign, and not a mindless drone

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tyranids

Also suggest you check out Oblivion's Edge free adventure (the sequel to Final Sanction) on the support page, could give you more info on the beasties.

Lightbringer said:

OTOH, this may well NOT be natural to them and may be the equivalent of a cancer in the Tyranid race or an autoimmune disorder.

HappyDaze said:

I like this- the attacking fleet is either the cancer or could seen as a 'disorder.' While not truly individual, just...different enough to trigger a response.

SubtleCadaver said:

You can't kill the Hive Mind, but if you destroy enough synapse creatures, you can cut off it's influence in a particular area, in which case the low-level Tyranids then revert to dumb animal/drooling lump status...

Adeptus-B said:

I'm aware of that, but unless I was misunderstanding the OP he was asking if you could kill the Hive Mind itself.

If I remember well, there is no specifications telling that all Hive fleet share a same mind. While thereare many different fleets, there is no actual report of the broken ones trying to reach the new arriving fleets like leviathan or behemot.

It could be entirely possible that each fleet belongs to a different "Hive" like ants or bees. The Norn Queen and the various other bioconstruct seen in massive tt version of 40k (can't remember the name now), suggest many advanced psycker or very large bio organism. Are they simply titant equivalent or very some sort of Mind Node?

Also one thing is deffinitive, the real core of any tiranid army are the hiveship. They are the focal point for the entire biomass and genetic sampling. It seams the Norn Queen, from various BL sources as a direct genetic link with the hiveship and is a key to bringing one splinter fleet down.

It could be possible that the HiveShips are the nerve centers of the HiveMind. Now since all hiveship integrate new geene and biomass, it's arguable that splinter faction will evolve within the HiveMind (should there be only one for starter, which I don't beleive personnaly), as chaos, humans, ork and orther DNA are digested they bring their own complicatiion, not too add the various other forms like the Slautgh, U'vath, Megarachnids, etc. All those geenes could leed to a drastical evolution resulting in a splinter HiveMind, which would then start it's own fleet, arguably this could very well be the evolution process of the tyranids on a galactical scale. Once a fleet as eaten or is eaten by another fleet, the biomass and DNA is absorbed into the winner resulting in a new onset of spontanuous evolutions.

In it self the hivemind can be "stopped" by destroing all the local HiveShip. This usualy leads to a massive scale tiranids organism reverting to their default behaviors, but some synaps creatures can hold their sway even after that (alot the initial shock of the hivemind loss is sure to shake even those creatures for a while at least). Then if we follow that path it is possible that by destroying all and every hiveship of a single fleet, you could destroy a hivemind (if we take the assumption that not all fleet share the same hivemind), that is if the entire genetic pool is not transmitted to each bioorganism of the fleet. Since there is alwasy a terraforming process involved it is possible that those "spores" contain enough material that a hivemind could resurrect over a lager period of time, from a single infected world. Infected world thend to develop tyranid "farms", those could eventually produce a single droneship that could overtime grow into a full fledgeed hiveship.

It could also be argued thaqt the Nharval may part fo the hivemind, It's very developped sensors coudl probably turn into braodcaster, linking all the hivemind together...

SubtleCadaver said:

Right, but Gurkhal has another question about this campaign in the GM section,I was trying to tie in with that- didn't mean to imply that you didn't know that, SubtleCadaver, I was just making sure that Gurkhal knew it.

Adeptus-B said:

Oh, right

crisaron said:

I think the Hive Mind is more of a distributed network, like the internet, actually. You have the big backbone nodes (the Norn Queens) which are probably one to a hive fleet, and your smaller servers of various capacities (synapse creatures.) I think the greatest evidence of this fact is how all of the Tyranid hive fleets are arranged like a giant mouth taking a bite out of our galaxy. You kill one fleet, you break a tooth, but the maw continues to close. I forget which edition of the TT fluff first mentioned that, but it was the moment when I fully appreciated how terrifying the Tyranids really are. I remember a passage going on about how a new hive fleet (Behemoth, I think?) had been discovered coming down into the plane of our galaxy instead of approaching edge-on as previous fleets had.

Anyway, these are the driving elements of the Hive Mind, and all the other Tyranids are like individual users, receiving and providing information to/from the network but not actually directly a part of the infrastructure. If you take out a Norn Queen you might well shut down an entire hive fleet, but the Hive Mind itself continues to exist in all the other Norn Queens. In other words, the Hive Mind is a singular entity, but it doesn't have a singular identity, body or mind. Like the internet, it is one "thing" composed of innumerable separate components.

You can cut off parts of it, even large parts, but the only way to finally destroy the Hive Mind is to eradicate the entire Tyranid race. That would, of course be impossible from any kind of practical perspective. Even if you could somehow exterminate every single Tyranid in this galaxy (and all the ones floating around in deep space just outside our galaxy, whose fleets have yet to enter the starfield), we know they came from outside the galaxy, so there's probably more of them in at least one other galaxy out there somewhere. Intergalactic travel through the Warp would be a whole other ball of wax from interstellar, considering how many people lose thier lives every day to maintain the Astronomicon, and even then it doesn't even manage to cover the whole of our galaxy. Forget about getting it to another one. Not to mention the Warp Shadow Tyranids create - I'm sure that would all over the place in any other galaxy(ies) they've consumed entirely.

Thanks for all the informative comments, I'm working on a reply that I hope will be able to adress all what's been said, but due to new comments I've needed to expand on it several times. Don't hesitate to post more however as this is really useful!

The other thing to remember is that 40K source material is in a constant state of flux,a lot of it is presented "in character" so it's not necessarily clear how much of anything is true,ultimately you get to decide what's true in an individual campaign.

Ultimately if you want to have a campaign that destroys the Tyranid Hive Mind by all means go for it, it sounds like a pretty cool concept - but you should probably bear in mind that 40K purists might object to the idea.

You could probably also have a splinter fleet isolated from the main hive mind, which still had a hive-mind of its own if you see what I mean. Not connected to the main Tyranid Gestalt, but still a vast world-devouring super-organism.

To perhaps emphatize my point, I was never considering destroying the "Hive Mind" in the big sense of eliminating the entire Tyranid threat entirely. I was mostly thinking about making a kind of psyhic attack upon a Splinter Fleet that leaves that specific Splinter Fleet cut off from the Hive Mind and with the local Synapse network thrased, and so in practice defeated - although the mob up operations will likly be as costly for the Imperium as a standard seize war with the Orksa sector-wide seperatist rebellion. I most certainly don't want to portray the Tyranids as a walkover or a lesser problem, but not make them out to be invincible either, and to allow my players to be the heroes of the conflict.

I realize that I should probably not have used the term Hive Mind, but perhaps "Splinter Fleet Mind"something to avoid confusion.