I recently have started thinking about the question in topic, I think it was caused by theheretek in broken chains who fuses his flesh with that of deamons.

As lexicanum states:

• The Void Dragon may be based on Mars.
• The Void Dragon may be worshipped by some of the Adeptus Mechanicus as the Machine God.
• The Void Dragon may be feeding in order to return in strength.
• The Void Dragon controls and consumes victims slowly through the use of technological implants.
• The Void Dragon may be able to remotely control technology over vast distances.

So what would tech-priests do when it awakens? There are a few possibilities:
- accept the void dragon as the Machine God and turn necron.

- view it as a false god and stay with the empire of men

- does not compute......

Not there are hereteks and there things may get more interesting as some of them have gained mutations, use psychic powers and creates warp-tech, which would make them not acceptable for the C'tan. So how would they (if at all) react?

We don't even know if there's such a thing as the Void Dragon anymore. The C'Tan were ret-conned into a dead race that were split apart into 'shards' and enslaved by the Necrons.

BYE

That would be the new Necrons that are more interested in dropping in for a cup of tea and a chat rather than exterminating all life-forms?

I'll take the old version thanks.

Q: We don't even know if there's such a thing as the Void Dragon anymore. The C'Tan were ret-conned into a dead race that were split apart into 'shards' and enslaved by the Necrons.

BYE

To be honest I like this version better than the old one. There were enough gods running around as it were...

Hygric said:

Ah, hyperbole, refuge of the indignant.

The new old Necrons weren't interested in the extermination of all life. They were depicted as little more than mindless slaves for the few remaining C'Tan, who sought to subjugate the material universe, and who were apparently behind every single conspiracy that existed in the 40k universe. Now, the new background makes it clear that most of the C'Tan that weren't destroyed during the War in Heaven were shattered, torn to pieces and trapped within pocket dimensions to be unleashed by the Necrons as their Overlords saw fit (though we don't actually know how many C'Tan managed to avoid this fate - the new Codex actually says that nobody knows how many C'Tan remain), and the Necrons are a species whose primary objective is the rebuilding of their ancient empire, dominating the galaxy as they always planned... they just don't agree on who should rule, and are scattered and disorganised after their aeons of dormancy.

Well, it seems that I have some catching up to do on necron lore.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

And how is this better then the silent sleeping toomb gardian of the C'Tan? I mean having the uber race of necron slaved to some even more uber evil entity the WARP fears was much more interesting.

Now Necron have the same storie as the Eldar... or the ORks, where if they where to unite... or chaos....

Bland...

I prefer the new version where the Necrons themselves have some personality and goals aside from the racial programming inside their heads. I also like the idea that they turned on the C'tan.

HappyDaze said:

crisaron said:

Except that the Necrons themselves were bland and boring to ludicrous extremes. They had exactly one motivation, and exactly one MO, and while you may be excited by monotony, there are a great many of us who aren't. I fail to see how anybody could be interested in the Necrons except as occasional antagonists when the singular choice within the background of a given force of Necrons was essentially the difference between being slaves of Cthulhu, slaves of Shub-Niggurath, or having defective programming.

The current background gives ample opportunity to customise and diversify the Necrons, with their fate driven by countless Overlords scattered across the galaxy, rather than the old background, which was "The handful of remaining C'Tan and their mindless slaves!".

The mindless slave concept works only if you can introduce enough personality and variance into their rulers and champions to create diversity. The C'Tan did not and could not provide that for the Necrons.

Honestly, I don't feel this changes all that much except to make the Necrons more nuanced.

There's still an unknown number of whole C'tan loose in the galaxy for all your plots needing an ancient, life eating dark god...

Since a lot of the DW material indicates a clash with Necron forces, I think this gives the potential to make them more interesting foes rather then as "terminators... from the paaast" which is more or less how they were before.

Hygric said:

A million dittos.

oberonzero said:

Dittos? No wonder you prefer the old.

Bland and boring to ludicrous extremes? Now who is engaging in hyperbole!

One thing I will freely admit, the shattered C'Tan is much better fluff than everything in the 40k universe being a C'Tan plot. That was getting really old really quick.

IMHO, the Necrons worked perfectly as a RPG "bad-guy" in the no personality kill-all-life style. A perfect villain for a BC campaign. The power of chaos being the only way to save life as we (sorta) know it? Great potential campaign material!

Hygric said:

You know, this thread really illustrates the beauty of pen and paper RPG's. I can have my game with boring Necrons, Rev. Mort can have his themed campaign using 'Nids, N0_1 can have his campaign with new Necrons and someone out there can even have his game featuring My Little Ponies as the Big Bad.

Pen and paper games are completely controlled by the small group sitting around one table Computer RPG's are controlled by the developers of some big game company.

True story, I recently got a work-mate of mine to try playing both RT and BC. He has never played a pen and paper game before in his life, but has been a WoW-addict since release. After his very first session with my group we had a conversation at work the next day that went roughly like this:

"So I can pretty much play whatever I want, do whatever I want, quest however I want and there is no end-game?"

"Yup."

"Sweet!"

He is now a regular gamer.

In short: I love pen and paper, because ALL our preferences and tastes are valid choices!

I was rasied on Daleks and Cybermen in Dr Who that where devoid of empathy, emotion, driven by cold logic, calculated motivations and to me at least are some of the most memorably nasty baddies in the whole series. Because there was no real way to negotiate with them, they just turned up out of nowhere, wrecked everything and unless the main characters managed to out-think and (very rarely) out-fight them everyone was completely screwed! Sure as heck, they'd also be back long before the 'Terminator franchise' ever though it up...

Sure, there was some very rudimentary desires which pushed them to do the things they did, but for the most part they where utterly alien and largely incomprehensible due to the complicated nature of their activities- That is the part GW got WRONG in their re-hash of the Necron fluff, none of this "lets hold hands and go bash up those guys over there!" in between whinning about not being able to have real bodies horseshit. There's a right way and a wrong way to present scary, alien machines as bad guys to make them interesting and its certainly not as emo-egyptian pharaohs.

MKX said:

Except that while you couldn't negotiate with them, you can at least talk to and trick them. The Daleks aren't driven by cold logic, but by absolute feelings of their own superiority and loathing for everyone else (remember, the Dalek is the mutant creature inside the shell... the shell is just wargear). The old Necrons didn't even allow that - they had no drives of their own, no machinations, no ego or desires, no goals except those given to them by the incredibly rare god-beings who commanded them.

While that may work for occasional antagonists it provides no incentive or ability to employ them as anything more.

MKX said:

Sure, there was some very rudimentary desires which pushed them to do the things they did, but for the most part they where utterly alien and largely incomprehensible due to the complicated nature of their activities- That is the part GW got WRONG in their re-hash of the Necron fluff, none of this "lets hold hands and go bash up those guys over there!" in between whinning about not being able to have real bodies horseshit. There's a right way and a wrong way to present scary, alien machines as bad guys to make them interesting and its certainly not as emo-egyptian pharaohs.

You're welcome to your opinion, and I respect your right to be wrong

However, you appear to be reiterating the same complaints that've been issuing from half-informed rumour sites for the last three months, which doesn't particularly paint an accurate representation of the new background.

Yes, the Necrons may detest what they are, but that manifests more as a hatred for the beings that did it to them - it's loathing driven by personal body horror, particularly when you consider the damage that has occurred to many of them, with minds and memories fracturing, corrupted programming causing things like the Destroyer Cult (who are omnicidal maniacs... of their own volition) or Flayed Ones (who have become feral and bestial parodies of Necron-kind). They bargained with malicious gods for immortality, and were given exactly what they wanted in the worst way imaginable... I think that's entirely appropriate to the tone and themes of Warhammer 40,000

Alliances... well, everyone but the Tyranids allies sooner or later (and the Tyranids work the "inexorable obliteration of all things" bit better than the old Necrons did anyway), more out of convenience than anything else. I mean, look at the Dark Eldar, who are known to regard all other life in the galaxy as little better than animals, good only for sport or sustenance... yet they still hire themselves out as mercenaries. The Necrons with the intellect remaining to consider such things (essentially, only the Lords, Overlords, Crypteks and Triach Praetorians - everything else is either single-minded warriors or automatons, much as they always were) by and large regard all the life that has sprung up since their slumber began as upstart animals, with only a few intermittent exceptions. The biggest difference now is that individual Lords, Overlords and Crypteks have goals, ambitions and personalities of their own, and often those goals are the total domination of the galaxy with the rebirth of the old Necron Empire... only with themselves at the top. Quite frankly, that seems like it makes them more Megatron and Starscream than anything else...

I thought the lords already were sentient in the previous editions, considering Xenology and all...

Which, by the way, was why old-style Necrons never bothered me that much - you have both the clanking menace and a few infiltrating lords for social play to happen (like preparing a planet for invasion when you find out that, oops, someone else with no chaos-ties is infiltrating it as well). Huh, that sounds a little familiar, but I guess all this has happened before...

I don't see why my players need to talk to necron... the silent horror.

They are know to raze entire planet without a sound leaving no living beings behind... Some are damaged and keep attacking the same outpost in the same maner, some where still very intelligent and trying to reawaken their master...

While you may think C'Tan where the ultimate bad ass, there was ultimatly 3 left, 1 sleeping and the 2 remaining where more interested in killing eahc other or just mischief... C'Tan are not noraml beings their minds are wicked and alto super powerful they are still incomplete.

Now well, let's try to have a necron friend ok? It goes well with our Dark Eldar, ork nub, there are the kroot merc "hi guys",...

Why was it so bad to have a chlutlian evil, never awakening but always on the frindge... makes a nice little arc ounce in a while and your players don't go like oh let's talk to necrons and win our way out of it!

If I want them to talk with robots, i'll make Man of Iron, Mechanicus Super magos, seed AI, etc.

crisaron said:

humm Nids have stealers, hive mind, Dagon... they are totally alien insectlike and are en masse, they are know and understood studied race.

Necrons where the uncountable tomb worlds, know but still a mistery, should someone just mange to trigger something then the planet goes silent. No huge fleet of insect, nothing...

Yet we had the cult on mars but then again it was avery located thing... shrouded in mystery, not like the nids where there are books and books on what to do during an invasion (hope u r not ready when it happens).

crisaron said:

Up until they produce some previously-unknown creature or variant of a creature that throws all that research and study out of the window... and it's happened frequently. Oh, and technically, the Tyranids aren't insect-like. They're six-limbed, but that's pretty much where the resemblance ends. Amongst other things, the presence of hooves and leathery wings are mammalian traits, but the Tyranids defy conventional taxonomic classification due to the fact that each Tyranid is an engineered species created from a diverse collection of traits from potentially thousands or millions of distinct species to serve a particular purpose. Many Tyranids actually lack a digestive system, as there is no expectation that they have a lifespan longer than a few days and are thus born with all the energy reserves they need to function... yet this significant trait may vary from generation to generation as the Hive Mind requires. It's arguable that, by some definitions of life, the Tyranids aren't even living creatures. They're organic, but they certainly aren't natural...

Consider that, technically, most of the creatures we regard as common parts of the Tyranid swarm had not been conclusively recorded or identified until the second Tyrannic War - besides ubiquitous things like Gaunts and Genestealers, Tyranid Warriors and Hive Tyrants, most of the 'known' Tyranid bestiary wouldn't be officially encountered until around 992.M41 at the earliest, including Lictors, Zoanthropes and most forms of bio-titan (rule of thumb; if it was present in the old Codex Imperialis book, then it's been known about since at least the Battle of Macragge and was likely identified originally on Tyran). Even by 999.M41, the Imperium is still uncovering new information and forming new conclusions about the Tyranids based on that newly-obtained data.

The Tyranids, due to their propensity for adaptation, are not a known quantity. They aren't mysterious, but they're still not a known and understood species.

crisaron said:

Tyranids shroud worlds in a vast shadow within the Warp that inhibits travel and communication across interstellar distances... most of the original worlds consumed by the Tyranids just "went silent" as well.