Morangias said:

Yeah, I wasn't so much referencing the mythos as a whole, but the creatures themselves. Yeah, I also realize I made up a word.

aeons-old race, once ruled the galaxy,......

Eldar +1?

To me the Tyranids are understandable. They move forward, consume, grow. They are nothing more than an alien biological entity that can be related to an insect colony or virus. The only thing they have going for them is the fact they don't have crazy generals leading them and that no one, to my knowledge, has made an alliance with them .

As for their lack of regard for other life forms, humanity doesn't have any either. That was one of the Emperor's big principals.

My problem, is the more you humanize Necrons the more boring they become. Every book, movie, or TV series that humanizes the villain, which is almost all of them, looses the menace and fear involved with that villain. As soon as you can make an alliance with something or someone that things looses any status as a "cosmic horror".

Well, I share your sentiment but I don't consider this a problem. The warriors remain silent and personality-less. The leaders are rare and you can tailor them to your own liking very easily. You like incomprehensible and mysterous? Not hard to convey that.

Also if you drop a hint to the players that there is more to the backstory of Eldar vs Necrons than meets the eyes, they'll be electrified.

Alex

ItsUncertainWho said:

There's a reason their backstories are so connected. Except the 'Cronz are much scarier than Spess Elfs, because Spess Elfs don't happen to randomly pop up from under the face of the earth and declare your entire Hive World trespassing. Nor has any Eldar threatened to steal Guilliman from Macragge so he could place him in his trophy room. Plus, you know, the whole "metal skeletons" thing.

ItsUncertainWho said:

Sure they are understandable. So are all critters from the Cthulhu mythos, because no human can conceive something truly incomprehensible to a human mind. So it all comes down to epithets like "amoral" and "alien", and to making people soil their pants when they do really grasp the whole idea behind the creature. Cthulhu isn't scary because I don't get him - I get all I need, he's big, strong and tries to eat me. What's scary is the idea that a creature exists that can eat a nuclear missile to the head without any irreparable damage and that wants my soul on a cracker. Likewise, Tyranids are scary exactly because I understand them - they are the end of all life other than Tyranids, and so far the chances of them losing are slim.

ItsUncertainWho said:

It's generally a common idea among 40k species. What sets the Tyranids apart is that every other race can present you more or less convincing reasons for their rampant genocidal tendencies. Not so much the 'Nids, who make no excuses - they just want to eat you along with everything else that was ever alive.

ItsUncertainWho said:

"...pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos."

Long time lurker of the boards, but this thread finally tipped the scales and forced me to throw in my two cents.

Are we seriously debating the merits of injecting flavor into the most bland army in all of 40k? Giving the Necrons an actual point has been one of the most sane moves by GW's writing staff in years. And it's about time GW stomped on the C'Tan which among most 40k circles became a running gag. "Some inexplicable plot device? C'Tan did it, clearly." I even like how GW handled the transition, instead of just handwaving it they gave the idea that the first wave of Necrons were mindless drones running on full automation, but now Lords have awoken with their minds intact and are taking command back of their race.

Face it, the Necrons, as they were, were dull. There have been many "shambling horde of mindless robots" done before and far better. For example, the Therians from AT-43 are far more interesting, they're a hivemind that instead of being controlled by a lord are commanded by a perfect democracy in which every member has a vote. They do a vote on every single action any member takes, which really gives a refreshing look at the whole hivemind idea. But Necrons were all the boring parts of the trope with no distinctive trait about them whatsoever beyond "They kind of look like egyptians" which isn't a new idea.

As far as the idea of "injecting humanity makes them boring because everyone is doing it now", my eyes are rolling back so far in my head I look like a slot machine. Character and humanity is a mark of good writing, it's why we remember iconic characters from stories like Luke Skywalker or Hannibal Lecter. Even the most evil of evil don't think that they themselves are evil. They see themselves as "right" in their ways, and 99 out of 100 times it's because of a belief that, by itself, is tame. Why do we like Hannibal Lecter so much? He eats people! But he's a memorable character because on top of his cold and calculating form he is also charming, possesses razor sharp wit, and he cares about Clarice Starling. But that doesn't make him any less evil of a guy, he still revels in peoples' deaths.

What I'm driving at here, in case you don't want to read the full version, is that giving Necron lords personality does not in any way make them less evil, incomprehensible, or indifferent. You can still have a lord who is cold, calculating, and indifferent to the suffering of others. The only thing that has changed is that instead of just doing it "just because" they actually have motivations, and varied ones at that. Some Lords want to conquer the galaxy, some want to finally dish out revenge that's been simmering for tens of thousands of years, some want to rebuild the culture of their ancient society so that it will not be forgotten, and some just plain want to survive amidst the tides of horrid things that have grown while they slept.

Speaking strictly from a Deathwatch approach, I can't see why anyone would want Necrons the old way then how they are now. Now you can really create iconic villains for your game rather than "Necron Lord #4 with an Orb". Imagine a scenario where the Kill-team is following a series of clues that leads to them killing a Lord, only to find out that the clues they were following were left by another Lord who had conspired against his kin (Maybe to claim the assassinated Lord's army). All this does is allow more room to create memorable characters and missions. You can still have your cold, undead killing machines, it's just that they actually have good writing behind them now.

ItsUncertainWho said:

The problem with faceless evils, and the reason why they tend to get fleshed out in this way, is because an unknowable, monolithic, faceless evil is limiting in the stories that can be told with it. In essence, you pretty much end up with one opportunity to tell the story before you have to come up with something new to add to them so you can tell a different story.

Beyond that, while it may be a valid approach for an antagonist... 40k has no full-time antagonists, except maybe the Chaos Gods. Because those armies are playable, they take on the protagonist role frequently, which means that there is a necessity for them to be more than a one-note villain.

Besides, there's no true evil in 40k just as there is no true good; it's all shades of grey, though some greys are darker than others. The vilest champion of chaos may have the best of intentions or may be driven by a sense of personal honour and nobility. The greatest heroes of mankind commit atrocities and actively promote the concepts of ethnic cleansing and absolute xenocide in the name of the survival of mankind. The Tyranids are slaves to instinct. The Tau routinely employ eugenics and harsh social engineering in their quest for a utopian galaxy under their rule and guidance. The passionate, artistic Eldar seek only to survive, but are cruel, self-serving and merciless creatures. Ork society is one that knows little of the social strife and doubt that plagues other civilisations, and the Orks do not hate their enemies, but rather embrace them as something to be treasured.

Why should the Necrons be left standing as an absolute, mindless, faceless evil when that's no more appropriate to 40k than Tau presented as good-natured United Federation of Planets types that'll help an elderly kroot cross the street.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

No, you can change the circumstances. To claim otherwise is like saying you can only tell one story about eathquakes is limiting in the stories that can be told with it. The focus isn't on the necrons who are like a natural disaster but on the people who are struck by it.

And certainly the necrons are much more cthulhu-esque than the tyranids.
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."

Perhaps it's more the imagination of GW authors that is limited here; there is no need for extensive interaction with a silent killing force like the necrons.

ItsUncertainWho is right: you detract from the scare factor if you make them into an army faction like any other; fortunately you don't have to. Conversely you increase the scare factor if you keep have them acting like a mindless machine army but keep hinting at a mysterious underlying motive - for that is really alien and scary: sentient beings that for some motive voluntarily behave like mindless machines.

Alex

But as someone else pointed out, what makes the Cthulhu mythos great is that you don't directly deal with it, the Elder Gods sit behind the curtains of the story pulling the strings. What you deal with are the cultists and madmen who serve these gods, and unlike their masters, they have personality and motivation.

So if anything, it's best to leave the C'Tan be dark and spooky, laying under the fabric of space taunting with they're mysterious unknown nature (rather than showing up in every god **** piece of fluff to adjust the plot), and let the Necron Lords and their minions be the ones people fight and interact with, sharing the same amount of personality and motivation that some cultist has. To actually put a unit on the table and say "It's a mysterious, facless horror" is just being lazy. Even Tyranids, while having the overall intent of being an indifferent devourer of all organic life, still has personality and variety amongst their kin from species to hivefleet behavior. Before this new book the 'Nids had more effort put into them than the Necrons had.

Personally I like the idea that, unlike any other race in 40k, the Necrons have killed their "gods"

ak-73 said:

At which point, you're not telling a story about the Necrons. They're the backdrop to another story entirely. The Walking Dead is a relationship drama set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse - the Zombies are a part of the scenery, not characters in their own right.

And that's the problem. When one of your major factions (they've got a Codex, they're a major faction) essentially cannot function except as a backdrop for everyone else's stories, then there's nothing compelling about the Necrons themselves - they're an abstract threat, not an enemy. If you're going to attempt that, you need something to diversify them - the Tyranids manage it through being inherently varied and mutable. The Necrons had nothing like that to provide diversity, because they didn't actually have a background... the C'Tan had a background, and the Necrons were dragged along with it.

I was going to write a lengthy post, but N0-1 covered everything I wanted to say. So, N0-1_H3r3 +1.

Blood Pact said:

DSotBH was pretty much the best sourcebook ever written to many eyes, though. It's power levels were whack, and a lot of Black Hand fans hated it because it turned out that 'their' faction was being utterly manipulated, but the basic idea of the souleaters et al was great (oh yeah: Everyone who loved vicisitude hated it, too. But then I always considered the Discipline to be a bad 'fit' for vampires, and loved having an explanation at last for it) . To have totally retconned it would have been like...erm...retconning C'Tan, I guess.

Developing it and nuking it, but keeping that past in the story was fine. It didn't alienate people as drastically as retconning.

There are a lot of factions in 40k. People buy what appeals to them. That spread of ideals is a good thing, and many are culled from classic sci-fi tropes. There is certainly space for a 'bugs' faction (tyranids), and there is also certainly a space for the mindless machines with super-tech. Turning the later into something else is removing a choice from the players.

I completely agree with Uncertain as regards humanising bad guys. It tends to ruin them. I want my alien bad guys to be completely alien in outlook.

I realise all the above is merely a matter of standpoint. So I'll cut back to 'development is cooler than retconning' with this:

How much cooler would it have been if -instead of keeping the C'Tan as they were AND instead of saying 'that never happened; they're different' - the new Codex would have outlined some event within the 40k world that caused the C'Tan to fragment (either because they were 'defeated', or as part of some new strategy, or left as an open question) and the 'new' situation to come about?

We have a great game universe out there. We all crave new story-lines and development. How much better is it to have that development than to merely make sweeping changes and pretend that nothing happened within the game universe.

Heck: They could have put out half a dozen softbacks and a supporting campaign book on the back of it. It was a chicken *&^% and lazy move to retcon instead.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

That is irrelevant to both DW as you are telling a story about the PCs as well as 40K where you're not telling a story but providing a setting. It is only relevant if you intend to create derivative works with techno-undead at the center of the story. One has to question whether that is required.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

A lot of people will consider that preferrable over yet another personalized threat. There is no accounting for taste. Lack of personalization adds to overall variety in some sense.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Compelling enough stories can be told with zombies as a backdrop. There is no necessity for personality. I am not radically opposed to it, as mentioned above, but I can see why some would long for more personality and some would like to keep them mindless.

The personalizing argument is evident and has been in discussion in a number of internet forums. I am providing here some more rarely heard (in my memory) argument why necrons should rather be brainless.

Alex

I must admit to being a little conflicted about this whole debate.

On the one hand, I totally accept the need to add a degree of personality to the Necrons. Much as I loved the old Necron Codex, the Necron Lords presented in that Codex were just ciphers...and that lack of personality made individual armies appear dull and unattractive. You need more than just two special characters to base a Codex on, especially if neither of them are actually Necrons.

On the other hand, I loved the C'Tan to bits, loved the "War in Heaven," and unlike a lot of people here don't regard the "it's stupid, the C'Tan are behind everything" argument as either correct or valid criticism of the original Necron codex at all.

I guess my major worry is not that Necron Lords have personalities, it's that the execution of this concept, if done poorly, could make Necron Lords appear cartoonish and trite ****-Dastardly-alikes. The Necrons are really at a crucial stage of their development here, transforming from robot drones in the service of malign star gods to a series of divided factions. I haven't read the new Codex yet, (I've been given it as an Xmas present, so I'm not allowed to read it yet ) but the WD previews I've seen of the way this transition appears to have been handled don't exactly allay my fears.

ak-73 said:

I dispute that it's irrelevant to the wargame - when you're presenting a playable faction, having a faction which fundamentally has no inherent purpose but serving as a backdrop for other people's conflicts will serve as a hindrance to the appeal of that faction, particularly when they have little to no options for diversity to allow people to make the army their own.

The background is driven by the wargame. The Necron background lacked a hook for players and a means for them to customise their army, which are dire flaws from the perspective of a wargame faction. Make the change in the wargame, and it has to be followed by the RPG, but I don't see that as a particularly bad thing - none of the new background (which, due to how thoroughly lacking the old background was, isn't actually that significant a ret-con... most of the background can easily exist in parallel) prohibits using the Necrons as robot space zombies... but it provides plenty of other options as well.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

The latter was the bigger problem with the old dex, I think nobody would dispute that. It was funny to compare the weapons list of the old necron codex with the weapon table at the end of say the 5E vanilla codex. Well, not funny for the necron player.

As for personality, I am not so sure. You could have tried to sell the new necrons as the ultimate bad guys. Silent, with no discernible personality, bent on destruction. That would be personality of that army. But then again I am not in GW's shoes, so it's none-of-my-business, fortunately.

Alex

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I think the idea of story telling as the driving force behind a TT wargame is terrible and silly idea. Changing the background fluff for an established faction isn't what drives the playability of a faction. Poor development and lack of attention from the game developers lead to a faction being unplayed. Necrons had around a nine year gap in development that lead to a lack of enthusiasim from fans. The story and viability of an army on the table top doesn't seem to be a concern for GW. These are used more as a way to leverage large purchases of new product more than a way of developing the universe or making a better game.

A faction in a TT game that dosn't have options for diversity is the fault of the game designer(s) and not the background story. If the backgroud is being used as an excuse to explain a purposely limited army option that hinders a faction, that is just poor game design.

I believe you when you say none of the new fluff prohibits Necrons as robot space zombies. Except now they are robot space zombies with wacky ledership.

Oh come on, that's stupid. Warharmmer Fantasy has had ACTUAL skeletons and zombies for decades and both Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts have leaders with personality and background stories beyond just being a faceless horror. You can have your cake and eat it too, you know. Just because you have stories of the various Vampire bloodlines competing with each other doesn't make their zombies any less mindless or annoying as a tarpit on the table.

WittyDroog said:

I am not a fan of Warhammer Undeads anymore since about 1994 or so. The old Undeads (around the time Rogue Trader 40K was published) were really fine, except for the silly Skeleton Horses. Sheesh, everyone knows that the Undead ride Zombie Horses.

Beyond that the analogy only holds that far. Necrons aren't really skeletons in space, just very similar. It all depends on what one wants out of them.

Alex

Actually, from traditional folklore undead ride skeleton horses more frequently. As far as pre-94 undead you mean pre-Nagash or just pre-94 Army Book? Either way before or after there were still characters in the army much like the Lord and Hero choices in the armies today.

The Necrons actually have a lot in common with the Tomb Kings, which is no surprise as GW intended it to be that way with all the egyptian iconography and flying space pyramids. The biggest thread of commonality is that both, unlike their vampire Count counterpart which raises freshly dead bodies, are composed of a race that died out long ago in history. Both have Lords that are hanging onto fragments of their original memories, and both eschew the Gods for their own godlike powers.

There's no real way to make a mindless army of robot without any personality to them unless you're just making von neuman probes in which don't make an interesting army or a mechanically fun army as von neuman probes are all the same. Find me any good example of a memorable robotic threat and you can find there is personality in them. Take the Geth from Mass Effect, on first glance they are just mindless killing machines but on closer inspection they have a lot to them, including a moment where they question their creators and then kill them off (Necron and C'Tan, anyone?). Legion is a great character, but he's still a Geth.

I just don't understand how fleshing out the Necrons' purpose, which doesn't in any way move them away from being a wave of killing (like many races in 40k), is a bad thing.

WittyDroog said:

I know. The problem was that GW took a turn towards the childish in the early 90s in general. While amateurish, the WFB 3E and the 40K 1E stuff was heavy metal. Then it turned into overly-saturated, overly-saturated colours everywhere. A serious dumbing down of rules for young teenage audiences. As for the Undead, the 80s Undead where quite spooky. The 90s undead were "colourful". OMG.

WittyDroog said:

For the same reason that Lovecraft hardly ever went into detail about his monsters: it detracts from the mystery. If you want the necrons to be scary, then they must have the fear of the unknown. The more the player's understand how someone or some force tick (or mechanically work), the less scary they are.

Scary NPCs are those who have no understandable motivation and who are not bound by normal game rules but by a hidden, incomprehensible (for the players) set of of rules. Tyranids are scary to me as a player because their sole desire to consume is easily understandable.

It's funny to see how many authors in the industry do not fully comprehend the concept of the white map. Detailling everything might be good from a business perspective; but once it robs player's of mystery/speculation/freedom to insert their own stuff without fear of conflicting later official developments it hurts player's interest and therefore also business interests.

This is a general remark and not aimed specifically at the necrons debate here. Regardless of what is canon, my Necrons will be a scary army of doom if the player's ever gonna meet them. There probably won't be any negotiations.

Alex

I wouldn't really call 2nd Ed 40K a 'dumbing down' of the rules. It was more a table-top skirmish game than an multi-character RPG like 1st Ed was, but it was still an (overly) complex game. The dumbing down really only started in 3rd.

BYE

ItsUncertainWho said:

Within the boundaries of the new fluff, you can have your old C'Tan worshiping Necrons as a subset of the new Necron diversity. The only deviation from the old 'dex is they wouldn't be led by a C'Tan but rather a rogue C'Tan Shard, and thus would probably be less concerned with reaping the lifeforce* of the galaxy and more concerned with restoring their god to it's full power by releasing other Shards. At least for now, that is.

In fact, all established appearances of the C'Tan in fluff and books can be explained by rogue Shards. This even puts a fun spin on the Nightbringer novel - what if those Necrons rising up when the Nightbringer awoke weren't there to serve and protect him, but to put him down and execute the fools trying to rouse him? Also, it explains how the hell Ventris managed to intimidate a nuclear god with a bunch of grenades.

* By the way, it's one of the things that make no goddamn sense about the C'Tan. What the heck is "lifeforce"? We know it's not a soul, because those are Warp-based, and C'Tan are Warp-impaired. So what is it and how can it be harvested?

The reason Lovecraft never went into too much detail about his monsters is because the human mind wasn't supposed to be able to comprehend it, which means it's very difficult to make in miniature form. Sure, we have statues and drawings of the monsters in the mythos but none of them are actually scary, because Lovecraft didn't want them drawn or modeled. He wrote about demons who paradoxicially had a thousand faces and at the same time none at all, of screams that would recite entire tomes in seconds and speak of forbidden truths, etc. Basically things that ONLY work as a blurb of text, doesn't work in film, doesn't work in art, certainly won't work in a tabletop wargame.

The only way Necrons would work as a Lovecraftian horror is if they weren't in the game at all much like the Chaos Gods. The Gods themselves are not in the game, only their minions and manifestations, but the Gods themselves remain as the backdrop. Now, Chaos Lords certainly have personality, desires, motivations, so why can't Necron Lords have the same?

You say that scary NPCs have no understandable motivations, and yet you just said the 'Nids' motivation: To devour the galaxy. Very simple, very easy to understand. And the problem is that, as a writer, you can't just write a villain with "mysterious motivations" because then YOU don't know what the hell they're doing. When you create a world and setting you need to really know what is the point, or else you have bad guys running around being evil caricatures because they can't justify their actions in their own head. When you're writing a book or a screenplay or something that's meant for an audience to witness then you don't need to say what those motivations are, but you as the writer need to know in order to know how your bad guys act and why they act that way. This is storytelling 101. But this isn't a script or a novel, this is a game.

And besides, just because the Necrons have motivations on the whole, that doesn't mean that on a mission basis everything about them will be known. I mean even a basic game of investigating who committed a murder is full of intrigue and hidden motivations, it's not like giving an army who's background was slapdash from a paragraph in an old rulebook more effort to actually create a compelling force with realistic intentions is going to change any of the intrigue in a game.

H.B.M.C. said:

Yes in 40K. In WFB it started earlier with 4E, iirc. In combination with "OMG! Colours!" and the first steep price increases the whole course significantly turned me off.

Alex

Morangias said:

This was kind of explained with a bit of extremely vague handwavery in the original Codex, as I recall. Something about "the dance of electrical impulses" emitted by all living beings being fascinating to the C'Tan. Much as I love the original Codex, this was not it's strongest point!

My own view on C'Tan motivation is that they weren't defined by their "vampiric" traits, but by their OCD. My interpretation is that the C'Tan were superintelligent malign entites obsessed with order and control. Anything outside their absolute control was an enemy to either be suborned or destroyed. The only exception to this is the Deceiver, who combines the usual C'Tan complete lack of empathy with a sadism and cruelty that is made all the more terrifying by his near infinite intelligence.

This is very much a personal interpretation, though, and is probably not modern Codex compliant!

Couple of things I figured I'd throw in here.

1) Intelligent Necron, and ones that spend time with other species as well as the escalating abilities and responsiveness/intellect of necron forces have actually been with the fluff for a while.

Anyone who says Xenology is a horribly mangled trasheap of dumbing down fanwank needs to be shot with a porcupine gun.

Then there was the teaser about the Necron hierarchy shown in the Apocalypse book.

2) There are still metal zombies running on auto pilot as part of the necron lore. Some tomb worlds have been so damaged that the main computer has gone skynet on the place or simply can't restore the minds of those who managed to keep their awareness and personalities. Others simply haven't reached the point where the really independent personalities have emerged.

So now we also have what is effectively stage 4 (or 40,000 for all we know) where the ones who were in charge are now awakening and finding that all the toys they buried themselves with are now working. For someone who has only a high schoolers understanding of the egyptian afterlife this worked for me as the vaguely tomb kings / egyptian feel of the necrons was already there. A pharoah gets buried with his boats and servants, wakes up in the afterlife to find them already waiting for him.

3) Some necrons want to be skin and bones again and so that's one reason for their harvesting of people. They use them to experiment on to see if they can perfect the old entechment process, find out a way to restore some of their fellow necronty, and then maybe reverse it.

4)Orks are still the best race in the galaxy for when you have to annoy people that are to smart for their own good.

5)The relationship between necrons and tyrannids actually gets a bit more of an explanation. Which provides all kinds of fodder for Deathwatch games.