Hi,

since I'm doing the Logician twist for my next campaign I was wondering if anybody knew more about the so called Men of Iron from the Dark Age of Technology.

I already looked here:
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Men_of_Iron

So if anybody can roll out some stats for me that would be great, I have no idea how powerfull they are or what they are capable of.
I do know they are supposed to be extinct but I gather Logicians could perhaps find one or two.

GrtZ,

Santiago...

They weren't all destroyed during the war?

IIRC Gaunt ran into some early on in the Tanith series. From the description they seemed very Necron like.

There were two different sets of 'Iron Men' that Cain encontered.

The first were the original sets that had been standing dormant since the dark age of technology. (Plainly not Necron-like at all.) The second set that he had to briefly engage, were the warp-corrupted ones the also chaos-infected STC he found began to churn them out. Unlike Necrons these were not once organic beings turned into cyborgs, but twisted AI versions of Iron men.

The confusion for some might lie in the fact that AI's were up to point of say, Dune-level sentience (which is where GW got the idea from them with the whole rebellion against machines and all.) They were not once organic beings, just a race onto themselves. That being said necon-theory could have been formed in part due to such living Ai's in thier prescence.

But anyways, Iron men...very dangerous and very tough.They seem to move slowly at a pace, so I could say most of thier stats save Fellowship, and Agility would be quite near the 75-90 percentile range. (The corrupted versions seemed to miss on occaision).

Actually, the whole "Men of Stone" and "Men of Iron" thing has been one of the more ill-defined portions of 40K canon, though they would definitely not be the same as the Necrons.

Gaunt's encounter with the Men of Iron was fairly Necron-like, so I understand the confusion.

I always imagined the men of Iron to look a bit like the abc robot from the Judge Dredd film

As for stats, hard as nails with some fleeting AI Int. left and a high armour. I can't speak for other resources (not that I think there are much) but in First & Only the Ghosts las-fire was bouncing doing nothing. They had to hack away the cables to defeat one whilst it smacked them about.

The ones in First and Only were all corrupted by chaos. I'm guessing the men of iron would be roughly equivalent to a space marine. They were built by humans to be super solider type things...so i guess you could use a space marines stats. Only problem is armour. maybe some types of weapon just wont work like las.

My personal take on the Iron Men is to move more into transhumanist concepts than the more obvious "robots rebel against humanity" approach. Of course, I'm not say that this is an less cliche.

Thus, for me, the Iron Men straddle the concept of human and machine... It's not the more popular Terminator or Butlerian Jihad model, but it works for me if for no other reason than it explores concepts of "man/machine" that I'm interested in!

Kage

There's a brief mention in DotDG in the section dealing with the Logicians - specifically the Silica Animus heretek.

I'd rather keep the Men Of Iron a MacGuffin, meaning that the Logicians are trying to raise one (and considering it's one of the main technologies from the DAoT, one will be entirely enough for a lot of trouble to happen) and the PCs have to thwart them. What the MoI itself can do is irrelevant - it's one of the big mysteries of the Dark Age. Nothing you can depict in the rules comes close to the imaginations of your players what it might be.

As Steven King said (well, paraphrased): "When you open the door and the ten-feet-spider is out and attacking the players, that's almost comforting. They will take a deep breath of relaxation and think to themselves 'Well, at least it wasn't a fifty- feet-spider.' "

Well, that's certainly one approach that Dark Heresy seems to try to live up to. And, for the most part, succeeds.

Then again, I find that imagination really gets going when there is some substance - some framework - to work upon.

Kage

I would reccomend that if you do have a Man of Iron active, and it is deciding to go Naked Lunch on everybody, that you have it not be the Terminator. Indeed, smashing it might be relatively easy, depending on how you choose to design it. I'd play up the high levels of intelligence and low cunning, and make it swift and agile to boot. Moving rapidly and quietly, and barely being sighted before its gone, makes for a powerfully frightening foe, even if it doesn't actually hit especially hard. (Give it a needler and have it hit kneecaps at first, to handicap foes and to judge how much its foes are concerned with each other, how militarily they behave, which foe cares about which foe most, etc.)

Considering how closely human technology is entwined with the necrons as per Mechanicum and the Dragon, I see the iron men as an attempt by humanity to emulate the sleeping necrons.

So I don't have a problem with them appearing a bit like necrons although I think that stylistically they would look more like the necron pariah than a normal warrior. More upright, less like a skeleton/

They weren't designed to scare people after all, so they aren't going to appear as giant skeletons. They were luxury items and a slave caste, so some would be shiny and sleak, others chunky and functional. Depending on the type of iron man their stats would be variable. The companion version may be less armoured and untrained in combat, but have a large database of information and an AI designed to 'converse' with humans. The workers would be heavy, armoured and slow, with additional tools for their original functions.

However, the rebellious factions of the AI may have set up automated factories to make combat robots, so there would also be heavy gun robots as well.

Personally I would treat them as servitors in terms of Machine Traits etc, with different stats and talents based on their manufactured designation. Pleasuredroid 5000 would obviously not have as high a WS as Combatdroid DX. Although personally I think they should ALL have a high BS. It's all about trajectories etc, and machines are pretty **** good at that.

Hellebore

Just a thought, you could take a page from SLA Industries and have them be along the lines of the Digger the Manchine. Serial-killer robot, once clothed in flesh, kills to replace the parts that have died.

AIs would have foreign, xeno if you would, perspectives and motivations. There's too many examples to even remember, but I've always liked the SLA one.

Hellebore said:

Less Terminator, more Cylon, perhaps?

Oan Mkoll said:

Like THIS perhaps?

Edit: fixed the link

Edit Again: since the image dosn't have this info on it, the image is Digger by Clint Langley from Clint Langley's site HERE

Meh. That looks more like a Necron Flayed One to me.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Yes, or perhaps more Star Wars, or even Metropolis or Cybermen.

Something less than human without the obvious psychological imagery the necrons have. The war models on the other hand may have looked more intimidating.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

This is one of those things that set off my "Disbelieve Klaxon," if only because I'm not overtly fond of wangling the C'tan into every little bit of the 'fluff.' Either them or the Old Ones.

To each his or her own, of course.

Kage

Actually in this instance I'm happy about it because of time and technology reasons. I've never been satisfied with the speed at which humanity advanced technologically compared to other races in the galaxy that have existed for millions of years. The same for the tau. So in my mind humanity MUST have stolen alien tech and retroengineered it or been inspired by it. The tau found an alien ship on their moon and have been strongly influenced by 'mysterious' outside forces.

So in this instance I'm happy with it because it provides the means for a race to reach technology levels equal to million year old races in only 20,000 years.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Which, for me, they never achieved anyway. More, if you start looking critically at technological evolution then the thorny issue of cultural evolution raises its ugly head. The evolution of the Imperium over the past 10,000 years, for example...

Kage

Actually in this instance I'm happy about it because of time and technology reasons. I've never been satisfied with the speed at which humanity advanced technologically compared to other races in the galaxy that have existed for millions of years. The same for the tau. So in my mind humanity MUST have stolen alien tech and retroengineered it or been inspired by it. The tau found an alien ship on their moon and have been strongly influenced by 'mysterious' outside forces.

Actually, I consider that much less of a problem: The only party that provides a logical problem are the Eldar. If you assume them to be technologically stagnant, everyone else falls into place. The Tau had about the same time as humanity for their rapid development, Chaos is just an offshoot of humanity, orks are retaining their memories genetically and don't develop, tyranids merely evolve and Necrons are generally treated as quite superior in technological regards, losing battles only because of their low numbers and the fact that they are still not fully awake.

Hellebore said:

I'd lean toward having some 'replicant' type modles just to include the 'machine that looks human' heretech issue. And that would cover a wide range of MoI's, some more combat and others more task oriented. In fact, I'm tempted to run a set of missions with an anti-climatic ending... something on the order of "the last Logican Initiate falls to your las-fire just as their high priest shouts; "You are too late! Behold the might of a Man of Iron!" A humanoid shape rises off a nearby table, white sheeting falling from atop it. It looks about with an alert eye and speaks; "Ah, we have guests! Pardon the mess, apparently the maid is off today. I'll have that tended to momentarily. May I take your coat, sir?"

Sounds fun - Kryten from Red Dwarf springs to mind !

or you could go Marvin from Hitch Hikers - "imagine if you were a Man of Iron with a brain the size of planet and they asked you kill to a few humans..............Existance, you have got to hate it"

New-style Cybermen definitely fit my image of Men of Iron. I suppose Cybermen are actually very heavily modified servitors in the 40k verse though, what with the organic brains and all .