Necrons: Long delayed eureka moment

[Necron2.0]

OK, so it finally dawned on me why of late the fizz has gone out in my frosty mug of Necron love. The models are great and I love to paint them. I love to play the army. I love watching my opponent's scouts scream "AIIIEEEEEE!!!" as my scarabs grind them into paste. Still, something has always just felt a little flat about them of late. Then it occurred to me last night just what that was. 40K has always been described to me as a game of "the bad guys versus the evil guys." Well, it just occurred to me the new(-ish) rules have made me into ..... the bad guys.

WTF, man?!! I used to be something. I used to be pure @#$! EVIL!!! And I mean real evil too, not some kind of "Ooh, he touched me with his noodly appendage and now I have roid-rage" or "Fear me! I'm an Emo/Space Goth (also corrupted by his noodly appendage) who likes to run into battle naked and die horribly!" No, I used to be the only purely and authentically evil race in the game. I was a soulless animated puppet, imprinted with the death rattle of an ancient devoured race, burning with hatred for life itself, and bent on feeding all that life to my twisted evil gods - REAL gods mind, gods older than life itself, older than time, birthed not from the fancies of mortal creatures, but in the first sticky-tingly-excretion of reality itself.

Now? I'm Nelson Muntz. I'm Bender with a zap-gun. I'm a galactic bully with a flesh fetish, out to take everyone's lunch money.

It was a slow burn, but I finally realized what's taken the fizz out of my favorite can of Whoop-Azz. Oh, I'll still pop the cap on it, no worries about that. It's just now I know why it comes more as a whoompf than a bang.

[eldargal]

Necrons weren't evil, you can't be a soulless puppet and be evil. They were a tool of the C'tan who were just so stupidly ridiculous it made everything else in 40k look sensible. Life survived only because the C'tan/Necrons got bored and went to sleep, basically. It was like a 12 year old read watched Terminator 2 and decided to make a faction that did everything better than everyone. The whole thing was a trainwreck. The new background is much better, if only because it is their own, not just eldar mythology/background with them awkwardly inserted into it.

I can't emphasise enough how much I loathed the old Necron background, it was an utter disgrace.

[Sly]

I was very disappointed that they failed to insert Fred Saberhagen's Berzerker concept in as the Necrons. That would have made much more sense, and been an excellent "pure evil" faction without risking any of the fallacies that both the old and the new Necron fluff contains.

[Cursed13]

Eldargal, you have no idea what you are talking about. The new Necron background is garbage. Utter rubbish. Even worse than the old background. The C'tan didn't "get bored", they Enslaver plague forced them into hibernation, the Eldar had them on the ropes, nearly defeated even, their empire was crumbling at the time of the great sleep. They needed to enter stasis and wait out the other races, to return to a distracted galaxy in turmoil so that they could easily retake it and have an abundant reserve of chattle uncorrupted by Enslavers.
I don't know what Necron army you saw, but the Necrons were far from being better at everything than everyone else in the last codex. They were slow, their weapons were short ranged, they could barely fight in melee. The only good thing about them was that their guns had a neat trick, they could stand back up and teleport around. But now with their new book, they're faster than Eldar, they melee like Space Wolves, and still have all the old returning tricks.
As for the C'tan being "stupidly ridiculous", that's perhaps the most asinine part. They were conscious held in the corona of stars. As far as we know, consciousness is nothing more than energy, and what better than a star for energy? They were born of the galaxy, with the powers of the galaxy. Seems pretty natural to me. No more ridiculous than the Eldar ancients, who somehow managed to create technology that allowed them to build tunnels in the warp. Tunnels, in the Warp! How stupidly ridiculous is that?! No more than C'tan I would think.
The fact that the Necrons and the Eldar were so interconnected made it incredible, it was far better than what you give it credit for. It was hardly a trainwreck, maybe not perfect, but it was a solid foundation of what could have been brilliant, whereas Matt Ward's creation is a plain mess. Just because you feel the Eldar were unjustly "robbed" of their oldest race award doesn't mean that the Necrons background was any worse or less ridiculous.

[bfmusashi]

Kind of makes the C'tan look like chumps when they couldn't handle a simple Enslaver outbreak.

[ElectricPaladin]

I'm not a Necron player - never will be - but I basically agree with Eldargal's sentiment. Whether or not she is 100% accurate in her portrayal of the old Necrons, the new Necrons have some nuance, some pathos. They've made mistakes, and they will compound those mistakes, and the galaxy would be better off without them... but you can kinda see where they're coming from, if you squint. The old Necrons were boring. They marched, they shot, and they did it all because this one dude - who you may or may not have put in your army, by the way - told them to.

If you want a faction who are just unrepentant d*cks, you still have options. You've got 'Nids, Chaos Marines, Chaos Daemons, Dark Eldar... They're all still pretty much jerks with only the barest hint of a point of view.

And can't you still go all Destroyer Plague and make your Necrons the kind who want to kill everything just because watching fleshbags die gives them a happy?

[Dlatrex]

Hmmm. When looking at the perspectives of the two stages of lore, if Cursed16 is Caesium and Eldergal Fluorine then I'd probably be Iodine. For the most part I am very happy with the direction the lore has taken. I do not begrudge the original story arch: it was unrevealed enough that the inconsistencies found with the different representations in the eldar, necron, and other codexes did not feel completely at odds with one another. There was also something very reassuring and 'pure' about the evil: there was no opportunity for discussion or compromise, especially with the Nightbringer.

The loss that Necron2.0 feels is most prominently the fall of the C'tan from their status as absolute bad-assery, to being overthrown by a bunch of roboboys. It is a shame, I know. I did love the concept of material gods to juxtapose the immaterial gods, and their collective malice at the affront of *life* was a nice twist. On the whole this thrust could have run a little to close to the tyranids: threat of extermination of all life across all of the galaxy.

I grieved the loss of the *gravitas* of the C'tan, and initially eschewed the new lore. That said, it has grown on me quite a bit, and the expansion it has offered Necron players for story potential is tremendous. Previously, with the exception of which of the two C'tan lead the Army, there was utter blandness across the Necron forces: sure you get different tomb worlds, but the motivations and actions of all of them are going to be predictable to a fault. They really do feel like a 'race' now, and still pose enough hostility and intolerance for me to be perfectly happy. In the small-medium scale this should cause almost no change needed: you can easily still play soulless robots who do not care to negociate if you want. On the galactic stage, the story is different; time will tell how much respect the Necron's will warrant in the lore going forward.

[eldargal]

Eldargal, you have no idea what you are talking about. The new Necron background is garbage. Utter rubbish. Even worse than the old background. The C'tan didn't "get bored", they Enslaver plague forced them into hibernation, the Eldar had them on the ropes, nearly defeated even, their empire was crumbling at the time of the great sleep. They needed to enter stasis and wait out the other races, to return to a distracted galaxy in turmoil so that they could easily retake it and have an abundant reserve of chattle uncorrupted by Enslavers.
I don't know what Necron army you saw, but the Necrons were far from being better at everything than everyone else in the last codex. They were slow, their weapons were short ranged, they could barely fight in melee. The only good thing about them was that their guns had a neat trick, they could stand back up and teleport around. But now with their new book, they're faster than Eldar, they melee like Space Wolves, and still have all the old returning tricks.
As for the C'tan being "stupidly ridiculous", that's perhaps the most asinine part. They were conscious held in the corona of stars. As far as we know, consciousness is nothing more than energy, and what better than a star for energy? They were born of the galaxy, with the powers of the galaxy. Seems pretty natural to me. No more ridiculous than the Eldar ancients, who somehow managed to create technology that allowed them to build tunnels in the warp. Tunnels, in the Warp! How stupidly ridiculous is that?! No more than C'tan I would think.
The fact that the Necrons and the Eldar were so interconnected made it incredible, it was far better than what you give it credit for. It was hardly a trainwreck, maybe not perfect, but it was a solid foundation of what could have been brilliant, whereas Matt Ward's creation is a plain mess. Just because you feel the Eldar were unjustly "robbed" of their oldest race award doesn't mean that the Necrons background was any worse or less ridiculous.
You might want to actually read the background.

Eldar were never the oldest race to begin with, that's just a straw man put out by Necron players trying to defend the indefensible, ie that the old background was written by a 12 year old terminator fanboy.


In the small-medium scale this should cause almost no change needed: you can easily still play soulless robots who do not care to negociate if you want. On the galactic stage, the story is different; time will tell how much respect the Necron's will warrant in the lore going forward.
This. What some of the hyperventilating fanboys have failed to realise is that you can still have your soulless killing machiens serving the whims of their technological gods. They just aren't all doing that.

[Cpt Codpiece]

i was never truly sold on the c'tan in a playable level in 40k. its like having primarc..... oh wait :)

but seriously a god (not just an avatar of one), actually being in battle and represented at a skirmish level? nope they dropped the ball there.

as far as the entire back story goes, the war in heaven still happened, just the c'tan were over thrown and trapped in little prisons by their puppets. the ward lore while not the most thought out is just a refinement of the previuos codex info, the guys that make the universe had to have gave him the guidelines to follow and then ok it.

and if you want to stick to the roots of the necrons you are a choas android from space crusade. a chaos android! not a necron.... android

[Necron2.0]

The loss that Necron2.0 feels is most prominently the fall of the C'tan from their status as absolute bad-assery, to being overthrown by a bunch of roboboys.

In general, this, although it doesn't fully cover it. I do think the conversation has been taken off on a slight tangent however. As I'd said, my biggest beef with the current background (other than, contrary to what has been said, it makes far less sense than the original did) is that it turns me from being truly evil into just another bad guy. Bad guys can be reasoned with, understood. Evil ... well true evil is mindless, thoughtless, careless, insensitive. True evil must be contained or destroyed, there are no other choices.

[Mr Mystery]

You can bargain with the C'Tan, after all, the Necrontyr did. Just because it's not terribly advisable, much like nailing one's head to the table for a bet, doesn't mean the option isn't there.

Me? I really like the new background. Necrons are suitably monomaniacal now. And there is also the hint that the Necrons, or at least a certain Cryptek with a time altering fetish, eventually become the very race that damned them. My army now has a soul of sorts.

[Kawauso]

I don't know that I agree with your notion of what constitutes true evil.

True evil, to me, would be more like the Inquisitor who condemns an entire world to death as sort of an 'easy' way out, rather than fighting to evacuate people, etc.

Hitler comes across as a lot more evil than the Hive Mind, to me - the Hive Mind is just terrifying and alien.

I don't think the new Necron background does anything to completely axe the old, though. You can still have a crazy-powerful C'tan shard (just say it's a stronger shard than most) 'in charge' of a Tomb World's forces. Maybe the old fluff for the Deceiver was just describing a number of events in which a shard of him was involved. You can still have Tomb Worlds that are peopled by soulless machines with no interest in negotiation or anything other than pursuit of the goals of the Red Harvest. There are still examples like that in the new book's background.

I love the new material, personally, because it branched out and gave players the opportunity/excuse to do more than that with the background. Now Necrons can have as much or as little personality as you want them to have, and either end of that spectrum (and everything in-between) is fully supported by the fluff.

And I really like the space pharaoh dynasty side of things, myself.

[Rev. Tiberius Jackhammer]

The new background made them too human for my tastes. 40k already has plenty of alien armies that are simple human caricatures, the Necrons added more to the setting as "mostly mindless pawns of the star-gods" than they do as another fractious semi-empire.

Plus, the humanization seemed to lead to some disappointing model designs - back when they were automatons, fast attack Necrons were the awesomesauce destroyers, but now they've been pushed into the background in favor of Necrons with jetpacks and Necrons riding bikes. Would've loved it if the new 'dex instead released the Destroyers with expanded weapon options instead of Tomb Blades, and released a close combat variant instead of Praetorians.

The most disappointing part was how unnecessary the retcon was - the fluff already featured high-ranking Necrons with personality (Xenology, for one) - instead of rebooting the army, why not just introduce the concept of "renegade" Necrons, Necrons who were revived from their sleep before their controlling C'tan was (those controlled by the Outsider and the Void Dragon), and now seek to free their kind from enslavement?

[Deadlift]

Personally, I liked how the necrons were portrayed. But I like the new fluff to. I suppose to me they are both viable and you can build your army to suit the previous incarnation or the new one. I will admit though I am an easy person to please as far as both Codex Space Marines and Necrons go, I tend to lap up the new toys and books for both very willingly. I don't really care if some new units are perceived as cack to play with either because to me they will look cool and at some point will end up on the table, if I can make them work for me "cool" if not well they will still be part of my collection ;)

[Dlatrex]

The most disappointing part was how unnecessary the retcon was - the fluff already featured high-ranking Necrons with personality (Xenology, for one) - instead of rebooting the army, why not just introduce the concept of "renegade" Necrons, Necrons who were revived from their sleep before their controlling C'tan was (those controlled by the Outsider and the Void Dragon), and now seek to free their kind from enslavement?

To turn the dime on its head can we not have this sort of thing as a plurality if no longer a majority? I think that the current iteration of the lore leaves plenty of ambiguity for the C'tan and their role in the existing Necrons. Are some C'tan awake, intact, and continuing to amass a Necrontyr army? The Deceiver and the Nightbringer could still have huge armies at their disposal, even if it did mean that this was to the tremendous chagrin of the Overlords and Nemesories. What you called the 'renegades' could just serve as a majority as far as the absolute count of Necron across the Imperium is concerned. What probably most galls the fans of the previous portrayal of the C'tan was not just their overthrow, but their demotion into mere 'elites' within the organization of the codex. Again, from a background perspective I can see no problem with having the Nightbringer head his own army including Necron Lords and maybe even Cryteks in his Thrall: play the army you want to play! :cool:

[The Sovereign]

The new background made them too human for my tastes. 40k already has plenty of alien armies that are simple human caricatures, the Necrons added more to the setting as "mostly mindless pawns of the star-gods" than they do as another factitious semi-empire.

Plus, the humanization seemed to lead to some disappointing model designs - back when they were automatons, fast attack Necrons were the awesomesauce destroyers, but now they've been pushed into the background in favor of Necrons with jetpacks and Necrons riding bikes. Would've loved it if the new 'dex instead released the Destroyers with expanded weapon options instead of Tomb Blades, and released a close combat variant instead of Praetorians.

The most disappointing part was how unnecessary the retcon was - the fluff already featured high-ranking Necrons with personality (Xenology, for one) - instead of rebooting the army, why not just introduce the concept of "renegade" Necrons, Necrons who were revived from their sleep before their controlling C'tan was (those controlled by the Outsider and the Void Dragon), and now seek to free their kind from enslavement?

Everything this guy said. Space robots with a human soul adds too much to the equation, and IMO muddies the character of the army. But I'm not a Necrons player, that's just my two cents.