Hammer & Anvil (40K) (Yes Spoilers)

[Srelex]

Also I must be one of the few people in the world who actually like much of what 5th edition did to the Necrons. I never particularily cared for the 'undead robots who collect souls for the thirsty space vampires' because it had no real depth or character. Tomb Kings isn't a MASSIVE change or neccesarily the best, but by 40K standards its probably better than what they could have done. and there's still room for the 'Feeding Space Vampires' angle too.

You're not the only one--Fall of Damnos was the first time I actually found the Necrons interesting in any sort of way. Besides, the Newcron stuff gave us Trazyn the Infinite, who more than makes up for any oddities the changes may have brought.

[Grumman]

Also I must be one of the few people in the world who actually like much of what 5th edition did to the Necrons. I never particularily cared for the 'undead robots who collect souls for the thirsty space vampires' because it had no real depth or character. Tomb Kings isn't a MASSIVE change or neccesarily the best, but by 40K standards its probably better than what they could have done.

The biggest sin of the 5th edition Necrons - apart from the bits that just make no sense - is that it undermines their relationship to other species. The Necrons can have depth and character, but the Imperium should never have seen it. No matter how nuanced the Necrons were, to humans they should have remained boogeymen that appear without warning, slaughter or abduct people with their teleportation-based guns and then vanish.

and there's still room for the 'Feeding Space Vampires' angle too.

Not really - the "C'tan as broken slaves" rather poisoned the well in that regard. Being enslaved to eldritch creatures that the rest of your people have already enslaved is just kind of pitiful.

The approach I was hoping for was for variation in how strongly the Necrons were "indoctrinated". At one end you'd have thralls to the C'tan, who could channel their power (like Dawn of War's Essence of the C'tan ability) but lacked the capacity to think or act for themselves. At the other you'd have sentient Necrons, too distant from their masters to channel their power but with the wits to interpret their commands creatively. They'd still harvest life for the C'tan without question, but could also conduct their own experiments on the side. The former would get the old C'tan models as foci of their power, the latter would get special characters and minor lords.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I think the last great portrayal of the necrons was in Dead Men Walking. The only dialogue spoken by a necron is "Surrender and die."

[Darth Hoth]

Lets just not talk about Henry Zou or Redemption Corps.

WHAT? You mean you think 40K didn't need more mentions of Picatinny rails or metrics I think my favorite was .45 caliber being a 'low power' or 'small' round in 40K or something.

I would have thought they ought to be, given the bores of the guns the Guard and Space Marines are generally lugging around in the illustrations?

Yeah. The problem with both is that they're largely contrivances to drive the plot. Baeder has to be seen as heroically turning to chaos or being forced to, but its done in such a hamfisted manner that the Ecclesiarhc needed a waxed mustache to twirl going MUAHAHAHA as he laid out his plans. He didn't really even *feel* all that religious - more like an Administratum drone really.

I thought he was just a bloody hypocrite, because the evil fundamentalists in military fiction tend to be?

Otherwise, he actually struck me as fairly restrained, given the standards set for villains in Warhammer fiction otherwise. Are there any at all who are not either baby-eating blackguards or mindless mutants?

In my opinion, Zou deserves some praise for at least attempting to explain why Chaos can hold any attraction to people. (Because, really, Chaos tends to be so repulsively evil that it makes you wonder what kind of retards it is who can ever "fall" to it in the first place.) Although then, again, you have the aspect of ham-fistedness to consider, as noted.

Oh, and I agree with most of the others on the matter of the Necrons.

[Simon_Jester]

40k Chaos has a very strange thing going on; they actually manage to get it make some sense that it can be totally unappealing to us while still reeling in the cultists.

The Imperial hierarchy is actually very distant- all these things that we're so familiar with like the Space Marines are very thinly spread, to the point where on many planets they might as well be rumors as far as the average man is concerned. The Imperium only becomes heavily involved in any one place when something very strange happens, so for the great majority of people living in the setting, local issues and local government matter much more than they do to us. We think of the Imperial hierarchy because we're looking at the whole galaxy, and any one planet only matters to us as the backdrop for the Imperial Guard fighting giant monsters. But from the bottom up, the universe looks like your planetary governor is in charge and answers only to a nebulous and indifferent quasi-divine authority.

From there, all sorts of strange ideas, variations on the theme of Emperor-worship or something-else-worship, or attitudes toward technology or certain pleasures, emerge easily. Chaos benefits from this, because at the low end, a chaos cult isn't necessarily all that different from a social club. People join without a clear idea of what they're joining, or where it can take them. And Chaos can screw with people's heads and draw them deeper and deeper into madness and folly. To use a cliché word, it's "memetic:" having a Chaos-related idea in your brain affects your brain, corrosively. It's corrosive to your body, it's corrosive to your ethical standards, it's corrosive to common sense itself.

So Chaos infiltrators can run these front organizations to recruit people, while steadily drawing their existing members farther into the web, until they're four-eyed mutants or sadomasochistic hermaphrodites or blood-crazed berserkers, because Chaos is actively contaminating their brains, making them crazier or stupider, more willing to accept each new change, as they undergo each old change.

Anyone can look at the extreme end of this process, the "baby-eating blackguards and mindless mutants" and say "this is terrible, these are the lost and the damned, I want no part of this." But it takes a high-level perspective to spot at a glance that the dance club you're joining is a Slaaneshi front, or that this charity is actually run by some very well-concealed Nurglites. The 40k Imperium doesn't teach anyone to recognize these things, either, aside from their inquisitors and some other high-level servants, so they can operate almost unopposed except by the general prejudices of the people, as instilled by the Ecclesiarchy.

[Darth Hoth]

Chaos as a mentally degenerative and self-reinforcing feedback mechanism is fairly much in the fluff. Where the Chaos corruption is a covert and gradual process, that makes sense. I would think that to some degree, Zou was aiming for the sort of thing you describe in his book. (Most of the rank and file of the guerrillas in Flesh & Iron were basically just pawns, and only a hardened core cadre was actually indoctrinated into Chaos and mutated by the Marines who supervised the uprising. And even then the Chaos ideology was mixed up in a blend of their native religion.) Although it would work less well where the process is quicker and more blatant.

[Simon_Jester]

Okay. Hm. [thinks]

Generally, the quicker and more blatant the process, the more intense the magic involved in making it work.

I think if you look at it, you'd find that there's a sort of critical... let's call it a critical black mass. Some density of Chaos devotion beyond which the entire society starts to lose touch with normalcy and sanity, fast. You get that when people start summoning powerful daemons, when a large enough percentage of the population has joined the front organizations that they can rebel and turn over power to the Chaos magocracy that's been running the front organizations, when it becomes practical for the Chaos cultists to start converting people by the sword. Conversion by the sword works very well for Chaos because they can make people worship them, if only they have enough of an access port to get into their heads by.

The transition from 'mild Chaos problem' where the cultists are still trying to lay low and 'huge Chaos problem' where there are gibbering mutant beasties and power-maddened sorcerors all over the place can seem very rapid, because the process accelerates once you get past critical mass.

Plus, 40k books are practically always war stories, so we almost always see Chaos as the enemy in a big war. To motivate the big war, the Chaos insurgency has to be large enough to draw the attention of the Imperium's interstellar hierarchy. And if it's already that big... well, no wonder the story only starts after the situation has blown hopelessly out of control and you've got demons and crazy people running around all over the place.

Take the Gaunt's Ghosts novels- they're participating in a major Imperial offensive to retake a large cluster of worlds that have been overrun by Chaos, and to relieve the nearby worlds in danger of becoming overrun. A few hundred years earlier everything was normal in that sector, according to the books, so what happened? Presumably, whatever Chaos infiltration had been sneaking around there hit critical mass. Even there, you see varying degrees of corruption and madness, and a sprinkling of antagonists who aren't really affiliated with Chaos at all.

[Talk738kno]

Okay. Hm. [thinks]

Generally, the quicker and more blatant the process, the more intense the magic involved in making it work.

I think if you look at it, you'd find that there's a sort of critical... let's call it a critical black mass. Some density of Chaos devotion beyond which the entire society starts to lose touch with normalcy and sanity, fast. You get that when people start summoning powerful daemons, when a large enough percentage of the population has joined the front organizations that they can rebel and turn over power to the Chaos magocracy that's been running the front organizations, when it becomes practical for the Chaos cultists to start converting people by the sword. Conversion by the sword works very well for Chaos because they can make people worship them, if only they have enough of an access port to get into their heads by.

The transition from 'mild Chaos problem' where the cultists are still trying to lay low and 'huge Chaos problem' where there are gibbering mutant beasties and power-maddened sorcerors all over the place can seem very rapid, because the process accelerates once you get past critical mass.

Even that doesn't always happen though, look at Qsal, its fairly normal considering its located in a freaking warp storm.

[Simon_Jester]

Q'Sal retains an appearance of normalcy because it suits the sorcerors who run the place to have a technological civilization. It's far over to the "power-maddened sorcerors" end of the scale, rather than the "gibbering mutant beastie" end.

In general, yes you can have normalish societies that sort of persist while coexisting with Chaos- but the usual dynamic seems to be that of infiltration, corrosion, corruption, and collapse into madness.

[Kuja]

Indeed. The days of inscrutable, soulless abominations bent on the horrifying, inexorable annihilation of all life as we know it, powered by technology so far beyond the ken of mere man that to know it is to know an unknowable abyss of insanity are... well, gone.

Good. Fuck 'em.


Yeah I said it.


Fuck the old 'crons. They were completely fuckin' boring; soulless was the perfect word for 'em. They never did anything but kill stuff (because we don't have the rest of 40K for that) and their sole schtick was "Unstoppable Killing Machines" (except when they could be stopped).

Now, the C'Tan could be interesting, but their appearances in the fluff were so vanishingly small I think I can count the books I own with a C'Tan appearance on one finger.

With the new setup the 'crons actually get some frickin' personality, and really, it it such a big deal that they're now Tomb Kings in Space? We've already got Space Elves, Space Orks, Space Dwarves (NEVAR FORGET), Space Werewolves, Space Russians, Space Arabs, the list goes on and on and on.

And hell, the players who want to keep their inscrutable killing machines can do so, since the new codex gives us necrons that were damaged during hibernation and so act like the killbots for the olden days.

[Ahriman238]

One thing I liked about Fulgrim was how subtle the corruption was. Everyone carried on with their lives, and if they were more determined after the Laer campaign, who could blame them? But their greater attention to duty slowly turned into obsession, their ennui with their lives increased and they began to seek more and more intense sensations until you wind up with people cutting themselves, painting with blood and shit, engaging in orgies. Then there's a concert that summons Slaneeshi Daemons who slay the musicians and the Space Marines in the audience... leap onto the stage and keep on playing. Reading the book it was a bit scary to me how minor every individual step seemed until you stepped back and looked at what they were really doing.

For that matter, when teaching commisar-cadets how to sniff out corruption in the ranks, Cain tells them to look out for the soldiers who excel on the battlefield starting to gather together, forming an elite cadre (especially if they claim to be a brotherhood of warriors) and especially to take notice if they start to favor melee combat.