The_Reptile_
Jolly Good
- Location
- THE PITS OF HELL. Also known as Connecticut.
You will take Trazyn from my cold, dead, metal hands ya haters.
I am not paying money to do homeworkRead The Infinite and the Divine and still tell me that.
If so, so be it.
Trazyn is fine. Most (not all, but most) of the Necron Lord special characters are fine and worthy additions. It's the rest of the changes I'm not so hot on.You will take Trazyn from my cold, dead, metal hands ya haters.
Fair enough, want me to buy it for you?
To be candid, I don't really spend money on Warhammer anymore. My days of really digging the setting for its own sake are long done, so my interest in going through Black Library novels is pretty low. Things like Maugan's quest sometimes catch my eye, but that's because I know Maugan and can expect his take to dig into some issues that do interest me - I'm there for the author more than the subject, unusual as that is for me.Fair enough, want me to buy it for you?
Edit: (I may just really like this book and wish to spend more in the faint hope that gw will fund more Xenos novels like it)
So I missed them earlier, if you stated them, and I'm always up for bagging on GW, but what specifically were the changes you disliked?
I honestly have never been much of a fan of the mindless life exterminating necrons. Narratively, they fill a very similar role as tyranids do, simply from a different direction.Speaking as someone who (ages back) got the first Necron codex (as hilariously thin and unbalanced it was. It was actually impossible to make a legal 500 pt army with the available units) I also really disliked the whole Newcron changes. The Necrons were meant to be an army of untiring merciless terminators marching in their war to completely exterminate all life. They weren't a civilisation, they were a civilisation's tragic and mindless tombstone. Giving them any characters or personalities spat in the face of that.
Now, I've considerably mellowed on Newcrons. I know why they had to make the changes (under old lore it would be impossible for Necrons to fight each other), and whilst I definitely don't like all of it, there's some fun stuff in there, and Trazyn is hilarious obviously.
Still think they should bring back Pariahs, as they were honestly the coolest looking unit they had, and there's no lore reason for removing them. Also think the original Wraith design was much better.
I probably should have like, established what my gripes were, yeah...So I missed them earlier, if you stated them, and I'm always up for bagging on GW, but what specifically were the changes you disliked?
At least design wise, GW seems to agree with you, given that the 9th ed Necrons model line revamp did some serious backtracking in that regard. With Illuminor szeras going from a dude with some crab appendages to a much larger monstrosity. When adding a new dedicated melee unit, instead of just doing what the original newcrons release did and adding some dudes with swords and boards, you got tri-legged freaks with blades for arms. And of course, they literally just brought back the original Wraith design as a new unit.Second, Oldcrons were inhuman. Alien, yes, but Eldar are alien; they're still recognisably people. Oldcrons had a clinical monstrosity and an atrophied sense of self that shone through in their unit design. Their units had a modularity that said things about how little they thought of their bodies, suggestive of their status as slaves to something beyond them that cared nothing for them; Oldcrons weren't alive, and they consistently carried that forwards into their unit design, modifying their bodies to create new units, using unmanned ships and vehicles without crews. Newcrons don't. As far as Newcrons are concerned, they're just metal people, and you can see the difference in these design philosophies when you compare old and new takes on similar unit roles.
Premise: "We need a fast, hovering skirmisher."
Oldcrons: "Okay, we'll make a flying body and replace one arm with a heavy cannon."
Newcrons: "Let's make ourselves some jetbikes and strap guns to the undercarriage like everybody else."
Premise: "We need a transport to deploy us deep into battle."
Oldcrons: "Okay, we have ubiquitous teleportation technology, we'll just use that."
Newcrons: "Let's make a hover barge so we can all pose on it! And it'll need a pilot, obviously."
With Oldcrons you can see why some of the Mechanicus are so obsessed with them, because they're such an extreme implementation of the principle of the being in service to the device. Form follows function to the point that form is totally subject to function. Now it's UFO's and Egyptian barges crossed with WWII beach landers. There's nothing alien about them, anymore. They're just people, when so much of the allure and the appeal of Necrons used to be that they haven't been people for a very, very long time.
It's a step in the right direction, yeah. Kind of too little, too late, though, and if anything it just highlights the problem, because it raises the spectre of like-This and the attempt to reintroduce horror to the necron motivations with the Pariah Nexus plotline, shows a lot of effort trying to get back at least some of the best parts of oldcrons without losing the newcron's character.
also likeI'm not a huge fan of the Egyptian aesthetic myself. It feels random and grafted on. The tomb kings are like a big cohesive whole as a faction which is why it works but it was just stapled onto the necrons and undermined how weird and cool they were.
That's literally just what gw does to xenos factions not named Tau. Craftworld eldar still have models older than the Tau and Necron lines, Tyranids haven't seen a new model since early 2014, Dark Eldar have only gotten character models and incubi since their relaunch that was the same edition as newcrons, and of course Genestealer cults were a faction that had been long squatted for decades until they were brought back, and Orks while they get a steady parade of new models the basic boy kit is 20 years old now.Notably, Newcrons have since been all but abandoned for another decade since then, so I guess the revival worked real well, huh?
This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't change the fact that Necrons have been on the worse end of the scale. Not the worst, they had it better than Dark Eldar (1998 > 2010), but I already pointed out that 'Nids and Tau got more frequent rules updates, and while it's true that Eldar have some incredibly old models still on the books, they also have roughly as many special characters alone as the entire 3rd ed Necrons roster, and even back in like, 5th edition before they had quite so many toys they still had a much, much deeper unit roster, to say nothing of the gaping chasm of the difference in customisation. Like, Necron players didn't run double Monolith because it was some cheesy meta build, we did it because it was about the only thing we could do.That's literally just what gw does to xenos factions not named Tau.
I mean yes you could be incredibly reductive and call it that, or you could call it the death curse of a dying C'tan. Either or, really.Flayed Ones, for example, explicitly did their thing with the skin-wearing because they were crazy, while Destroyers were noted to act on emotional impulses. Now Flayed Ones are the way they are because of a computer virus in their beep-boops.
Sure. I mean, it's literally called The Flayer Virus, but sure, we can dress it up however we like.I mean yes you could be incredibly reductive and call it that, or you could call it the death curse of a dying C'tan. Either or, really.
Trazyn's the only Newcron character to earn any degree of traction in the fanbase over the last decade they've had to cultivate their special characters*. Tyranids have had more success in cultivating individual characters than the Newcrons, despite this being the only positive driver behind Newcrons in the first place. He only managed that by being a meme; not like CREED, or Armless Abaddon, or other actual characters who developed memetic in-jokes around themselves, but designed as a joke from the ground-up.You will take Trazyn from my cold, dead, metal hands ya haters.
My real issue with Trazyn, though, is that he's just a Drukhari Archon in Necron cosplay. Traizhn the Antiquary, a cruel intellectual of Comorragh whose vast arcane knowledge is dwarfed only by his obsessive hunger for unique trinkets and objects of historical significance
That's what I mean, though. That kind of colonial paternalism and faux-affability is suited to Drukhari, not Necrons. That kind of comedic misunderstanding and parodic characterization is suited to Orks, not Necrons. That kind of callous obsession with relics of the past is suited to AdMech, not Necrons.My personal like for Trazyn is based on two things, him being a genuine history nerd, and his delusions that the people who keep trying to kill him are doing so out of mere temporary misunderstandings, and that with time to cool down they have of course recognised that he is only trying to preserve artefacts to the benefit of all, and without doubt they agree he is the right being to act as custodian.
Like, if he stumbled into a museum on an Imperial planet he'd be entirely happy to have a pleasant and genial conversation with the curator about the contents and the difficulties in getting others to understand the value and meaning of what they have preserved. He'd then steal the entire museum, because their storage methods lead to degradation, but the point stands.
I will confess that Ork Trazyn would be hilarious, yes.
And this, this right here, encapsulates my problem with oldcrons.Cyber-Nyarlathotep, face of the Great Reaper and herald of The Death That Is Metal
We already have ancient empires reclaiming their lost glory, and a shallow Egyptian aesthetic, too. Thematic/aesthetic overlap is not by itself a bad thing, it's down to what you do with it, and Oldcrons used theirs to tap a different narrative vein. Tyranids, Chaos, Necrons, they all deal in body horror to some degree, but they don't do it in the same ways.And this, this right here, encapsulates my problem with oldcrons.
It dwells in narrative space already deeply taken up with other factions, star-gods dwelling in the dark between worlds, oh hey wait, the setting already has those.
Overlap is one thing, but the Deciever is literally just Tzeentch and the Nightbringer is a cartoon grim reaper. I do not consider either of those actually interesting divergences in narrative. The only c'tan to ever go into that area is the Void Dragon.We already have ancient empires reclaiming their lost glory, and a shallow Egyptian aesthetic, too. Thematic/aesthetic overlap is not by itself a bad thing, it's down to what you do with it, and Oldcrons used theirs to tap a different narrative vein. Tyranids, Chaos, Necrons, they all deal in body horror to some degree, but they don't do it in the same ways.