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.
Astartes - Web Animation
- Thread starter Bork Lazer
- Start date
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
I am not paying money to do homework
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.
- Location
- Los Angeles
Fair enough, want me to buy it for you?I am not paying money to do homework
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)
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
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.
Plus, to be honest, I have a hard time seeing how Trazyn and Orikan could change my mind about Newcrons. I'll allow that it might be a good piece of character fiction, but as I alluded to above, that has nothing to do with my gripes about the changes to Necrons.
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
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.
- Location
- Los Angeles
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.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
I probably should have like, established what my gripes were, yeah...
Fundamentally, a lot of my perspective is rooted in the assertion that Oldcrons worked. They weren't perfect! They had problems! Any update to them would need to de-emphasise the C'tan to some degree to combat the impression that they were behind damn near every major event in the galaxy, for example. They needed to be hands-off figures, wreathed in at least as much mystery as the Primarch's before the Horus Heresy novels pulled that veil back- at the very least, the C'tan definitely needed to not be special characters you could theoretically drop into a 1,000 point tabletop match. Repurpose the models for like, weird Necron dreadnoughts or something.
But when you set that aside? The essential premise of Oldcrons, of a legion of glittering skeletons marching in lockstep, their implacable advance wreathed in flensing balefires, an unliving epitaph to a once-great empire, now reduced to an atrophied remnant by their own bitterness and arrogance, utterly broken to the will of thirsting gods... As a faction they had a texture, an atmosphere, that worked. Damn it worked. @Revlid put it perfectly some time ago in conversation, when he wrote, "just as Skaven are a fantastical translation of the horrors of industry, Necrons were a fantastical translation of the horrors of a transhuman future. You know, like the Cybermen before them, just with more Lovecraft." Newcrons trample all over that in the name of making An Ancient Empire Striving To Reclaim Their Lost Glory, and like... 40k already has that. Twice, if you count Biel-Tan. Doing it a third time, This Time With Pyramids, always struck me as distinctly underwhelming.
Like, having characters with names and personalities to them isn't a bad thing, but there are two key aspects I can point to which Newcrons wrecked, to illustrate what I'm getting at.
First, Oldcrons had a distinct edge of Clarketech to them. They were a technological threat, yes, but the mechanism of that technology was distinctly, deliberately vague and up in the air. They weren't robots, precisely, they were shells of living metal, inert matter brought to soulless life through arcane engines of physics-twisting technosorcery, shades of Jewish Golem mythology. You had lore like that Mechanicus report 'proving' that Gauss weapons were mathematically impossible, the stresses too much, the margin for imperfections too slim. The whole basis of Necron technology was the C'tan, who gifted them "weapons of god-like power and ships that could cross the galaxy in the blink of an eye" so that their supremacy stemmed less from scientific progress than divine intervention.
By contrast, Newcrons are happy to liberally splash around technobabble like 'biotransference', and generally root the sense of who the Necrons are in a veneer of technology that, while advanced, is nevertheless comprehensible to modern minds. They're robots now, the technosorcery angle has been heavily de-emphasised. You can see it in how the respective army books describe items like Resurrection Orbs; for Oldcrons, it's 'With a gesture from the Necron Lord the scattered remains of destroyed warriors crawl together before standing ready to do battle once more." while for Newcrons it's, "This glowing sphere focuses energy into the regeneration circuits of surrounding Necrons, hastening their repair." Newcrons spend a lot of words making the mechanisms of their existence legible to conventional science, where Oldcrons are content to preserve their mystique. Some of that mystique endures with the Crypteks, but the texture of it is different when it's the remit of a special few rather than a pervasive quality of the faction in general.
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 metal 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.
Necrons needed some personality injected into them, yes, but that doesn't mean you give every Cyberman a catchphrase and a hoverbike. Just take Oldcrons, vagueify everything to do with the C'tan by about two orders of magnitude, add some Newcron-style special characters, and expand the roster with stuff that fits in with the 'fantastical transhuman horror' feel. Gribbly floating abductor machines that collect and/or vivisect your enemies on the battlefield. Avatars of the C'tan that straddle the line between drone warfare and divine colocation. Big clouds of smoke that turn out to be nanobots that devour people to rebuild the Necrons. Supersized Wraiths with weaponised quantum uncertainty so you like, deploy them as D3+1 markers and any time one of them gets shot you decide whether it was the real thing or an illusion creeping up on you from another dimension.
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- Location
- Los Angeles
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.
And they didn't add anymore piloted vehicles, the only new vehicles were canoptic walkers that admittedly are just cribbing their design from War of the Worlds.
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.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
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-
Frankly, a lot of the problems that Oldcrons had can simply be put down to the fact that they were released in 2002 in a poor state, and then abandoned for nine years. The old Necron army list had exactly thirteen unit options - one regular HQ, two special characters, three elites, one troops, three fast attack, three heavy support. Ten of them were metal or semi-metal, too, so expensive and unpleasant to work with - I cannot overstate how much of a pain in the ass my Heavy Destroyer was. The whole army had next to nil customisation; besides the Lord's wargear allotment the most you got was the option to add disruption fields to some units.
Contrast, say, Tau, who were released in 2001 with a roster of two HQ choices (plus an optional bodyguard), two special characters, two elites, two troops choices, three fast attack, three heavy support, and one dedicated transport; not a huge step up, granted, although it was a step up. But their line was predominantly plastic, and offered significant room for customisation; one of those elites choices was Crisis Suits, after all, and while the meta might have calcified around the Fireknife loadout there were still plenty of options you could take to equip them. Then they got a video game - Fire Warrior might not have been well regarded, but it was a timely 2003 release and still gave the Tau front billing in a Warhammer title. I think there were some novels, too, and then they got their second codex next edition, in 2006. Necrons didn't get a second 'dex and model line until 2011.
Despite the problems of their initial roster, 3rd ed Necrons were actually very popular in their day, but is it any wonder that popularity bled and bled, given the lack of support? Hell, I was there to hear people level the same complaints at Tyranids, how they had no personality because they were just a mindless tide of space bugs (and to see how that didn't matter to the people who actually played Tyranids, for whom the whole 'mindless horde' shtick was often part of the appeal). But because Tyranids got official support worth a damn (1995 'dex for 2e, 2001 'dex for 3e when I got in, 2005 'dex for 4e, 2010 'dex for 5e), written by people who were on board with and actually liked the spirit of the faction, they were able to address those complaints with small adjustments rather than Mat Ward throttling Oldcrons in their sleep and paving over them to write an entirely new faction - one which I could rant plenty about just on their own dubious merits.
Notably, Newcrons have since been all but abandoned for another decade since then, so I guess the revival worked real well, huh?
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Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
I'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.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
- Location
- Los Angeles
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.
The only Xenos who get consistent, gradual updates are the Tau, for all their players complain how they're mistreated lore wise GW seems to believe giant robots sell.
Edit: And the 9e necron relaunch is notable in that it's headlining an edition next to space marines and is literally the biggest rework a xenos faction has ever seen, model count wise. And yes, while it's been released mid covid, I have found that it has actually been very successful, with a ton of people picking up necron armies.
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
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.
"Abandoned for a decade" isn't an unknown state of being for xenos factions, but it's not the norm either, it is a worse end of the scale, and it's one Necrons have firmly occupied.
EDIT: Also like, a point I wanted to hit when talking about the publication history, but forgot about in the course of writing that post, is that Newcrons get a lot of credit for injecting personality into the faction that wasn't there before by making room for characterful Necron Lords, but people forget that this... wasn't new. Those were always possible, Oldcrons just didn't make an explicit point of them, because see above: extremely thin roster and little support. But like, Dawn of War and Xenology had Necrons with defined character, well before any hints of the rework started getting seeded. Hell, in some ways the 3rd ed codex gave them more personality; 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.
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- Location
- Los Angeles
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.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Sure. I mean, it's literally called The Flayer Virus, but sure, we can dress it up however we like.
Regardless of how you present it, the fundamental change is still there. Old!Flayed Ones are a staple of transhuman horror, the dysmorphic cyborg driven mad by the loss of their flesh, seeking warmth and perverse comfort in the stolen skin of its victims. Their story is a horrible, creepy tragedy, a reminder that these things used to be people. New!Flayed Ones are insane robots with bladed fingers who want to steal your skin because they were cursed by a dying star god, and the resulting virus drove them mad. The end result is the same, but the root is so different that it shifts them to a totally different genre of horror.
And, of course, they are both Terminator jokes, but that's just Warhammer.
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Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
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.
*we now also have The Silent King, who is literally just Settra Again
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, fed by raids into realspace, from the last soulstone of a fallen Craftworld to a caged clone of Goge Vandire. Or he could be a Tech-Priest, Traesun the Unfathomed, a legendary archaeo-excavator whose private, aggressively-populated and meticulously-indexed collection of lost tech, genetic specimens, holy relics, and xeno artefacts is viewed with jealousy and fear by his peers.
He'd work fine as a Daemon, too; Tra'Zyn the Archivist, the mad horror who archives Tzeentch's infinite and arbitrary museum of curiosities and lore, or Traashyn the Incomplete, an avaricious Slaaneshi prince desperate to fill their exhibits with pristine and perfect treasures from across time and space, or Tro'zyt the Embalmer, a withered and skeletal daemon of Nurgle dedicated to preserving the galaxy's extinct species, last survivors, and lost relics in foul jars like flies in amber, monuments to the decay of all things. Even Trazan the Claimer, a Khornate prince known for gathering and displaying trophies and relics from worthy battles and mighty warriors throughout the galaxy.
You could make him an Ork, for god's sake, and he'd be barely any more comedic; Trazzun Da Collectah, whose stash of shiny gubbinz includes mint condition memorabilia and stasis-locked fighters from across the galaxy, polished and sorted by a horde of gretchin minions aboard his gold-plated vault-rok.
That's it. That's what we got out of Newcrons. A special character who works better as an Ork.
EDIT: These two problems ("he's a joke" and "he belongs elsewhere") actually dovetail, because a major problem here is what Trazyn says about his faction, how he reflects and is reflected upon by its themes and tone.
- Drukhari-Trazyn works wonderfully, because it's a whole colonial metaphor played for that faction's usual pitch-black humour. It's Victorians eating Egyptian mummies and using their flesh for paint. It's a dozen highborn standing around a collection of human holy relics arranged on a pedestal and chortling about the charming primitive aesthetic.
- AdMech-Trazyn works fine, because he's a riff on the AdMech's cargo cult and obsession with the past. He's a display of useless hoarder tendencies dialed up to the Nth degree, to produce some of the callous, absurd humour, intellectual bungling, and faintly depressing dramatic irony that runs through the AdMech.
- Daemon-Trazyn works fine, it's just another example of human behaviour distorted and exaggerated to the point of madness. You can play it for both horror and humour, and daemons usually have a fair mix of both, particularly Nurgle and Tzeentch.
- Ork-Trazyn works great, because it's just a straight-up comedy about nerdy collectors, as fits them. Comic Book Guy but big and green and violent.
- Necron-Trazyn, though? Necrons exist far on the "horror" end of the horror-humour scale, so the most fitting interpretation you can get is a creepy science horror one. Specimen jars and alien abductions and such. Mi-Go and Yith. You are so insignificant that this being is treating you as an intellectual curiosity, an animal to be examined and dissected and preserved. Data collection by minds too vast to bargain with or comprehend. Trazyn... very much isn't that. He's just the Drukhari/Ork-version in goofy Necron cosplay, and this reflects back on the faction he belongs to.
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deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
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.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
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.
Significant characters reflect strongly on their factions, serving as a channel for their themes and tone and ideas. Trazyn is a very fun character in entirely the wrong faction, and so his existence warps the faction and perceptions of it. Much like all of Newcrons, he was written by someone who didn't care much for actual Necrons, and it shows.
Cyber-Nyarlathotep, face of the Great Reaper and herald of The Death That Is Metal, should not be pulling a cheeky Carmen Sandiego heist.
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- Location
- Los Angeles
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.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
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.
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Like, people bitched about how Necrons being an implacable existential threat was such a terrible escalation for the setting and just made them Silver Tyranids and I'm like, motherfuckers this is Warhammer 40,000, the only faction that aren't an implacable existential threat is the anime kids whose shtick is being the wide-eyed new kids on the block! And they got a famous 750,000 word fanfic turning them into one! Everybody's got some unbeatable endgame scenario that'll happen any day now, the comic relief are a potential existential threat, that's just 40k, y'know?
At least for Oldcrons it was a grand design they were working towards, there was no implied possibility of 'whoops, someone poked the Celestial Orrery and a bunch of planets imploded'.
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- Location
- Los Angeles
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.
- Location
- Canada
Yeah the big problem with the old crons was that they sort of painted themselves into a corner thematically and narratively which perhaps is a side effect of the era that assumed they would never ever advance the story. The Necrons were presented as an almost totally unstoppable alien force able to beat almost everyone else with ease only limited by the fact most of them had not yet woken up. Unlike almost every other faction even other mindless swarms like tyranids, they were incredibly uniform in presentation you met one tomb world you met them all. It could be used well in one off stories featuring other characters reacting to them like some of the early Cain short stories, but it bumps against the nature of the 40k universe where there are always layers and layers of customization and personalization available.