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Nurglitch wrote: I think it's moreso a testament to the Tyranids ability to cull errant psyckers than to their psychic strength.

Actually I don't think there is any culling involved. Wouldn't it be pretty bad if daemons possesed synapse creatures on a regular basis. The Tyranids would have been defeated ages ago by the forces of chaos if that was the case.

I prefer to think of it this way. Humans can be distracted. Lust, Ambition, Despair and Hate are temptations that every human feels every day of his life. By contrast Tyranids are not only completlely emotionless but at the same time completely single-minded. The hive mind itself, while intelligent, only concerns itself only with the most basic functions. Breed, Kill, Eat, Lather, Rinse, Repeat. The Tyranids have no room whatsoever to be tempted by any power of the warp other than their own hive mind.

I wholeheartedly agree with your statement. That's an incredibly good way to put it, and does indeed explain why there are no stories of Tyranids being possessed.

The Unending:

I'd have to disagree. Firstly, Genestealers are Tyranids, and there are stories of Genestealers being possessed. There's a story about Ragnar, for example, where Tyranids possessed by a Greater Daemon of Nurgle battle the Space Wolf and Inquisitorial Allies. I wish I could remember the name. "Grey Hunter"?

Secondly, there are no stories about Tyranids where they are the protagonists: they have no society or culture to speak, and zero human interest, so it's rather hard to hold a deficit of possession against them.

As mentioned Tyranids can suffer from the Perils of the Warp if the players hasn't brought along the Shadow in the Warp. I mean, obviously there are other warp entities and the occasional threat of exploding heads, but the main peril of the warp is daemonic possession.

If anything what protects Tyranids is the Shadow in the Warp, rather than any single-mindedness or lack of cultural depth to psychically active Tyranid organisms. Taking the metaphor of turbulence to describe the behaviour of the Immaterium, I'd compare peg the effect of a human psycker as like a candle - it produces some turbulence, but enough turbulence and it's out. Put enough candles together though, and you have a forest fire, something that affects turbulence patterns on a climatic scale.

What Tyranids have going for them is strength in numbers. It's hard to possess any one Tyranid or group of Tyranids when the sheer mass of their presence sweeps the warp, and there's no fear of warp gates spontaneously forming or reality randomly breaking down because the turbulence is that of a pyroclastic flow rather than a draft of hot air.

Finally, if anything is for certain about Chaos, it's that it is the ending of all things. The Realm of Chaos is supposed to be beyond time and space, with the Material Universe being The Tyranids could conquer the universe, and the greater part would still be Chaos. The Tyranids will get theirs in their turn.

In my own personal background on Tyranids they're carnivorous flesh-moulding psychic eusocial space locusts whose religion revolves around the Great Devourer much like the Imperial Cults revolve around the Emperor, they can be poached by the Dark Powers, but in entering the Milky Way galaxy they're drawing nearer to the Emperor, and facilitating a slow accretion in the Warp: a new and ravenous Dark Power whose birth may consume reality.

Of course, I also conceive of Chaos as a set of gargantuan i-dimensional jaws, above which the speck of reality is suspended, like an asteroid in decaying orbit around a black star, so I have funny ideas about how these things go

Dang... Fluff pwnage. All I gotta say.

Well Tzeentch does recruit the lore folks lol

Nurglitch wrote:They could gain the advantage of exposing a tendril of the hive fleet to the mutating effects of the warp.

Per Codex: Tyranids, Hive Fleet Ouroboros did exactly that...and it may have been intentional for the reason you cite.

Yes but they could have screwed themselves over. Chaos mutations sometimes aren't that beneficial.

lol unless your a "favored" it normally falls under not so much lol I could see the chaos gods liking nids cause of the fear and panic they cause.. assuming the nids didn't eat their cultists or attack the csm..

Not always. In the chaos spawn entry it says that the favoured are actually MORE suseptible because if they keep winning their battles they get more "gifts".

Favored as in relative terms lol more luck not particulary god favored lol

penut the butter wrote:Yes but they could have screwed themselves over. Chaos mutations sometimes aren't that beneficial.

Although the Tyranids would likely be able to sort out the beneficial mutations, duplicate them, and dump the bad ones back into the spawning pool.

Oh yes. I forgot about that. Natural Selection still exists in the 41st millenium.No the ones with damaging reults usually die off before their bad genes contaminate the species gene pool.