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 Charistoph wrote:
Consider it either an Old One in hiding, or more likely, the initiation of the life process which ended up being human. Either way, some patronage there.

This is speculation, as that is never even hinted at in the lore. The eldar actually look down on humans because we evolved naturally and were not created by the old ones.

 Charistoph wrote:
The imprisoning of the Void Dragon is what led to much of the Imperium's tech, so some patronage there. There are also some indications that a shard of the Deceiver started implementing the "Blank" or "Pariah" gene in to humanity at some point. Though, with the Deceiver, you can never really tell.

This is also speculation. There is nothing in the lore that hints that humanity derived all of its tech from the Void Dragon or study of necrons, considering that humanity independently developed warp drives, a drive that utilizes travel through a dimension that is anathema to the necrons, and that a lot of the tech we use now was explicitly stated to have either been developed by the emperor himself (bolter, power armor) or the techno-barbarians on earth during the age of strife.

 Arbitrator wrote:
I get what they were going for with the NewCron fluff. They wanted to give them more personality than "mindless machines EXTERMINATE" and that's fair enough. I have a soft spot for them actually having Lords who are affable and not just up for killing everything just because.

On the other hand, they almost come across as a bit too human. Worse than that, they're too obviously Tomb Kings... IN SPACE! 40k has it's caricatures of cultures, but that's mostly kept to the Imperium - where it 'kind of' fits - but it just feels a bit too blatant with the NewCrons.

Absolutely agreed. I still think they could have gone with the "Lords with interesting and unique personalities" without altering the original fluff at all.

 Arbitrator wrote:
I get what they were going for with the NewCron fluff. They wanted to give them more personality than "mindless machines EXTERMINATE" and that's fair enough. I have a soft spot for them actually having Lords who are affable and not just up for killing everything just because.

On the other hand, they almost come across as a bit too human. Worse than that, they're too obviously Tomb Kings... IN SPACE! 40k has it's caricatures of cultures, but that's mostly kept to the Imperium - where it 'kind of' fits - but it just feels a bit too blatant with the NewCrons.

To me the Tomb King in space element of the Necron was always there. The very first Necron Lord model had a pharao crown on its head. Add to that the concept of tomb world, fabulous treasures and curses, all there from the inception of the Necrons, and you are basically stuck in all the major trope of Tomb Kings.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
In a sense the necrons now are in a state of horror. They know they've been screwed badly, and are "soulless machines" but still retain some emotions and the sense of loss they we're stuck with.

Right, but like I mentioned above, and other's put more eloquently, part of what was interesting in the old lore was that the author of the Necron's predicament was the Necrontyr themselves. In the pursuit of victory at any cost, they sold their soul to The Deceiver. In the new lore, The Deceiver simply just hoodwinks the Silent King who sells out the Necrontyr and only later realizes he got duped.

So, rather than a tale about the danger of courting Nihilism incarnate, it's about the danger of Nihilism courting you. It's a fundamental locus of control change and not a small one. It means that Nihilism is an external force, rather than an internal one. And that's largely garbage, in my opinion.

It makes the Necrontyr seem like victims of The Deciever, when before they were victims of their own iniquity, manifest through The Deceiver. There was no real need to flip that script to arrive at the aim of the new lore though, which is why I pointed out that the new lore isn't bad, a priori, in intention, it's just poorly done in actual practice.

It'd be far more interesting if the Necrons now had personality, but rather than just lamenting how "unfair" the C'Tan were to them, they would recognize that their undoing was of their own accord. The Silent King could be the tragic figure who realizes that, despite them having messed up, they are now basically pot-committed, having gone all-in on victory, there is only one direction to go and that is onward toward toward overwhelming Order Incarnate.

epronovost wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:
I get what they were going for with the NewCron fluff. They wanted to give them more personality than "mindless machines EXTERMINATE" and that's fair enough. I have a soft spot for them actually having Lords who are affable and not just up for killing everything just because.

On the other hand, they almost come across as a bit too human. Worse than that, they're too obviously Tomb Kings... IN SPACE! 40k has it's caricatures of cultures, but that's mostly kept to the Imperium - where it 'kind of' fits - but it just feels a bit too blatant with the NewCrons.

To me the Tomb King in space element of the Necron was always there. The very first Necron Lord model had a pharao crown on its head. Add to that the concept of tomb world, fabulous treasures and curses, all there from the inception of the Necrons, and you are basically stuck in all the major trope of Tomb Kings.

It was more of a funerary cult thing than an egyptian thing.
You had Egyptian imagery, such as Scarabs and pyramids, but you also had other horror/sepulchral imagery as well, such as wraiths (not an Egyptian thing), the Grim Reaper (not an Egyptian thing), spiders (not associated with graves in ancient Egypt myth like it is in the west) and flayed ones (based off of the cult of Xipe Totec, the Aztec god of Death, Rebirth and Disease)

The old necrons weren't so much about Egypt as they were about death, tombs and rebirth. It was only after 5th ed that they started to really push the Egypt in space thing, complete with stupid head crests and boats.

w1zard wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:
Consider it either an Old One in hiding, or more likely, the initiation of the life process which ended up being human. Either way, some patronage there.

This is speculation, as that is never even hinted at in the lore. The eldar actually look down on humans because we evolved naturally and were not created by the old ones.

 Charistoph wrote:
The imprisoning of the Void Dragon is what led to much of the Imperium's tech, so some patronage there. There are also some indications that a shard of the Deceiver started implementing the "Blank" or "Pariah" gene in to humanity at some point. Though, with the Deceiver, you can never really tell.

This is also speculation. There is nothing in the lore that hints that humanity derived all of its tech from the Void Dragon or study of necrons, considering that humanity independently developed warp drives, a drive that utilizes travel through a dimension that is anathema to the necrons, and that a lot of the tech we use now was explicitly stated to have either been developed by the emperor himself (bolter, power armor) or the techno-barbarians on earth during the age of strife.

1) I didn't say "all" of the Imperium's tech, but "much", as in a significant quantity. Warp Drive was around long before the Emperor was made, much less before he forced the Void Dragon to give up some of its secrets. The Emperor combined much Dark Age tech with Martian tech with some of the Necron tech he gleaned from the Void Dragon. Heck, it's quite possible his idea of the "human webway" was gained from the information on Dolmen Gates.

2) I never said that this was solid fluff, either, I just said it "seemed" to have been. There are random bits of fluff which point at the possibilities of such, but little else. One case is the story of the Culexus Assassin being sent out to have them captured and converted in to a Pariah. Another is all the dominate saurian life on Earth before being smashed at roughly the same time as the War in Heaven, but didn't quite take out all the life on the planet.

40K Lore is very... imprecise and if it has been written, it is canon, even the contradictory stuff. When you toss in beings like the Deceiver and the Laughing God in to the mix, historical facts can be quite difficult to identify. Most if it is based off of myths, legends, and manipulated information. The "truth" can be as malleable as you desire it to be for YOUR particular army.

It has definitely been hinted that the Old Ones, or rather one remaining Old One, interfered with human evolution(Xenology). There's also the blindingly obvious fact that humans have the same humanoid shape as most of the Old Ones' creations. Then you have the more subtly hints, like maps of ancient Earth being found on dead worlds during the crusade.

And the Dragon is explicitly stated to be on Mars, chained by the Emperor to be the inspiration for the Admech. If you don't like that fluff...welcome to how we feel.

A C'tan being on Mars isn't new. It was heavily implied that something related to the Necrons was on Mars, which is why they tried sending a landing party down there, and there was supposed to be a necron cult there too.

 Grimtuff wrote:

Cryptek of Awesome wrote:

 NoiseMarine with Tinnitus wrote:
Oldcrons all the way - but if they were to retcon them I would keep Trollzyn, he is hilarious.

"I don't like the new fluff, but if they were to change them back I'd keep the one character who most epitomizes everything they changed about the fluff because he's awesome".

Nice strawman there...

Trazyn can easily be shoehorned into the Oldcron background. In fact, I made such an assertion earlier this week

It's not a strawman - we just disagree on the nature of the Trazyn character.

I'm using a humorous (to me) recreation of the OPs post to point out that the very things they like about the character would not have existed in the old fluff and any attempt to recreate him in the old fluff would (IMO) either fundamentally change the character or be a jarring anomaly.

The fact that the OP calls him "Trollzyn" implies that they like his independent and irreverent qualities - e.g. the fact that he talks and banters with people, is always 1 step ahead and seems above everyone else - not just his machine-like efficiency at putting things in a museum.

Again - IMO - you can't just take his character as-is and say "also he's a slave to some star gods who want to absorb all the energy in the universe". You either need to re-write the motivations of the C'tan or rewrite Trazyn to the point where he's not Trollzyn anymore he's just Evil Xenos Who Wants to Kidnap People So they Can Be Used For Something Unimaginably Horrible and Scary Later #26775

Cryptek of Awesome wrote:

 Grimtuff wrote:

Cryptek of Awesome wrote:

 NoiseMarine with Tinnitus wrote:
Oldcrons all the way - but if they were to retcon them I would keep Trollzyn, he is hilarious.

"I don't like the new fluff, but if they were to change them back I'd keep the one character who most epitomizes everything they changed about the fluff because he's awesome".

Nice strawman there...

Trazyn can easily be shoehorned into the Oldcron background. In fact, I made such an assertion earlier this week

It's not a strawman - we just disagree on the nature of the Trazyn character.

I'm using a humorous (to me) recreation of the OPs post to point out that the very things they like about the character would not have existed in the old fluff and any attempt to recreate him in the old fluff would (IMO) either fundamentally change the character or be a jarring anomaly.

The fact that the OP calls him "Trollzyn" implies that they like his independent and irreverent qualities - e.g. the fact that he talks and banters with people, is always 1 step ahead and seems above everyone else - not just his machine-like efficiency at putting things in a museum.

Again - IMO - you can't just take his character as-is and say "also he's a slave to some star gods who want to absorb all the energy in the universe". You either need to re-write the motivations of the C'tan or rewrite Trazyn to the point where he's not Trollzyn anymore he's just Evil Xenos Who Wants to Kidnap People So they Can Be Used For Something Unimaginably Horrible and Scary Later #26775

I think you could do it.

There's no reason that a "slave to some star-gods who want to absorb all energy in the universe" couldn't have a personality. It's not like slaves in historical human societies didn't have personalities.

Besides, where does it say that they are all mindless slaves? What if one Necron lord was really into becoming a machine, and became a loyal servant / collaborator? Wouldn't you think that the C'tan would reward him by letting have most of his personality intact?

Indeed, if you take my Lovecraftian analogy that I made above, the cultists (in this case the cultists of the C'tan, or Necrons) are only brainwashed (mindwiped) at the lowest levels. The higher level cultists (Lords, Overlords, etc.) are all enthusiastic supporters of the cult (C'tan), and would likely be allowed to keep their sapience (however broken or trollish or mechanized it might be).

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I miss the lovecraftian vibe that oldcrons had. That's missing now from Warhammer 40k.

And before anyone says "BUT MUH TYRANIDS": They're not really lovecraftian. The whole point of lovecraft was madness and cosmic horror from beings that could barely perceive you. The Tyranids absolutely perceive you (including getting shot off your world in some cases), don't really cause madness (GSC can break social order, but studying the Tyranids doesn't drive individual academics off the deep end), and are basically just hive-mind predators. Not really a "cosmic horror."

Meanwhile, the Old C'tan barely perceived humans as different from eldar, orks, whatever. They were all food, like motes of dust to be hoovered up for sustenance. The Nightbringer was the cause of the "Grim Reaper" in the minds of the living races, Death with his Scythe, implying a great horror from beyond the stars that could be worshipped as a god. Studying the Necrons drove Imperial historians and philosophers to madness; the former Imperial archaeologist "Thomas" in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade becomes what is essentially a lovecraftian cultist after being driven mad from unearthing a tomb. The Necrons, obligingly, turn them into a pariah to serve them.

Then there was the old Lovecraftian themes like the poems and prophecies of the Eldar, that talked of the return of "The Outsider" and "Vaul-Moons" and other cryptic things, much in the way Cassilda's Song speaks cryptically of the King in Yellow...

.... bah. We need more lovecraft in 40k, and changing necrons utterly killed it.

I want to build a King in Yellow army now. And I can't.

"BUT MUH CHAOS"

I am a much newer player who has been fairly interested in following this thread. So I can't exactly speak about new vs. old too much beyond it sounds like the newcrons sound like a better idea for a faction where players usually spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours before playing a game. As much as playing a force of unstoppable alien terminator robots sounds, I would rather be able to hang my fluff hat on something more.

My actual point is that everything you describe sounds like it would be the preview of Chaos being actual extra-dimensional entities largely alien save the raw emotions which should encompass more than just the species of human and Eldar (like the rest of the minor non-faction minor species which I imagine added together would be a significant %). I have been playing some of Dawn of War Winter Assault and the voice like from the CSM of, "Do you hear the voices too!" which has reminded me that it is very likely that nearly all Chaos space marines, and generally all Chaos followers, probably have a constant whispering of the maddening things 'beyond space and time' that literally feed upon raw emotion of the galaxy. I think everyone has just got comfortable with the personifications of the Chaos gods since most are depicted in a pretty hackneyed characture of their thing. We don't really consider Chaos like that anymore since they got all those brightly colored lesser demons and space marines being the 5-8 hit dice (as in Orks constantly depicted as the 1 HD) monster of the setting. Just tough enough to show how awesome the heroes are.

Even though Chaos is composed of very human (Eldar and other minor species) emotion, this does not necessarily mean that they are understandable. Other than the fact that Chaos generally takes an active part far more than most Lovecraftain entities it just about the biggest difference between the two if you want cosmic horror. Basically, what you say you want from Necrons can easily be delivered by Chaos in the 40K setting. The still have all those crazy prophecies, it is just that they have been around for so long that it is hard for them to be cryptic. Especially since the big 4 Chaos gods were all written having a shtick which hurts them as much as it allows players to grasp what they are about.

 Saturmorn Carvilli wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I miss the lovecraftian vibe that oldcrons had. That's missing now from Warhammer 40k.

And before anyone says "BUT MUH TYRANIDS": They're not really lovecraftian. The whole point of lovecraft was madness and cosmic horror from beings that could barely perceive you. The Tyranids absolutely perceive you (including getting shot off your world in some cases), don't really cause madness (GSC can break social order, but studying the Tyranids doesn't drive individual academics off the deep end), and are basically just hive-mind predators. Not really a "cosmic horror."

Meanwhile, the Old C'tan barely perceived humans as different from eldar, orks, whatever. They were all food, like motes of dust to be hoovered up for sustenance. The Nightbringer was the cause of the "Grim Reaper" in the minds of the living races, Death with his Scythe, implying a great horror from beyond the stars that could be worshipped as a god. Studying the Necrons drove Imperial historians and philosophers to madness; the former Imperial archaeologist "Thomas" in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade becomes what is essentially a lovecraftian cultist after being driven mad from unearthing a tomb. The Necrons, obligingly, turn them into a pariah to serve them.

Then there was the old Lovecraftian themes like the poems and prophecies of the Eldar, that talked of the return of "The Outsider" and "Vaul-Moons" and other cryptic things, much in the way Cassilda's Song speaks cryptically of the King in Yellow...

.... bah. We need more lovecraft in 40k, and changing necrons utterly killed it.

I want to build a King in Yellow army now. And I can't.

"BUT MUH CHAOS"

I am a much newer player who has been fairly interested in following this thread. So I can't exactly speak about new vs. old too much beyond it sounds like the newcrons sound like a better idea for a faction where players usually spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours before playing a game. As much as playing a force of unstoppable alien terminator robots sounds, I would rather be able to hang my fluff hat on something more.

My actual point is that everything you describe sounds like it would be the preview of Chaos being actual extra-dimensional entities largely alien save the raw emotions which should encompass more than just the species of human and Eldar (like the rest of the minor non-faction minor species which I imagine added together would be a significant %). I have been playing some of Dawn of War Winter Assault and the voice like from the CSM of, "Do you hear the voices too!" which has reminded me that it is very likely that nearly all Chaos space marines, and generally all Chaos followers, probably have a constant whispering of the maddening things 'beyond space and time' that literally feed upon raw emotion of the galaxy. I think everyone has just got comfortable with the personifications of the Chaos gods since most are depicted in a pretty hackneyed characture of their thing. We don't really consider Chaos like that anymore since they got all those brightly colored lesser demons and space marines being the 5-8 hit dice (as in Orks constantly depicted as the 1 HD) monster of the setting. Just tough enough to show how awesome the heroes are.

Even though Chaos is composed of very human (Eldar and other minor species) emotion, this does not necessarily mean that they are understandable. Other than the fact that Chaos generally takes an active part far more than most Lovecraftain entities it just about the biggest difference between the two if you want cosmic horror. Basically, what you say you want from Necrons can easily be delivered by Chaos in the 40K setting. The still have all those crazy prophecies, it is just that they have been around for so long that it is hard for them to be cryptic. Especially since the big 4 Chaos gods were all written having a shtick which hurts them as much as it allows players to grasp what they are about.

I couldn't disagree more. Chaos has some lovecraftian vibes, but they are absolutely an understood quantity. I play a Slaanesh Daemons army right now, and I've looked at Nurgle. Nothing feels terribly "lovecraftian" about them. They're not cryptic, they're well explained, and easily understood. They're just not that horrific in the "Cosmic Horror" sense (or the Lovecraftian genre sense, in other words). Life under a Chaos God would be awful, to be sure, but not unimaginable. Similarly, the gods themselves aren't really unimaginable. They're manifestations of mortal emotions, which means I can inherently fathom them because I can inherently fathom my own emotions.

Remember, part of the criteria of a Cosmic Horror is that it doesn't necessarily set "Goals" or "Objectives" or deliberately do wilful things to get stuff done. Their cultists and servants do, generally, but there's a heavily implied sense of "if it ever actually willed something to happen, it could just happen." The Chaos Gods once willed the Fall of Man during the Horus Heresy and the Emperor said "talk to the hand, bitches." A unfathomable cosmic horror ceases to be unfathomably horrific as soon as it becomes fairly trivially stopped. Chaos has been driven off of worlds time and again, and is fairly well understood. Studying it doesn't automatically make you go mad (though sometimes it does, RIP Inquisitor Quixos).

As soon as you can say "Oh, we'll just shut down the <Cosmic Horror Faction> by shooting it with enough bullets" then that faction ceases to have any value as a cosmic horror, and Chaos has been driven back and defeated time and again by a sufficient number of guns.

It's why I liked the old Necron Phase-Out mechanic so much, from a fluff perspective. They voluntarily (though not so much from the player's perspective) withdrew from battle once casualties exceeded a certain threshold. That always implied to me that any 40k match involving Necrons was basically a recon skirmish, since they just up and left once they suffered a bit too much. Any battle they directly participated in was always, invariably, a victory (before Newcrons), from Sanctuary 101 where they wipe out the Adepta Sororitas and the Black Templars to the fight with the Mechanicus when the Nightbringer was released, where they get barely a single pict off the tombworld before being wiped out. The only major loss suffered by the Oldcrons was their ships attempting to land on Mars, and it was only five ships of a fairly minor class. One actually made it to the surface IIRC before it was destroyed, through all of the Terran defenses. Sending only 5 medium-weight ships to Mars struck me as "probing mission" if I ever saw one.

I guarantee you 5 Chaos ships of a similar medium weight class showing up in the Terran system unexpectedly would be swatted like flies. Chaos isn't scary. There's no horror there.

Chaos doesn't work well as Lovecraftian on the tabletop because there are only so many model designs you can make molds of and everything has to be neatly defined to fit into units. As Unit puts it, we know everything about Chaos. We understand how it functions (roughly), what effects it can have, and what daemons look like. We know this because they're a tabletop faction that has to fit nearly into boxes.

I think that's why I'm excited for the Daemons of the Ruinstorm list coming for Horus Heresy. They seem to have acknowledged this, and the list itself is deliberately throwing out the hard set 'these are Plaguebearers, these are Bloodletters' to work with the idea of Chaos being an evertwisting, horrifying, un-knowable thing that manfiests in an impossible number of ways. I can't wait for some weird and wonderful conversions to get put out and for the opponent to ask, "What are those?"

Chaos' Lovecraftian themes work great in Black Library or Dark Heresy because writers can go wild with making Chaos a truly disturbing, reality-bending, corruptive force that warps minds, flesh and machine. It doesn't work on the tabletop.

The problem with what you are describing sounds like an completely unworkable concept in a miniatures war game as a player controlled faction. You want a completely unknowable force that can't be destroyed in setting to allow players to take a group of models to play a game with another player and have them fight a fictional battles where bullets are commonly used to destroy enemies. I can't see how that can work where both players are supposed to have symmetrical forces.

If you can't have cosmic horror is a setting that can destroy it with bullets. Then by your own reasoning, Warhammer 40K can't have cosmic horror. Remember, the setting is a war game where that has to be a thing.

Fact is any daemon destroyed in the materium also 'phases out' back to the warp where it can just try again. I like to think the same goes for most csm too. How else to you think they recover their numbers so quickly yet never seem to have more. Sure, maybe this return causes mutation sometimes to the point of spawn-hood, but the forces of Chaos cannot be defeated by military might. In fact, the case of Khorne in particular, war only strengthens him.

You say that the Emperor stopped the Chaos gods during the Horus Hersey, but it could have been that gods accomplished as much as they needed to and didn't have to work together for a second longer. It seems to me they each did quite well for themselves in the last 10,000 years. Or do you think the IoM is going turn things around?

I don't think Chaos wants a definitive end. They may think they do. It might even be in their destructive nature to try for it. Post destruction of everything seems far too orderly for them. Chaos wants chaos and having the IoM eat itself from the inside provides far more of what the Chaos gods want that if Horus would actually defeated the Emperor. Then again, I prefer to believe that Chaos' motivation is unknowable least of all to Chaos itself. I do think you can argue that Necron could be like Chaos save they actually do want the death of everything and won't stop until they get it where Chaos will always break down before then.

Again, what the Necrons do with phasing out is the same thing that demons do except they don't remain in the materium. It might take a while, but when the stars are right those demons will return. Seems pretty Lovecraftain to me.

As for the Necron ships making to Mars, so what? It is obvious that Chaos couldn't get that close due to they way they are written and the setting plot armor of Terra. I am sure it there was a way for Chaos to bring 5 ships into the terrain system NOT having the goal of wrecking as much stuff as possible and leaving of their volition, they could. But we both know that isn't what Chaos are about they would have to be destroyed completely or Terran system would have be corrupted by Chaos. The fact is any faction that directly attacks the Terran system upset the status quo of the miniatures game potentially costing sales. So it isn't going happen.

Lore bends its knee to the models and game surrounding them because models are where GW make most of their money. So the Necrons, like any other faction, are going to be written in such a way that GW thinks they can make the most money.

I think Chaos is and should be the Lovecraftian faction of the setting. Sure, the human followers and perhaps even ascended mortals such as Daemon Princes may have understandable personalities and motives, but closer to pure daemon you get, more eldritch they become. The chaos gods themselves should be completely unfathomable to humans. Even a lot of the 'facade' of the chaos as it is shown to us could be mere mortal interpretation of it, and attempt of their feeble and limited minds to place logical structure on a thing that ultimately is beyond reason.

Thematically 'machine men' is completely different of this; machines represent reason, even if may be cold and uncaring reason, inimical to life.

I see it more like this:

Chaos: Is the dark mirror to the order of the Imperium, and essentially a result of the races subjugated to it. The endgame to Chaos is total freedom and the consequences thereof.

Tyranids: Total annihilation.

Oldcrons: Absolute subjugation of all conscious life. Humanity becomes cattle.

 Arbitrator wrote:
I get what they were going for with the NewCron fluff. They wanted to give them more personality than "mindless machines EXTERMINATE" and that's fair enough. I have a soft spot for them actually having Lords who are affable and not just up for killing everything just because.

On the other hand, they almost come across as a bit too human. Worse than that, they're too obviously Tomb Kings... IN SPACE! 40k has it's caricatures of cultures, but that's mostly kept to the Imperium - where it 'kind of' fits - but it just feels a bit too blatant with the NewCrons.

Yes the necrontyr were human in many ways, humans suffering terribly and bitter about it, humans who were angry when the cure for the their suffering was denied them, and now they still retain some humanity, the bitterness, jealousy, pettiness, spiteful, angry parts. Even as machines they retain the worst parts of humanity.

I don't think what I want is impossible in a minis game.
Oldcrons were it, lol. I even explained how.

Both Necrons and Chaos are Lovecraftian.
Necrons are comparable to Great Old Ones, and Chaos is comparable to some of the Outer Gods (the ones exist outside of our dimension, that is).

However, as Chaos is born from human emotion, they do lose some Lovecraft points as the whole idea of his work is that there are alien creatures that exist beyond our understanding.

Chaos draws more inspiration from Judeo-Christian demon lore, really.
Chaos needs to possess people to get things done, are reflections of human vice and have demon cults.
Cults are not necessarily Lovecraftian, otherwise every satanic cult in every work of fiction ever could be called Lovecraftian.

Necrons are completely alien, are dormant on planets and even have a Nyralothep expy. They are even implied to have a cult on Mars, which fulfils the cult quotient that apparently has to be fulfilled now when determining if something is Lovecraftian or not.
Necrons are a lot closer to Lovecraft's works in this respect, especially once you consider that a lot of them are dormant. Just like Cthulhu.
Keep in mind that the Great Old Ones are entities from space who once ruled the Earth, but were forced to go dormant. Just like Necrons.
There's even a faint hint of the Color from Outer Space, if you consider what the C'tan's true form is like.

Who says that only one faction can have a monopoly on Lovecraft anyway? I mean, Genestealer Cults are basically Innsmouth in space, and the Tyranids certainly take inspiration from some of the alien races and outer gods.

If I were to compare the 3 world enders, it would be something like this -

Chaos - Threat from within, societal decay and loss of inhibitions, interdimensional reflections of humanity's sins
Necrons - Threat from nearby (as in, underneath you), mechanical, planetary kill bots
Tyranids - Threat from beyond, organic, intergalactic locust deathswarm

There's nothing wrong with a bit of overlap, the devil is in the details. Going "but X is Y except Z" is just lazy.

I wrote a lot more about this, but Dakka ate my message

Agreed, though I think part of the Lovecraftian theme also has to be unstoppability.

Before the 2011 5th Edition Codex release, I don't think the Necrons had a single major loss in the fluff. They had minor losses, like the 5 small vessels that tried to land on Mars, but they were never wholesale thrown off a world that they wanted and utterly defeated. Indeed, the greatest heroes of the Ultramarines chapter, including Sergeant Chronus, Cato Sicarius, that one chaplain guy... etc. only managed to heroically evacuate a planet with their lives in Fall of Damnos. I think they escape with a bit of the planet's population, 30 Space Marines, and 20 Guardsmen. Like, it's a war, and there's impressive moments of heroic feats for the Space Marines, but the Necrons don't care. They're utterly silent, utterly relentless, and unstoppable in their convictions in the services of their old reanimate Gods, the C'tan.

Meanwhile, same era of fluff, Tyranids are being beaten back from Macragge, and Angron, greatest ascended daemon-champion of Khorne, is getting punted back to the warp with a solid licking from the Grey Knights. They're hardly unstoppable.

"What is not dead can eternal lie, and in strange eons even death may die." One of the most famous Lovecraftian phrases, and describes exactly no-one in the fluff except Necrons.

Yeah no. Chaos is annoying when GW tries to push how unstoppable it supposedly is, Oldcrons were the same type of annoying.

Having an unstoppable faction sucks all the tension of the setting and makes a joke of the narrative.

The Oldcrons were nearly unstoppable. However, there was a prophecy...

Tyran wrote:
Yeah no. Chaos is annoying when GW tries to push how unstoppable it supposedly is, Oldcrons were the same type of annoying.

Having an unstoppable faction sucks all the tension of the setting and makes a joke of the narrative.

*COUGH* Tyranids... *COUGH*

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Agreed, though I think part of the Lovecraftian theme also has to be unstoppability.

Eh...not quite.
Its more inevitable than unstoppable. You can stop the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, you can kill their servants and foil their plans. But they will always be there, waiting. All you are doing is buying time, which they already have plenty of.
You could totally kill Deep Ones, but in the end it hardly matters, because there will always be more in hiding. Dagon will still be there, and you will never know who has Deep One genes.

In that sense, Chaos is also Lovecraftian, as you can kill demon after demon, but it ultimately won't matter as the Chaos Gods will just try again in a couple of centuries.
Yes, there is overlap between Chaos, Necrons and Tyranids. But that's not inherently a bad thing, as there is still room for nuance and differences.

Come to think of it, Orks would also be a world ending faction. Usually an ork infestation is permanent, meaning that no matter how many times you beat them, they will come back.

Since there are 4, I can now make a Four Horsemen analogy

Oldcrons - Death (omnicidal)

Chaos - Pestilence (corruption) / Conquest (wants to control and spread over everything)

Tyranids - Famine (hungry, Famine is associated with plagues of vermin and locusts)

Orks - War (obvious reasons)

The analogy doesn't really work now though, as newcrons are more into conquest than omnicide, and you can't let Chaos stay pestilence as conquest and pestilence are the same horseman, depending on version.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Eh...not quite.
Its more inevitable than unstoppable. You can stop the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, you can kill their servants and foil their plans. But they will always be there, waiting. All you are doing is buying time, which they already have plenty of.
You could totally kill Deep Ones, but in the end it hardly matters, because there will always be more in hiding. Dagon will still be there, and you will never know who has Deep One genes.

In that sense, Chaos is also Lovecraftian, as you can kill demon after demon, but it ultimately won't matter as the Chaos Gods will just try again in a couple of centuries.

Yep.

And in a war game you cannot have an faction which is unbeatable, it goes against the whole point of the game. You need to be able to beat any foe, even the victory might be a mere setback to the enemy in the grander scheme of things.

Tyran wrote:
Yeah no. Chaos is annoying when GW tries to push how unstoppable it supposedly is, Oldcrons were the same type of annoying.

Having an unstoppable faction sucks all the tension of the setting and makes a joke of the narrative.

I'd argue it's annoying because for all the' unstoppableness' they don't actually do too well in media res. When the setting is supposed to be about how doomed the Imperium is, and how we're watching the doom of it and there's just too much pulling at the seams, it feels like everything that's not a codex paragraph is about how those nice Imperial boys manage to save the day anyway.

They couldn't even give the Tau a win at Damocles without it coming off as Pyrrhic.

Cadia sucked, but it led to Gulliman and the Primaris which is just about the best thing ever, apparently.

The Imperium Nihilus kind-of-but-not-really sucks because it's the same thing as before; some random planets we only get the name of are lost, but the actual relevant places get saved by Primaris hop, skip and jumping over the Great Rift in time anyway.

Having an unstoppable faction sucks all the tension of the setting and makes a joke of the narrative.

Why I dont like the current version of Tyranids.

 Arbitrator wrote:

Tyran wrote:
Yeah no. Chaos is annoying when GW tries to push how unstoppable it supposedly is, Oldcrons were the same type of annoying.

Having an unstoppable faction sucks all the tension of the setting and makes a joke of the narrative.

I'd argue it's annoying because for all the' unstoppableness' they don't actually do too well in media res. When the setting is supposed to be about how doomed the Imperium is, and how we're watching the doom of it and there's just too much pulling at the seams, it feels like everything that's not a codex paragraph is about how those nice Imperial boys manage to save the day anyway.

They couldn't even give the Tau a win at Damocles without it coming off as Pyrrhic.

Cadia sucked, but it led to Gulliman and the Primaris which is just about the best thing ever, apparently.

The Imperium Nihilus kind-of-but-not-really sucks because it's the same thing as before; some random planets we only get the name of are lost, but the actual relevant places get saved by Primaris hop, skip and jumping over the Great Rift in time anyway.

Except that I disagree that the setting is about how doomed the IoM is. Imperial players would like their victories to mean something, and current fluff is a lot about how Guilliman and the Primaris bring hope.

But more importantly, the setting is not binary. It isn't only about the IoM vs Chaos, or the IoM vs Necrons.

It is about everyone vs everyone, and it is annoying how Xenos factions are sidelined for the sake of Chaos. And Oldcrons sidelining everyone else is just as bad.

Sir Heckington wrote:

Having an unstoppable faction sucks all the tension of the setting and makes a joke of the narrative.

Why I dont like the current version of Tyranids.

I do agree to a point that Tyranids should not be a faction. They should exist in the lore though. GW should have continued with the Genestealer cults instead of ditching them and bringing them up only recently. Narratively speaking, Genestealer Cult is a much better foe. They are subversive. They are alien, but also human. They have personnality. They can hold territory and create small empires against which one can wage war or even temporary and very risky alliances. The Tyranids should exist as the thing they rever. They would be to the Genestealer Cut what daemons and the Gods of Chaos are to the Lost and Damned and Chaos Marines. They are the virtually invincible, but still distant, swarm that comes to consume the galax, but just as Khrone himself doesn't have stats, neither does the Tyranid super-organism.