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How much fluff is known about the Iron Men and the war against the thinking machines at the end of Dark Age of Technology?

Only thing I ever read was the doodle in the 3rd edition rulebook and a little thingin the gaunt's ghosts novel "first and only". I'd say your best bet is lexicanium.

IIRC One of the gaunts ghost novels has an Iron men creation facility in it..

I couldn't find anything about it at Lexicanium, but they're a very obvious bit of plagerism from the Dune series. Frank Herbert described a world where mankind had become lazy and decadent because they had created thinking machines to do all work, leaving mankind to "purer" endeavors.

The machines rose up against their creators and mankind was almost destroyed before successfully destroying them. From then on, no machine could be made that duplicated the thought of man and schools were developed to train men and women to perform those tasks, i.e. Mentats and Bene Gesserit.

Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson have written a series of novels based on Frank's original ideas, however I personally found them lacking compared to the original Dune novels.

Much of 40K's flavor and setting was drawn directly from the Dune universe, from the omniscient God Emperor to Space Marines (Sardaukar with power armor - that's from Heinlein's Starship Troopers) to Navigators and Death Worlds, like Dune itself as well as Salusa Secundus, where the Sardaukar come from.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_universe#The_Butlerian_Jihad for more information!

Based on the increased exposure of the C'tan in the back story I think a reasonable conclusion to draw was that the Iron men were a primitive form of Necron created by the Humans during the Golden Age through inspiration by the Dragon or involvement of the Deceiver. Perhaps used to hasten the fall of man? Or a failed attempt by one of the C'tan to recreate their armies that now lay slumbering? Both? Or they could be completely unrelated, though I find that hard to believe!

Shaman wrote:IIRC One of the gaunts ghost novels has an Iron men creation facility in it..

yep... the Iron Men are in "First And Only"

the revelant fluff can be found in watching all 4 Terminator movies. . . . .
but really, not much is known, due to that it was the "dark age of technology"

To elaborate a little bit... in First And Only Gaunt and his men find an STC structure that makes Iron Men. They then accidentally turn it on and it starts making dudes (IIRC) and they eventually have to blow it up to stop it.

Perhaps give it a read, it might have some of what you're looking for in it.

They have to destroy it because the Iron Men it starts making are corrupted. The machine has been tainted by chaos.

Gavin Thorne wrote:I couldn't find anything about it at Lexicanium, but they're a very obvious bit of plagerism from the Dune series.

Herbert was hardly original either; the idea of constructing of artificial intelligences superior to man has been around since at least the Greeks, from Hephaestus's automatons to Talos. That these machines could supplant humans of their own volition was at least thought of in 1863 by Samuel Butler (drawing on the ideas of natural selection put forth in Darwin), and he later published a novel called Erewhon in 1872 where to prevent this from occurring the Erewhonians discarded all machines developed within the last ~270 years, a case of technophobia similar to 40k's (270 years, after all, would put their tech level at just prior to the Enlightenment of the 17th/18th centuries, and mired in the stagnant dark ages).

Coming into a thread and having nothing to say other than "it was ripped from Dune" is lame. This is 40k. All records of Dune were lost 35,000 years ago. It's almost as bad as saying "the C'tan did it!" every time you don't know why something happened...


My copy of First and Only is a 9 hour drive away, but IIRC, they're at least as resilient as power armor, given the ineffectiveness of lasfire against them (Gaunt's powersword, meltabombs, and the infamous tanith 'tube charges' had no problem though). I want to say it had a plasma weapon built into the back of one of its hands, but that might just be wishful thinking caused by my lack of sleep. Also, the Iron Men in First and Only were infected by chaos and have been rusting in hibernation mode for thousands of years, so I'm not sure they're an accurate example of their capabilities.

Only reference I have read is first and only - some good commentary indirectly there from a psychic kid who talks with Commiss. Gaunt.

Interesting thread about whether the necrons started from something like iron men hummies created - anyone able to elaborate on that? (apologies to original poster if this draws away from original q on iron men)

Loricatus Aurora wrote:Only reference I have read is first and only - some good commentary indirectly there from a psychic kid who talks with Commiss. Gaunt.

Interesting thread about whether the necrons started from something like iron men hummies created - anyone able to elaborate on that? (apologies to original poster if this draws away from original q on iron men)

All discussion is welcome mate

This is all good stuff; I’ve got to read First and Only now.


I have 4 theories
My impression is that when they were working out the time line when the franchise stated this may have been put in partly to create a spin off game ‘when they got round to it’ but 40K took off better than expected so needed no spin offs set in earlier time periods.

Or it could just a bit of fluff slipped in to keep other avenues open for future releases.

Or the most plausible explanation just fluff to explain the wide spread technophobia within the Imperium.

And lastly a combination of all of the above as has been mentioned before in some article about their story development they intentionally left loose threads so if they painted them self into a corner story wise they always had another why to go. It was written as a thread with no fixed agenda, kind of like the Cult of the Star Child, or the one most people would be aware of the C’tan phase sword carried by the Callidus assassin which then allowed the evolution of the C’tan / Necron story line and army list.

But this is all blue sky thinking really.

I can vaguely remember robots being used in guard armies during the Rouge Trader era. How were these different from the Iron Men?

Could also have been a tenuous tie to the robots from RT that were dropped pretty quickly after the robot rules were published.

Loricatus Aurora wrote:Interesting thread about whether the necrons started from something like iron men hummies created - anyone able to elaborate on that? (apologies to original poster if this draws away from original q on iron men)

No, the Iron Men were not the precursors to the Necrons, nor are the Necrons the result of AIs who turned on the Necrontyr. The Necrons are the immortal shells the alien necrontyr built for themselves and transferred their memories/consciousness to, not knowing at the time that this would make them all slaves to the C'tan.

Obsidian wrote:I can vaguely remember robots being used in guard armies during the Rouge Trader era. How were these different from the Iron Men?

The Legio Cybernetica, an army composed entirely of robots, is still around. We just don't see it in the game because there's no Codex: Adeptus Mechanicus. The robots are different from the Iron Men because they're not sentient; they can't make decisions for themselves or have intuitive leaps of logic. They can't solve a problem they weren't programmed to solve. All they can do is follow a simplistic command sub-routine pretty much identical to the Instinctive Behavior rules for Tyranids in BFG.

Im pretty sure the iron men were made by a company named skynet and the resistance was led by a man named Sean Conner

I think this piece of fluff was loosely based off of The Greek dude Hesiod description of the five ages of Man.

The fluff was made to describe mans fall from grace ala matrix, terminator...

In his description Zeus created first the golden generation of man which was equated to 40k humans in the 21st century to the dark age of tech. they lived long and blahblah but were few in number

then zeus made the generation of silver= men of iron i believe? which im guessing the AI robots to do all the work

im guessing the war began which forced the golden race to create the men of stone which equates to some type of enhanced humans admech maybe? which eventually outlived the golden race and controlled the bots

sorry if i dont have any sources but this is old fluff pre 2000 I liked it cuz it makes sence and explains why 40k human cultures are the way they were

does anyone remember this fluff maybe i got one of the generations wrong?

I think your ages are also present in Ovid's Metamorphosis. I also thought there was a connection back in the day, but I think that is giving too much credit to the the current GW and most of the game players.

There's lots of old background that has been changed, removed, or is no longer to be relied on.

http://www.philipsibbering.com/WH40KRP/40K_2_Dark_Age.shtml

here is a pic http://wh40k.lexicanum.de/mediawiki/images/5/50/Man_of_Iron.jpg

Where is that pic from?

Firaxin wrote:

Gavin Thorne wrote:I couldn't find anything about it at Lexicanium, but they're a very obvious bit of plagerism from the Dune series.

Herbert was hardly original either; the idea of constructing of artificial intelligences superior to man has been around since at least the Greeks, from Hephaestus's automatons to Talos. That these machines could supplant humans of their own volition was at least thought of in 1863 by Samuel Butler (drawing on the ideas of natural selection put forth in Darwin), and he later published a novel called Erewhon in 1872 where to prevent this from occurring the Erewhonians discarded all machines developed within the last ~270 years, a case of technophobia similar to 40k's (270 years, after all, would put their tech level at just prior to the Enlightenment of the 17th/18th centuries, and mired in the stagnant dark ages).

Coming into a thread and having nothing to say other than "it was ripped from Dune" is lame. This is 40k. All records of Dune were lost 35,000 years ago. It's almost as bad as saying "the C'tan did it!" every time you don't know why something happened...

Ermmm.....No, I think the statement about Dune is very relevant.

First of all, nothing is "new" under the sun, and that Frank Herbert may have drew from other sources is not a negative thing, every creative writer does this.....what is important is that you take that "thing" and make it your own in a way thats original and fresh!

Dune qualifies for this, and being a new recruit to the Dune Universe, you've got to be blind or ignorant to fail to see that GW has "stolen" many ideas from this setting to create its own.....universe.

The main difference here though, is that Frank Herbert actually makes the effort to fill in the details of his back-history, while GW is happy to leave far too many areas open.

Now, to be fair on GW, many other sources have played the "advanced machine" card, Terminator amoungst them, but none have gone into the detail that Herbert has.

You are right about one thing though, thats Dune and this is WH40K.....and the two should not be compared, thats like comparing a Rolls Royce to a Hyundai.

pic is from warhammer monthly 36/Eternal Damnation found it on german lexicanum