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I'm reading tv tropes and I found this

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/Warhammer40000Necrons

Villain Decay: Courtesy of the retconned lore. Originally, C'tan were some of the most ferocious things any army could face. They were star gods in living metal bodies in lore; they were nigh-unstoppable death machines on the tabletop. These days, both in lore and on the table, C'tan are less threatening than your average greater daemon, particularly because Matt Ward pretty much undid all their accomplishments. Oldcron fans were pissed. In fact, it got so bad that GW issued a characteristic Shrug of God stating that despite the unavoidable loss of badasse, the C'tan were merely set back by the Necrons' rebellion and there are a lot of C'tan Shards and even whole C'tan who remain unaccounted for, allowing those who actually like them to assume that there are C'tan who regained control of their Necron jailers or went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after breaking free.

Anyone have a source where Matt Ward says there are whole c'tan who remain unaccounted for and regained full control of their necrons? I have no idea where to start looking for such "shrug of god".

Makes sense though. In Gladius in the Necron quest, you gotta kill a necron army that's under the control of the deceiver. Immediately made me think of Dawn of War and how that behavior is identical to the nightbringer and the deceiver in those games. So I figured oldcrons are canon and they're just necrons enslaved by a transcendent c'tan shard like Gladius. And then I read the above quote which seems to suggest that oldcrons are in fact officially canon.

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I was reading
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Mephet%27ran
And it says the Deceiver was shapeshifting in one of the lore stuff. Which got me thinking, why do the C'tan look like humans? And the internet says it's because they choose to look like that. So it got me wondering, can all C'tan shapeshift? Or is it just a Deceiver thing?

I can't provide sources because I'm not in a position to look up and read codices atm to verify these stuff. Anyone know where they talk about why C'tan look the way they do?

C'tan don't look like humans, they look like Necrontyr, which they did so the Necrontyr would "trust" them.
There are definitely C'tan shards out there that the Necrons have forgotten about. The Necrons controlled huge swathes of the galaxy prior to the Great Sleep and there are millions of worlds that were once theirs.
Also as a side note, 4chan is really really bad for having an article authors personal opinions hardbaked in (and trash memes). As bad as Lexicanum is for mixing its sources, 4chan is basically glorified blog posting. If you want proper background always go for proper sources first then Lex.

All C'tan were broken into Shards (Codex: Necrons (5th ed.), pg.40).

Some Shards are more powerful than others though, and they can consume one another (Apocalypse (6th ed.), pg.32), so the noticeable difference between a powerful Shard and a full C'tan might be relatively minor.


The World Engine features Necrons who remain loyal to the [a] C'tan.


Not all C'tan need necessarily be humanoid. Yggra'nya in The World Engine has more limbs than is normal for humans/necrontyr. Although (very) unreliable as a source, the Dragon as presented in Mechanicum is an actual dragon in form.

While all necrodermis can change form, it isn't clear whether all C'tan [shards] choose to alter their forms significantly.

There's a Void Dragon model now. It looks nothing like a dragon.

But yes, there are loads of loose C'Tan shards still out there. There's also several alternate ways to employ old Necron lore nowadays. A dynasty may become fully overtaken by the Destroyer Cult, effectively giving them the same goal as Oldcrons to wipe out all life. There are also The Severed, dynasties where all of the Necrons have ended up mindwiped, from radiation or other means, and then overtaken by the Master Program of their tomb.

jareddm wrote:
There's a Void Dragon model now. It looks nothing like a dragon.

Not all shards of a single C'tan have the same appearance - for example Yggra'nya in The World Engine vs Yggra'nya in Warzone: Damnos.

Also see the variety of slightly different versions of the Nightbringer and Deciever.

Why no mention of Androids created by chaos Squats?

Ok I re-read parts of the world engine and the answer is a resounding yes. All C'tan can shapechange at will. In the World Engine Yggra'nya looked like a starving crippled malnourished human-ish creature with fingers and limbs falling off of him in an attempt to elicit sympathy from Hyalhi. And once freed he changed his shape to look like his former pre-fall form to strike fear into the necrons. So yeah, all C'tan can shapeshift at will.

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New question. Rather than make a new thread, I'm hijacking this one since it has a low post count.

Can any C'tan absorb any c'tan shard?

So like could a Deceiver shard absorb a Nightbringer shard? Or can they only absorb shards that originated from the same c'tan?

Transcendent C'tan are made up of many different shards forcibly merged into a devastating weapon. I would assume that the more shards added to an original, the less the original is able to maintain its "personality" and becomes Transcendent.
There is also the C'tan known as the Outsider who may or may not have gone insane after consuming another of its kind.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
All C'tan were broken into Shards (Codex: Necrons (5th ed.), pg.40).

Some Shards are more powerful than others though, and they can consume one another (Apocalypse (6th ed.), pg.32), so the noticeable difference between a powerful Shard and a full C'tan might be relatively minor.


The World Engine features Necrons who remain loyal to the [a] C'tan.


Not all C'tan need necessarily be humanoid. Yggra'nya in The World Engine has more limbs than is normal for humans/necrontyr. Although (very) unreliable as a source, the Dragon as presented in Mechanicum is an actual dragon in form.

While all necrodermis can change form, it isn't clear whether all C'tan [shards] choose to alter their forms significantly.

Did you edit this post significantly after posting? I don't remember reading all this!

Having trouble getting my hands on apocalypse 6th ed, but I'll take your word for it.

Ok I think all my questions are answered. Consume, absorb, same difference.

Thanks!