How did the Necrons look before their transformation?

Something like this?

Another theory is that Tau and the proto-Necrons share common ancestry, Tau being short lived, and the one of the Necron's driving forces to become what they are now was being bitter about their short lifespan.

Also both Tau and Necrons almost completely lack warp presence.

How on earth would two races divided by millions of years and light years of space have shared ancestry?

Space travel and sci-fi fuckery

He looks so timid and afraid.

Which contrasts the Necrontyr warlike and arrogant ways.

Necrontyr are the Galaxy's timid nerd bullied by the Old Ones' Chad.

>Egyptian based culture
>Egyptian themes all over the place
>instead of having Egyptian looking gods, GW made their gods look like greco-roman gods with togas and everything.

justify this, Veeky Forums.

Necrons didn't have any significant Egyptian themes. Everything Egyptian about them was introduced by Matt Ward, and it was still not much.

Even post-Wardedation the C'tan designs kept being based around Greek gods. Where are the jackal and bird headed deities?

Actually, the Necrons share a lot more with the Sumerians, rather than the Egyptians. Sumeria not only inspired the Lovecraft mythos, and even created the name Nurgle, but it was also known for the creation of /monoliths/.

There are even more similiarities, such as the idea that the Star that gave the Necrontyr life, also gave them death, just like how the Eupherates and Tigirius river gave both fertile soil and deadly floods.

The general style of the Necrons outfits even match, with long capes and waist robes.

Pic repated, its a Monolith.

Because you get a being that really looks divine if you go for the Greco-Roman way, mostly because that is what you'd associate with divinity thanks to history

Aren't there necrons with time-travel tech?

I know one.

Actual canon answer: Males looked like brightly coloured anthropomorphic hedgehogs. Females looked exactly like your waifu.

Source: Vengeful Spirit

That's been my theory for years.

The big counter argument is Necron legs and feet. But if admech can be digitigrade, then why can't necrons go the other way?

>>/choas/

Wasnt the Tau homeworld engulfed in a warp storm that lasted thousands of years?

>How on earth would two races divided by millions of years and light years of space have shared ancestry?

A Dark Age of Technology scientist on Earth obtained a rare sample of Necrontyr DNA from one of the fucktillion sources of weird arcane sci-fi shit that make up the 40K setting, decides it would be a great idea to make a super-species based on this hyper-advanced mythical race. They travel to the farthest reaches of known space and sets to work.

That's an Earth specific example, anyway. Tau could just be an off-shoot of the Necrontyr that bombed themselves into the stone age and forgot that they were ever part of a different species. Hell, with the time-frame involved it could be that a Necrontyr just really liked shooting his jizz into space, and that eventually landed on T'au in the right place and time, and the species evolved from his genetic sample.

Before the whole New-cron retconning, I always held that cron race was an insectoid/arachnid species.

The whole "robo-skeleton" thing was just a form given to them by the C'Tan, and used to intimidate the lesser species of the Old Ones who all had that same body template. The original Necron'tyr body was something more like a Tomb Spyder, who maintain the underground tomb-cities of their race. As another creep-ifying thing, is that Scarabs are effectively swarms of Necron babies.

the hole in that theory is that it was some eldar that were seen stealing the genetic material to uplift them

the c'tan took over the necrontyr as ruler

pottery

Not bad. Especially for Oldcrons. He should look physically pathetic and sickly but wrapped up in regalia to make himself seem more impressive.

see Biotransferrence requires biological bodies to transfer into. Plus they can work out bio-upgrades to lengthen their lifespans and generally improve their health and physiques. Tau probably aren't straight clones; they've probably benefited from at least some genetic tinkering. That might be where the castes come from: attempts at social engineering or just pitting competing genetic templates against one another.

There's a lot the two races have in common. The Tau are physically weak; the Necrontyr allegedly were. Both focus on shootiness and technology/automation. Both don't have much in the way of warp presence. Both have highly stratified, structured societies rich in protocol.

Being hesitant and weak and put upon is a great formula for getting drunk on power when you finally get the physical upgrade of all time. People who've been bullied sometimes internalize the lessons and are careful not to become bullies themselves, but other times they'll mistake their victimhood for virtue and see it as a license to do whatever to people once they have a chance. Hell, you see it on these boards all the time.

So yeah, subtract a soul and then add in a nigh-invulnerable superhero robot body and I can totally see nerdlings turn into arrogant supervillains. It's not just plausible, it's a well-known trope in fiction.

Remember also that sometimes non-FTL ships get sucked into the Warp. A necron cryosleep slowboat colonizer stuck in the warp for 60 million years suddenly shows up a few thousand years ago and crashes. The survivors are awakened automatically, but with no tools they quickly fall into savagery and faction fighting that leads to a long interregnum. That's when the castes evolve. Then six thousand years ago, the savages are discovered by explorators right before their big push to civilization.

When? What's the story of that?

I wonder if this has ever happened to anyone before.

Not I. I'm the one who agreed with the theory here: Otherwise I haven't contributed.

But, if you're looking for some, then uses these as needed:

(You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You) (You)

>Necrons didn't have any significant Egyptian themes.
It was more subtle pre-Ward, but it was still there. Things like pyramidal monoliths, scarabs, and the obsession with tomb-terminology is all from 3rd edition. Dead Men Walking even features a Necron Lord who's described as having a Pharaoh-esque look.

Because the C'tan are not the gods of the Necron people, so having them be culturally similar is not necessary. IIRC, the term "star god" is actually a bit of a mistranslation of the word "c'tan", "star vampire" would be more accurate.

>Because the C'tan are not the gods of the Necron people
Meant to say Necrontyr

It may be a comedy show, but I thought If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device had a fairly good approximation on how Necrontyr probably looked.

This is pretty good too.

>There's a lot the two races have in common. The Tau are physically weak; the Necrontyr allegedly were. Both focus on shootiness and technology/automation. Both don't have much in the way of warp presence. Both have highly stratified, structured societies rich in protocol.

Also, both were introduced into the setting at around the same time.

They looked like they were in a lot of pain.

If we're talking about species evolution in 40k, then I have a question. Is there a specific origin story for humanity in 40k or is it just humans evolved like in real life going all the way back to simple bacteria?

The C'tan took the forms of the Necrontyr old gods.

Humans evolved like normal, though it's possible the Old Ones planted the seeds of our evolution, essentially ensuring we'd end up being humanoid like the other races they made.

Good point, though I don't think a Necron/Tau connection was ever planned or intended to be part of the metaplot.

Nevertheless I think that's a good point because you have the same writing staff, the same tone, and so similar feels.

So far as I'm aware, humans evolved exactly as scientists currently believe we did. There's some speculation, I think, and Eldar/Necrons both might have meddled slightly (thus explaining the human cultural cues that we recognize in them) but otherwise we weren't important enough to have been worth bothering to meddle with.

Fuck you and your qualified opinion. Out of my Veeky Forums reeee

We know they were humanoid vertebrates, and some hint that the Deciever looks like a healthy necrontyr, that said given they are described as sickly. We can assume they were pale, gaunt and willowy, with sunken features, punctuated with tumorus growths

The origin of humanity is considered a bit of a mystery. Most humans in the setting believe that the Emperor created humanity, but that's obviously just a post-facto religious attachment.

What we know:
1) Humanity has hardly changed since we left Earth for space. There has been occasional genetic tinkering by outsiders, but other than a few strange occurrences (Ogryns, Ratlings, some deathworld natives) humans from one end of the galaxy to the other are broadly identical and can interbreed fine. This is odd, to the point where the Magos Biologis have noticed this lack of diversity (despite evolution being a demonstrable fact in other species such as grox and the Tau) and wondered as to why.

2) Eldar, Necrons and probably Old Ones all visited Earth at various times before humans evolved, and afterwards. The webway passes close by (hence the Emperor being able to start his little project in the basement of the palace), and the Void Dragon was fought by the Emperor and exiled to Mars in pre-technological times.

3) Humans generate pyskers, nulls, blanks and pariahs. No other species has this number of different interactions with the warp. Tau and Necon'tyr are broadly nulls, and Eldar are all pyskers, but humans get both. Our psykers are also some of the more powerful (if short lived, and prone to be daemon-food) in the galaxy. And NO other species generates pariahs (negative warp presence) at all. The occurrence of the pariah gene was always made out to be a plot of the Deceiver C'Tan, but since the ret-croning it's been left in limbo.

So basically, it could be any number of things. Any evidence on Terra was long ago paved over (or collected by the Emperor himself), so there's not much way of discovering the truth. Other than asking Him on Earth personally, or a shard of the Deceiver, or a particularly ancient Daemon (good luck with that!).

I always liked this art of an immortal - enhances the humanoid shape but blatantly inhuman motif Necrons should be rolling with.

Pic related is from 3rd edition, and definitely has an Egyptian thing going on.

>Eldar, Necrons and probably Old Ones all visited Earth at various times before humans evolved, and afterwards.
I would argue that the ancient Egyptians were almost certainly hit up by Triarch Praetorians at some point.

woops, forgot pic

>They were all ill as fuck, and had painful space cancer - which was seemingly hard-coded into their equivalent of DNA, seeing as they were never able to rid themselves of it as they spread throughout the stars
That's actually bullshit. The background material states explicitly that they turned to space colonisation to escape from the diseases brought by their sun. Once they escaped, they were merely short-lived, and even that in comparison to the Old Ones. For all I know, they could have longer lives than humans.

Warhammer -65,000,000: The War in Heaven when?

Necrontyr/Necrons and pre-splintering C'tan vs. Old Ones, Krorks, and pre-fall Eldar? That would be fucking awesome.

>no one else notices that this entire post is trollshit.

Maybe after forgeworld is done with HH?

>he origin of humanity is considered a bit of a mystery.

No, it's not. Humans evolved as a part of a biosphere that the Old Ones made on Earth. Source is the Oldcron codex.

Nah, the codex says the curse of their star lingered even when they left their planet.

My theory is that descended from a splinter of necrontyr who rejected the bio-transference and hid away on T'au, rejecting technology until they descended into primitives.

>Source is an outdated codex

Like how that guy in fury road had that weird plastic armor to look more intimidating?

But its not?

Unless there is no lore that says otherwise, it still goes. So eat a dick.

I don't see this line anywhere in the codex. I even looked in the older codices, nothing. So I call bullshit.

No marines? You can forget it bro.

I think this is the best representation of their race.

>The random hair placement noting how their planet is bombarded nonstop by lethal radiation, meaning even a quick peek on the surface is the equivalent of an extended chemo-therapy session.
>Sickly, aged and miserable appearance contrasted by rich looking regalia are a stark contrast to the angular, healthy Eldar they hated so damn much. A life dealt a shitty hand, lending to their bleak outlook on life and why they were so quick trust Space Farts with their race's future.

>Billions of years before the birth of mankind on Holy Terra, a bitter, accursed species known as the Necrontyr clawed its way to sapience beneath the hateful light of their home world’s baleful, fl ensing star. Driven by necessity, the Necrontyr escaped their crucible-prison and struck out for the stars, hopeful of carving an empire in which they could realise their species’ potential free from the lethal energies of their birth star. Yet, the Necrontyr would not fi nd peace in their nascent empire, for their highly stratified society was soon riven with internecine strife. Each dynasty of the Necrontyr sought to claim its own destiny and soon the great houses were engaged in all out war. Had circumstances remained as they were for but a generation more, it is possible that the Necrontyr would have wiped themselves out, as so many species had before them and shall do in the future. Instead, as the Necrontyrs’ young and fractious empire sprawled outwards through the stars, it inevitably encountered far older powers, beings that have dwelled in the galaxy for long aeons. Collectively, these beings were the Old Ones, and they were absolute masters of forms of energy the Necrontyr could not even conceive of, yet alone wield. The Old Ones had long ago conquered the secrets of immortality, yet they refused to share the gift of eternal life with the Necrontyr, who yet bore the curse of the bitter star they had been born under.

-Deathwatch Outer Reach

Look harder!

Old Ones army when? It'd be a good way to finally get us some lizardmen/Seraphon outside of fantasy.

Remember when Necrons had ships that can cross the galaxy in moments (picture related)? Why did they remove them and make the Necrons reliant on the Webway?

Justify this.

>Deathwatch Outer Reach
>the codex

Oldcron codex also says that the curse was encoded into their body. It went with them wherever they went.

Justification: because this shit was OP as hell. Besides, 40k usually have enough taste to at least mention magic when it breaks the laws of physics.

>Justification: because this shit was OP as hell.

Newcrons have Webway access which allows them to skip through the galaxy in a few heartbeats also. This is why the change made no sense. It doesn't serve any purpose but ruin the image of the Necron as masters of real space.

>1) Humanity has hardly changed since we left Earth for space.

Men of Gold vs Men of Stone. As of 40k, humanity as we know it today (men of gold) is extinct. Whatever replaced it appears to evolve more slowly or at least hasn't been subjected to as much genetic drift.

But yeah it could be any number of things. "Evolved naturally but lots of aliens meddled" appears to be the closest to canon.

Underrated post

For 60 million years?!?

Actually, timescale in 40k is flexible, so sure. That would be an interesting twist.

Necrons research Tau genetics. If they had Necrontyr genes, the Necrons would have known already.

All that theorizing is cool and all but the tau do have a warp presence its just very small, and secondly the necrons sold their souls. Its kind of hard to transfer a soul into a new body when you don't have one and the host already has something in it. Like trying to get your non-existent foot in a shoe that has some paper still in it, even if you had a foot it wouldn't work.

We always hear about how the necrons were "short lived", but what if they were just bitches and actually live much much longer than humans. I would make some sense given they evolved on a harsh world which they would have evolved to resist, and that when comparing any lifespan to immortality makes like seem short. Also in human history there have been various societies that deal with the matter of death in different way, some obsessing over it and other not really thinking about it.

That makes sense, because a race would likely have evolved defenses against whatever the local ambient radiation level was (less whatever the useful productive mutation rate is).

I'm really pissed about that. I miss Oldcrons who could exceed the speed of light in normal space, powered by GREEN and FUCK YOU RELATIVITY. That kind of blase disregard for the basic laws of science and causality really drove home how powerful necron science is. I miss it.

It's too bad that I looked in it and it says nothing of the sort.

Except it did. Despite their advanced technology, the curse of their star lingered in their bodies as it was encoded into their bodies. See picture again

Would they? How many crypteks would have records of their own DNA 60 million years later? It's probably rare lore limited to specific types of crytek-- maybe even just one house that would therefore monopolize the data and use it perhaps to build the Tau. :)

I don't buy that biotransferrence included their souls. The Necrons are soulless, right? I mean in the sense of anything short of a living intelligent being.

I think they're digitally uploaded mind emulations, AIs that are protected from Warp fuckery. They're programmed with the personality and memories each of a specific Necrontyr, designed to think they ARE that long-dead guy (who in ancient days was uploaded and then eaten by a C'tan). Their souls perished millions of years ago. The Necron is driven by programming to long for a soul-- but that's something it can never have.

>I'm really pissed about that. I miss Oldcrons who could exceed the speed of light in normal space, powered by GREEN and FUCK YOU RELATIVITY. That kind of blase disregard for the basic laws of science and causality really drove home how powerful necron science is. I miss it.
As far as I'm aware, they can still do all of this.

here
I forgot to say that what if their look was just a complex. I mean how would they know they are ugly and stunted unless they had something to compare themselves with. Which may make sense given that the way these stories are written it seems they had the opinion that their world was toxic and their bodies were poisoned well before they even had advanced to the point of space travel.

Yet if we assume their world was truly toxic then it would be useful to compare them to the native of Baal.

>Would they? How many crypteks would have records of their own DNA 60 million years later? It's probably rare lore limited to specific types of crytek-- maybe even just one house that would therefore monopolize the data and use it perhaps to build the Tau. :)

Many of them? Since a lot of the Cryptek are biologists. They were so thorough in their study of Tau genetics that they saw that they weren't the creation of the Old Ones. They even detected the the Tau were genetically tampered by the one of the Old One servant races (Eldar).

Anyways, the crypteks of the Flesh Vats must have the genecode of the Necrons since one of their solutions is cloning new bodies for the Necrons to transfer into.

Necrons were fucking everywhere.

Wow, amazing, did you read my original point at all?
>necrons went to space to flee from their sun

They can't. Their engines are near-light. They now rely on the Webway or else they become doomed to isolation. Somebody tweet Ward and tell him he is a twit.

Yes, it was stupid since the codex says that before they even traveled into space the Necrons realized that the curse of their sun ain't going away.

More accurately, it was the curse of the Nightbringer which haunted their species since birth.

So fucker you lied. They didn't go to space to escape their diseases. They carried their diseases with them.

It isn't said anywhere that they are sublight and they even go above lightspeed in Fall of Orpheus

Wanna habe some context forndoomed to isolation?

Your species has achieved technology to go double light speed, congratulations. You can now get to another solar system in only 2 years or cross the milky way in only 50,000 years.

Webway on the other hand takes from weeks to months to do the same.

Eldrad sees tyranids incoming. He says fuck that shit we need more meatshields. So he has some alien spider queens killed for their pheromone control ability's. He then gets a couple of tau sticks the pheramone organ into their heads and mind fucks them. He then releases them into the wild where they start spouting shit about the greater good and literally stop the Fire nation's siege on the Earth city before it was cool.

I wonder who could be behind everything that happens in 40k...

>It isn't said anywhere that they are sublight

"Hammer and Anvil" which is a novel co-written by Ward. Imotekh's fleet drives are near-light.

Also Shield of Baal.

>they even go above lightspeed in Fall of Orpheus

Actually, they don't. They just zip out of there. One of the advantages of the interia-less engines is that they can go from zero to near light in seconds. To the naked eye, it seems that they just disappeared.

To those that keep saying that the Necrontyr were arachnids/insects/otherwise non-humanoid creatures, there's one thing I'd like to bring up.

For the most part races tend to create effigies/machines with a likeness to their own body. So if the Necrontyr truly were insect-like, then why would they make humanoid bodies? Especially since the only race they know of that are humanoid are the Eldar, one of their most hated enemies. It just wouldn't make sense. As well, even if it was the C'tan that told them to do this, they still made the bodies for the C'tan to inhabit, which were also humanoid. It'd just make more sense overall that the Necrontyr were humanoid at least.

To me, I feel like the original Necrontyr would resemble the Muun from Star Wars. Except they'd have incredibly ravaged skin and a multitude of different cancers afflicting them all at once.

>Imotekh’s steady march across the galactic plane wove its course even now, out in the depthless tracts of interstellar space where necron tomb ships and harvester cruisers travelled at near-light velocities. The Royarch’s grand schema, embedded in the mindframes of every necron in his service from warlord to drone, was to reunite the scattered, sleeping remnants of their species under his sigil. They had come to the Kavir system in search of the Obsidian Moon, and the Dolmen Gate that lay hidden beneath its surface. The Atun, the dynasty that had built it, was weak and scattered, and the Sautekh had claimed it for themselves.

-Hammer and Anvil

>Zarathusa’s host also escaped the destruction of Aeros, phasing back to their fleet of harvest ships before engaging their inertialess drives and outrunning the shockwave in a flare of relativistic energy. Safe beneath a mile of snow and ice on their tomb world, the Necron Overlords watched with satisfaction as the Tyranid tendril headed for the planet was swept away like so much dust. Across the system, when the wave reached the Magnovitrium, its mirrors shattered into a billion fragments and the Burning One soared free to feed upon the solar winds.

-Shield of Baal Exterminatus

Related text.

Yeah the Muum are kinda how I pictured them but a guy earlier in the thread makes a convincing argument on them being insectoid. Mainly that their new shiny skele body's were created by the C'tan to terrify the old ones creations which tend to all look the same. And that the Tomb spiders are what they originally looked like.

>a convincing argument on them being insectoid.

Which is bullshit considering that....

-The C'tan took the forms of the old Necontyr Pantheon of Gods. All C'tan are humanoid. If the Necrontyr were insects then their racial gods would be the same.

-We already have descriptions of the Necrontyr from the World Engine novel. They are pretty much the same as the Necrons except they got meat on them.

-The C'tan did not design the Necron bodies. The Necrontyr did.

Get assfucked by cancer across your entire species and then wage war with someone who's on a whole other level than yourselves and see how you look.

>-The C'tan took the forms of the old Necontyr Pantheon of Gods

here
How would the Necrontyr have the beauty standard they push upon their gods if they were unable to encounter that in their lives. So the Necrontyr probably looked fine but it was their crazy image/life complex that drove them to think otherwise.

video related

youtube.com/watch?v=thLGbYh6ZE0