Tyranids as a fantasy race

As one of the races with no clear analog in fantasy, how would one go about converting the tyranids into fantasy/AoS without making them too OP or setting breaking? Could they work like daemons, with the exact same units from 40K? Or would they work better as something like fishmen, corrupted old one creations, creatures from before the old ones/sigmar, etc?

>inb4 skaven
Skaven are nothing like tyranids except that they're both swarm factions that eat a lot. Beyond that, skaven don't capture the singleminded hunger, the adaptability, or the alien horror that we have with tyranids.

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The problem with tyranids is they have so much unbeatable stopping power.
Every one of them that falls, they drag back to the pools to make another one.
Every one of yours that fallens, they drag back to the pools to make more of themselves.

A main staying point of Fantasy is that they don't have infinite manpower, they can't just draw on more numberless soldiers from another far off world, devastating more previously unmentioned resources.

The only potential way to make tyranids work is for it to be a small festering group which is well known to other factions, and is continually beaten back relentlessly to where it sprung from, every time it arises.
For Fantasy to stop tyranids, they have to burn them to cinders, each and ever time they rise, almost as soon as they do.

Read the book series Furies of Calderon. It's got what you need

Doing a google search of the series but so far nothing like tyranids. What exactly am I looking for?

The big bad of the series are pretty much Nids/Zerg. Takes place in a fantasy story.

Ah, finally found it. I guess for tyranids to work as a fantasy race they'd probably need a nest of sort since there's no . The same kind of tyrannoforming they already do except slower and more long term. I'd imagine that once the tyranids finally defeat the forces there and consume everything of value, they pick up and leave to new feeding grounds.

In the time before the old ones, the planet was dominated by great beasts. While the dragons of today pale in comparison to the dragons of old, the dragons of old are similarly mere shadows of the monstrosoties that walked the world before the coming of the Old Ones.

Nearly all of them are dead or lost to time, but a slim few know the name of a single True Great Wyrm who slumbers beneath the waves. They call it Tyran: The Great Devourer

Though his name has been stricken from the Plaques of history, Disgraced Slaan Priest Ick once questioned the wisdom of reshaping a world that rightly belonged to such majestic creatures, and for this, he was struck down; forced to walk the earth with his own feet.

For centuries, he brooded and contemplated his misery, until in the great contemplative divinations, he saw Tyran in all its majesty, and with a proactivity uncharacteristic of his race, he made haste to find its place of slumber.

Ick does not share with anyone what happened when he encountered the sleeping beast, but what is known is that he brought back a vial of some fluid only obtainable from the Wyrm itself, and proceeded to create his own spawning pool, using the essence of Tyran rather than the works of the Old Ones.

This pool worked neither on the magics of geomancy, nor the winds of chaos, but the most primal of blood magics that predated the Old Ones interference. Each new spawning requires a great blood sacrifice. No pomp and circumstance, or pleading to fickle gods, is required, merely blood, bone, and sinew, given directly too the pool itself.

These dark spawnings have frequently been mistaken for Lizardmen throughout the centuries, but recently Ick has discovered a new and insidious deviation of his Dark Saurians from the normal breed: they can procreate with lesser species, creating dark hybrids. These hybrids can often pass for their parent race, but remain loyal to their Dark Saurian progenitor.

I think that works in the basics of both the Tyranids and the Genestealer cults, while fitting in to the Warhammer World. I'm not familiar with AoS, so I can't fit them in there.

Just make them much weaker on the individual scale.
Just like roided up ants that sometimes gather enough biomass / strenght to take on villages / small towns

I like it, keeps the theme and feel right.
But avoids their dropping billions from orbit thing that would crush any fantasy world.

I presume if left to it the spawned beasts will go out and slaughter things to make their own sacrifices to summon more Tyranids, which can lead to a bad end for everyone?

Ick believes that with enough blood sacrifices he can awake Tyran himself and he will return the world to the way it was meant to be before the Old Ones or Chaos showed up. Variations of this work their way into the Tyranite Cult sermons, but like other Slaan, Ick's plans are impossibly long-term and circuitous. Also, he's clearly insane, and it might be a pipe dream that he thought-up high off of swamp-fumes.

However, yes, with or without the Resurrection of The Great Devourer, massive blood sacrifices to functionally to spark more and more Dark Spawnings is always a viable threat.

for the cults thing, could the gunbeasts osdible be spawned seperately. With the appropriate sacrifice. So you could conceivably get a a cultist "blessed" with a Fleshborer.

The way I imagine it, wherever a cult forms, they use their blood to ceate a lesser spawning-pool in the sewers/catacombs/caves beneath whatever city/villiage/fortress they are infecting. While it can't directly spawn new creatures like the true Tyranite spawning pool, hybrids can bathe in the pool during a blood sacrifice to gain further mutations.

That could, therhetically, justify some bio-guns here and there. However, if I were to put them on tabletop, I'd either make them a rare choice, or a weapon only available to heroes/lords.

you could get away with the guns more if you tone them down a little both in power and fire rate. Make them need to be feed flesh and blood to generate more ammo.

make the fleshborer hit as hard as a crossbow instead of a bolter for example.

You can always just regress to rogue trader lore, wherein tyranids have the same technology as everyone else, but just make all of their equipment out of organic materials obtained by melting down biomass and the equipment they use is just strange looking, meat/bone equivalents of whatever is currently in use by everyone else.

yeah makes sense.

though I also like the more recent nid fluff of everything being a creature, even the a lot of the ammo.

Plus there's the body horror element of being attacked by weapons that literally eat you alive.

It has always been the case that their technology is alive and/or is created by biological processes, but there's no necessity for their technology to be even similar in power to how it is in 40k.

Tyranid technology is a response to the threats that exist in the 40k universe. If those threats don't exist tyranid technology will be different. Also the scale is also likely to be vastly different, in 40k there are hundreds of millions of inhabited worlds in the imperium with populations in the billions and tyranids consume the biospheres of entire planets routinely and assault the entire planet at once from orbit with armies of billions of organisms, a fantasy setting likely takes place on one continent of a single planet populated by hundreds of millions of people at most, which requires the scale of the invasion to be dramatically scaled back as to not be totally apocalyptic.

I'd turn them into one of those Lovecraftian horrors from the deep underground that we get some snippets of lore about here and there.
They could serve the fluff-purpose of finally allowing the dwarven race to recover some holds and rebuild their strenght as both greenskins and skaven have to fend the not!tyranids off as a result of digging to deep.
Apparence-wise I'm thinking hordes of pallid and mishappen eyeless creatures with some really large WTF-am-I-even-looking-at monsters as their lords and heroes.

Easy, we turn the Tyranids into Formorians. We now have ant-styled Tyranids.

If we want to stay with the mastery of adapting that tyranid got going for them the not!tyranids could have some mindcontrolling beings who insert themselves like some kind of sapient underground cordyceps into the other species of the world.

I agree with this, fantasy tyranid biotechnology would obviously be more on a traditional fantasy level than a far futuristic setting. Biomorphs should be more crude and not fully integrated into their users. For instance, bone swords could be a type of fast growing horn or spike on some specialized creature that gets harvested for use by others.

Ranged options should be pretty limited since heavy ranged options really only developed in 40k after the Nids were getting repeatedly BTFO by futuristic ranged weapons. In a fantasy setting there really isn't much pressure to develop guns or heavy artillery. If anything, fantasy Nids should have things we see in other creatures like fire breath, acid spit, poisonous gases and firing spines like a razordon.

What if the weapons are "born" from pools of organic slop that have chunks of tissue from Tyran dropped in?

After the "Immature" weapon has formed, it is then fused into the body of a cultist and grows into a mature form from there.

Some sort of breath weapon in which a massive not!tyranid spews out a bunch of its offspring on the foe which results in a continued but low dmg attack would be neat. It could even give some debuff on something like ws or initiative as the foe is busy trying to get rid of all the creepy crawlies that are swarming them.

>For instance, bone swords could be a type of fast growing horn or spike on some specialized creature that gets harvested for use by others.
That's literally what a bonesword is already except the entire creature is carried and does the whole psychic pulse thing.

I have the book on my shelf. I don't know where I got it. Is it worth a read?

I'd forgotten boneswords were psychic.
mundane ones could just be the harvested spike growths. while the psychic creature blade is their magic/artefeact weapon, but rathwr than being just a plain say flaming enchantment it straight up has levels in wizard.

>while the psychic creature blade is their magic/artefeact weapon, but rathwr than being just a plain say flaming enchantment it straight up has levels in wizard.
I blame Warpstone Dust Contamination.

I don't think that tyranids would produce a complete organism, particularly a symbiote weapon that is not imidiately ready for use. Consider that even though the things they make are alive, for tyranids this is an industrial process.

Also, interestingly there is a very old story that was published in Hive War, the first ever real tyranid army book which was for Epic which involves a Fleshborer, as it turns out they are actually intelligent, aware and utterly hateful of all non-tyranid life and are compelled by an urge to shoot at other living things, which gives it pleasure. It is also a composite organism with a limited local hive mind which includes the beetles it uses for ammunition and the creature that carries it.

In that story an astropath had come in contact with the weapon which had been recovered by a survey team, it formed a group mind with him and drove him to murder the crew of a spaceship with it. Later tge same thing happens when another psyker performs a reading on it and attempts to shoot inquisitor Kryptman with it.

>every one of them that falls, they drag back to the shrines to reanimate
>every one of yours that falls, they drag back to the shrines to animate

Tyranids are undead


Also, pic related is the closest we have to Tyranids in a fantasy setting, imho.

its even got the swarmlord equivalent

youtube.com/watch?v=Aq8vAMfNfT8

Ever play Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic? The Shadow Demons from that game are in many ways "Fantasy Magic" Tyranids.

battle for the skies.
Hivecrone vs Dragon, who wins?

It's written by Jim Butcher, the guy who wrote Dresden Files. It's about Romans with elemental Avatar powers & Pokémon. Of course it's work the read.

Plus the MC is my favorite character ever

>no clear analog in fantasy,

they're skaven

and just to flog the point some more:

skaven and tyranids are both varieties of beastmen

I know you only said that to trigger OP but
>tyranids are beastmen
>tyranids are related to chaos in any way

You could at least attempt to not come off as completely retarded and ignorant of the fluff. You know, the way this works is you're supposed to seem cleverer than the guy you're trolling, but what else should I expect from underage summerfags?

Bones swords in 40k come melded to their users, are complete creatures with their own minds, constantly regenerate damage and sharpen themselves to a mono molecular edge and produce a psychic field. That's pretty much the equivalent of a power sword, and advanced futuristic weapon. Now imagine that what a regular sword is to a power sword, the fantasy tyranid bone sword is to the 40k bone sword. Way less advanced in biotechnology.

I wouldn't, fagranids are trash and their fans are even worse.

What an absolutely useless thing to say and provide no contribution to the conversation, thanks for wasting everyone's time, especially your own

U mad

Don't greenskins already fill the "impossible to stamp out invasive species that is vaguely dangerous to humanity " roll?

No, I'm just depressed, you could be doing so much more with your life than this.

It's somewhat of a shit movie, but the lizard dragons in The Great Wall are kind of similar. They came from outer space in a meteor, attack anything they can eat to accumulate more biomass, bring back their own dead, have a hive mind. Might be worth looking into.

>For instance, bone swords could be a type of fast growing horn or spike on some specialized creature that gets harvested for use by others.

Like the boneswords that genestealer cultists use? Those are harvested from the throne of the patriarch, if I'm not mistaken. Still have the rules of a regular tyranid one tho

>Skaven are nothing like tyranids except that they're both swarm factions that eat a lot. Beyond that, skaven don't capture the singleminded hunger, the adaptability, or the alien horror that we have with tyranids.

But that's the thing. In a fantastic setting, how do you make aliens any more different than magicians and other races?

The only thing I can think of that could fit on this is a blob-like thing expanding through the land. Maybe a wizard created it as a weapon, but it backfired and it's trying to eat the planet. The thing is capable of using the bodies it's consumed to create an army of brainwashed creatures. From insects to trees to dragons... everything consumed could be used as an army, but the more it uses this trick, the less biomass is able to use, and thus, it shrinks. That way, there can be a realistic way to beat it.

This kind of blob.

Look up Kythons from the Book of Vial Darkness. They match the look close enough. Then add some flavor:
>Exiled/Created on the mortal plane long ago
>Seeking to gain numbers slowly and secretively by harvesting/consuming flesh of magic users. Can only reproduce if they consume magic user flesh.
>Once critical biomagic-mass is reached, they can flood the world in an orgy of consumption.

>But that's the thing. In a fantastic setting, how do you make aliens any more different than magicians and other races?
You don't necessarily have to make them entirely different from everything else in the setting, there can be some overlap just like in 40k. Tyranids are a swarm faction but so are Orks, cultists and daemons. All 4 are entirely different foes to face and all act entirely different, despite all having some very broad and general similarities. Other anons showed there are multiple ways to pull off tyranids besides making them scheming chaos rats or blobs.

They fill that role in 40k and we still have tyranids. Aside from being hard to get rid of swarms that war a lot there is nothing really tying the 2 races together

>what are the tyranids like
>don't say the one thing they're kind of similar to
well just fuck off

>skaven are kinda like tyranids
By this logic, so are goblins, flesheater courts, ogres, chaos hordes and zombies. You know, because they're all either swarm factions and they eat a lot

These are perfect, a few tweaks and we got ourselves fantasy tyranids. I guess if these things can fit into fantasy, there's really no need to change too much about how the tyranids look.

So no exocrenes, tyrannofexes, tyrannocytes or long ranged biotitans, everything else is a go. No guns for the gaunts, at best some of them will have skink level ranged weapons like spine fists or thrown objects. Warriors, carnifexes and hive tyrants should also be entirely close ranged, with a few exceptions among warriors functioning like a skaven weapon team.

who gives a shit about the fluff here? OP's talking about the meta, not the means by which Tyranids were created, which for all any of us knows was a million years ago in Sigmar's Warpstone anus galaxy

Tyranids and Skaven are, conceptually, varieties of Beastmen; it doesn't matter that Tyranids aren't Chaos (40k Beastmen are often implied or stated, like other Abhumans, to be the result of 'evolution' in 30,000 years of galactic colonization, meaning 'genetically manipulated during the Dark Age', because no amount of inbreeding is going to produce Ogryn in 30,000 years)

Nids are bug-men (ironic, really, given they eat dwarfs) and Skaven are rat-men; look I'll even trigger you some more: Lizardmen are just a subset of Beastmen created by the star-travelling Slann, suitable to working around Slann-favored habitats

>underage summerfags?

I can almost guarantee I'm older than you and have been having this exact conversation about Tyranids since the 2E Codex formalized all the stuff WD had been printing about their background for the previous few years; because it was abundantly clear even then that, conceptually, they were coming from the same design studio that was just settling down on what Skaven were supposed to be and why they were different from vanilla beastmen

>sub-variety of Beastmen, not!Gors
>own god in the Warp
>coming up to own your civilization from the sewer

it's not hard to see where the inspirations were, especially since Skaven were a big hit

>who gives a shit about the fluff?
I do, that's the whole reason I created this thread. Thanks for writing all that just to miss the point completely