Friday, January 22, 2010

Tyranids, eh?

I like the new Tyranid codex, enough to want to play the army, but I don't want to go through the expense of buying a whole new army. My Necrons are just sitting around, so I thought I'd combine the two. So the whole week I've been wracking my brain trying to map Necrons to 'Nids, and of course, I keep coming up short on the monstrous creature front; I mean:


Necron Warriors=shooty Gants
Flayed Ones=stabby Gants
Necron Warriors with weird scratchbuilt flight systems= Gargoyles
Scarab Swarm=Ripper Swarm
Wraiths= Raveners


and then the whole thing falls apart from there. You have a whole pile of MC's with no evil machine equivalent, all the way up to the Hive Tyrant. I suppose Tomb Spyders could map to Tervigons (it's a stretch), but other than that, there's a long way to go. So, in search of ideas, I meander around the web, ending up here, on the Privateer Press site.


Evil machines with green power sources? The horns and skulls don't say "Necron" but everything else kinda does. Then we have the new plastic Cryx models: (pic from BOLS)

Oh my.  It's a MC with no organic gribblies. I see crushing claws, scything talons, even some kind of gun that I'll replace with a gauss cannon anyway.  One thing I was agonizing over is that, beyond a certain size, Necrons become all slab-sided and float everywhere. You know what? Screw it. The minions of the Void Dragon/Outsider aren't gonna do that. They're going to scuttle, crawl, run, and not WBB all over the place. Also, the word "Hive" will be replaced with "tomb", and I'll add the suffix "cron" all over the place. Tomb Tyrant, Tomb Guards, Trycron. Mawcron. Sure. It works. For those of you who haven't seen my Destroyer Lord:


Those flight bases are large enough to be MC bases themselves. He also looks sufficiently serpentine to be a Void Dragon minion. Of course, Hive Tyrants bulk larger and have more weapons, but.... yeah I can see it. I might have to make a mk.II of him. 


Watch this space for updates.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Check out some of the AT 43 models. They have a race of robotic skeletons that may have some good things for your MCs.

Mark said...

I saw those at my local gaming store, and I like 'em! The spider-centaur things would make nice Tyranid Warrior stand-ins. They bulk smaller than the Carnifexes and Trygon's I've seen, so I dunno if I'd use them for anything larger than that. As for the giant-ass spiders, now those have promise.

The only thing I dislike about the AT-43 stuff is that it's pre-painted (boo!) and I'm worried that repainting would obscure the detail, which already looks kind shallow. I suppose I'd have to strip one to find out for sure...