Techno-religion (Adeptus Mechanicus)

[maldur]

Have fun reading those, I know I do everytime I pick them up

Feel better soon.

[malika]

This is more directed at Philip. Since we're discussing potential GDS stuff and Sciror is part of it; how would you apply this Techno-religion into Sciror? Would it be something worshipped by the Legion, or does it stand completely outside of this?

[Philip S]

@ Malika - I was thinking they would have a similar role as they do in 40K, through perhaps with more tech description. I'm not 100% sure at the moment, they may be a separate faction or ally.

In a 40K like role they would be 'tech support' to the legion, the industrial military complex, with strong ties to the leadership. A twisted 'science as religion' setup (in the same way scientists now can get stuck in a rut and find it hard to accept new ideas and change). In this Sciror set-up most of the advanced tech is way beyond human comprehension, so it's hard to challenge the science, a lot has to be taken of faith (as it works) and when faith gets involved humans tend to exhibit religious behaviors. After all religion is one way to explain that which cannot be explained.

In Sciror 'everyone knows' in a sense that the high tech stuff is 'science'. That the machines made it, that is is really science deep down, but it's so weird and mind bending that many just think the machine invented a type of 'magic'. In a sense this is not far off the truth as the machines first tapped psionics. So you could say that the idea of what science is has shifted to include 'magic' form the human point of view, whereas from the machine point of view it really is science and understandable (to a machine - a vast artificial intelligence).

In this case it's 'magic' because it matches what human's think of as magic. This point of view is down to human ignorance brought about by their limitations. They are never going to understand the higher sciences, there is not enough brain capacity to cope with it, well unless the become a psionic focus and elevated to god status

Philip

[kage2020]

Since we're back into the realm of magic, I'm now thinking of reshaping some of the ideas presented here into my "40kFantasy" concept for the sheer heck of it. Seems that I'm still burned out on the 40k universe but it might be fun to try and run a small campaign with the fantasy variant. Of course, that depends on juggling the full-time job, the two part-time jobs, and the part-time Masters degree... Heh. Ain't some of us suckers!

The technology angle? I'll think that I'll just borrow some of the ecorium (sp?) concepts and work from there. That will probably be for the more developed "kaers" and I'll have to look for alternate answers to the ersatz communities but... Well, there we have it.

Oh, and the shoulder is doing much better now. I can actually lift my arm over my head and do all manner of things with it. Might be a time, however, before I can start doing some Aikido again.

[malika]

Short contemplation here, it's more connected to Sciror than it is to 40k, but it fits with the whole "techno religion" thing.

What means of communication would the machines use? Would it be binary code? Or perhaps something completely different? Personally I'd like to see the use of Binary code still being the norm. Most humans wouldn't comprehend it, but there are a few who could translate it.

Those who are even smarter (due to psionics or other kind of upgrades) could even communicate in Binary, maybe even sort of "speak" it.

Taking it into the religious context binary could then be the "Language of God" or something along those lines....

What sayeth thee?

[Philip S]

Sept 15, 2011 8:11:57 GMT -5 malika said:

What sayeth thee?

Could be.

I'll refer you to this article: Programming Bio-Photonics

In the above setup in that article I imagine that humans will not get down to the 'machine code' used within a cortex (cortex is the brain inside the Artilects and Artiloids). This is part of the security setup. I want to isolate the core functions of the Artilect from human eyes.

Giving an Artilect code, is like giving a human algebra. The Artilect can work it out, but the code is not running on the hardware natively. The cortex is not so much 'emulating' the code but thinking about the code. It can also stop processing the code at any time, and start to ponder the code. It is very hard to hack, and very hard to infect with a virus. If would be like trying to hack a human mid by giving a person equations, you may stump a person for a while, but you can't gain control. Artilects are much faster.

Digital code will turn up though, but more for peripheral (non-cortex) systems where the Artilect can write code on the fly (much as a human can write code).

The cortex is like a very smart, very powerful, human mind (minus all the emotions and stuff) and works at fantastic speeds.

As the communication with peripherals is 'digital' at heart (even if it is billions of streams) then humans may consider binary code as some form of 'god's language', but this is a language to the machine in the same way our languages are to us. The machines 'speak' digital, and that digital is translated by the receiver into something useful.

Philip

[malika]

Didn't really know where else to post this, since we don't have a separate discussion on the machines themselves. But a new discussion has opened up on Warseer regarding the Dark Age of Technology. You might want to check it out: link

[Philip S]

Thanks for the link

An interesting thread, and quiet a few idea I agree with. I'm very much a fan of the idea that the Necrons = Iron Men (artilods), however this puts the C'Tan in the position of the 'Artilects' - and the C'Tan are not like the Artilects! Perhaps they could be some evolutionary offshoot, or some specific construct (i.e. not the true form)?

Philip

[malika]

Speaking of Necrons, take a look at these rumoured fluff changes they will have in the new Codex. I see a lot of elements for rogue machine systems (such as your assassins) in here...

There is a dramatic change in the fluff in this codex from the previous incarnation of the Necrons. The Necrontyr's empire was massive at one point, but the different Lords in the empire started to turn against each other in civil war. To prevent this from happening the overall ruler of the Necrons (the Silent King) started the war against the Old Ones specifically to give them a common enemy to fight against to prevent his empire from destroying itself. Of course, the Old Ones ended up kicking their butts and in desperation, the Silent King found the C'Tan and agreed to the Deceiver's pact without realizing what he was doing. However, after the Necrons helped the C'Tan to kill off the last Old Ones, the Silent King then ordered the Necrons to turn on the C'Tan in vengeance and utterly destroyed the C'Tan into tiny shards. This war agains the C'Tan weakened the Necrons overall so much they decided to go into stasis to avoid the vengeance of the Eldar (the C'Tan had killed the Old Ones, but not all their children).

Now that the Necrons have reawakened in the 41st millennium, their goal is no longer to 'harvest' souls for the C'Tan (the C'Tan shards are now their slaves) as it was in the old book, but rather to reestablish the great Necron empire that spanned the galaxy before the war with the Old Ones began. However, the overall hierarchy of the Necron people is gone for the most part, leaving each individual Empire to once again rule for itself. This means each Tomb World (or cluster of Necron worlds) is essentially a separate little empire to itself, with a full backstory and idiosyncrasies. While Necron warriors are pretty much just automatons and Immortals not too much better, every other higher Necron being is now much more like an actual person, as their essence is simply trapped inside a metal body.

So there is lots of crazy nuance to Necron culture that was never present before. The codex now has plenty of 'quote' boxes featuring memorable quotes from Necron Lords like other races have in their books. There are some Necron Lords who honor valor in battle, there are a few Necron Lords who trade with other races, and although an uneasy alliance apparently, yes Necrons and Blood Angels did end up fighting against a Tyranid Hive Fleet together. Oh, and there is definitely plenty of reason to have Necron vs. Necron action now (as the old feuds between competing Necron Lords flare back up again).

All in all, it is a major tonal shift. While part of me recoils from it, the other part of me thinks that Necrons as they were had no distinct 'character' that each player could choose to get behind. Yes, the race as a whole had 'character' in how it was organized and functioned, but there was never any really good reason that a player should have his Necron force painted and modeled 'X' way as opposed to another player with his Necron army looking 'Y' way. People certainly painted their Necrons in different (neat) ways, but there was never really any good fluff giving players inspiration to do so.

The only real 'personality' in the old book was the Deceiver, and that frankly wasn't the Necrons, it was their god. The mindless mission that all Necrons were on was basically really similar to Tyranids...the Necrons were coming to harvest every living thing in the galaxy (yawn).

This new incarnation, love it or hate it, gives the Necrons a whole wide array of personality and every single empire has different goals and motives (not to mention paint schemes, markings, etc). Some Necron Lords are obsessed with finding the perfect flesh bodies to transfer their sentience back into. One Necron Tomb World was damaged during the great sleep and erased all the Necron sentience and has started basically commanding its Necrons like true robots (and is actively attacking other Necron worlds to take them over and keep growing), and there are of course dozens more little stories. The Silent King, who put himself into exile (for his unforgivable crime against his people) by leaving the galaxy after defeating the C'Tan encountered the Tyranids in the void between galaxies and has returned to spur the Necrons into action against the Tyranids (realizing that if the Tyranids wipe the galaxy clean of biological matter, then the Necrons will never find a form to transfer their minds back into).

Oh, and the biggest rival of the Necrons is now actually the Altaoic (sp?) Craftworld. Apparently they are the only Eldar who stayed true on the original path to seek out and destroy Necron Tomb Worlds while the rest of the Eldar got all caught up and destroyed in their decadence and then the Fall. Altaoic rangers have traveled the galaxy far and wide over the millennia (ever since the Necrons went to sleep) to track down and destroy or hamper Tomb Worlds from reawakening.

So with this new direction there is now tons of different possibilities for players to make Necrons forces different from each other and there are neat new takes on 'nemesis' races like Eldar & Tyranids to drive gaming plots as well as good reason for Necron on Necron battles.

And as for totally destroying the background of the C'Tan, the codex does allude to the fact that there are lots of unaccounted for C'Tan shards still allegedly cast around the galaxy. The Necron are always trying to hunt them down and imprison them (in pocket dimension prisons), but this does still leave the door totally wide open for a shard of 'The Dragon' to be on Mars and for shards of 'The Deceiver' to have done all the crazy things that's been written about him in novels. Essentially, the full power C'Tan were massively, massively powerful, and the 'shard' versions of them are closer to the idea of what we had in the last codex anyway (something that can be killed/banished on a battlefield).

So while it is a little shocking to have such a massive fluff change hit, I do think it is probably the right way forward to create a more fully realized faction. But I do think it is probably going to be a massive turn-off to those players who absolutely adored the old fluff for the army.

[Philip S]

The Necrons are so 'magical' I'm waiting for the day that GW fess up that they are really 'chaos'. GW may never admit it, but it seems the Necrons have powers that are, um, well 'psyker', but they are not called psyker. Yet we know the Emperor inhabits a 'different bit of the warp' to paraphrase, and is deadly to chaos, so why not the Necrons have their own bit of the warp that does not play well with the regular chaos bits?

I think chaos needs a re-think as the concept is no longer 'scary', they have become too defined, or rather the beings inside the warp are to defined, whereas what we need is some bigger concepts - like, um, chaos! You know, the primordial chaos envisioned by the Greeks. That stuff. Where the chaos gods are not 'real' but mere personification made up by humans to rationalise the unknowable, and that the daemons summoned into reality take the form the summoner expects.

Then the warp is more like the Krell Great Machine in Forbidden Planet, and we have daemon of the Id. New daemons never seen before could come into being.

The Necrons could be daemons house inside metal bodies, like golem of a sorts. The may react so badly to psyker attacks in the exact same way that daemons react so badly (daemons are vulnerable to psyker powers, and far more resistant to mundane weapons).

It seems to me, that where you strip away the Wizard of Oz smoke screen, the Necrons are exactly like manifest daemons and can do a lot of things that daemons do. The only difference is that the Necrons do not suffer from instability (though neither to Vampires, Enslavers, or Spectral Hounds).

Perhaps the C'Tan are nothing more than escaped Daemons, staving off instability by feeding on stars.

It would make a lot more sense, but I suppose 'chaos' has to be spiky. Seems to me that GW's chaos is not really chaotic.

I quiet like the idea that if a summoner misunderstood Tzeentch, that the daemon summoned would reflex the misunderstanding.

I also like the idea that if humans are latent Psykers, that their collective souls in the 'shallows' of the warp form a 'soul net', and this gives rise to a being of a sorts, or shapes the 'chaos gods' in the deeper layers, or perhaps some deeper being that is unknown, our 'Id' waiting in the darkness.

What is the most horrific thing you can imagine? Don't say it here else it will be deleted, but that horror you can imagine is reaching out to chaos, and is forming, waiting to get you.

See? Isn't that more scary??? That the worst crap you can come up with is going to turn up once a little bit of primordial chaos gets into the world though some dozy Psyker messing with powers he or she shouldn't.

Anyway, enough of this tangent - steering it back on topic: I suppose the Artiloid body would make a good home for a daemon possession, and pow! Sciror version of the Necrons...

Philip

[malika]

Have you read the next Necron codex? Interesting bit with the C'tan is, is that they are no longer the almighty overlords. They've basically been weaponized. This in itself could perhaps be very psionic in nature, kind of akin to the concept of the terramorph. You'd have the essence/soul of a single or multiple humans trapped in a shard. That shard could sort of 'come alive' and form into a humanoid figure (like the T-1000 from Terminator 2).

Also, we were talking about techno-religion, which is basically the Adeptus Mechanicus. Are these the 'space Greeks' compared to the Legion who are you basic 'space Romans'?

[Philip S]

Jul 1, 2012 4:17:07 GMT -5 malika said:

Have you read the next Necron codex? Interesting bit with the C'tan is, is that they are no longer the almighty overlords. They've basically been weaponized. This in itself could perhaps be very psionic in nature, kind of akin to the concept of the terramorph. You'd have the essence/soul of a single or multiple humans trapped in a shard. That shard could sort of 'come alive' and form into a humanoid figure (like the T-1000 from Terminator 2).

This remind me of Champions: Return to Arms (sequel to Champions of Norrath) and the shards of Innoruuk.

Jul 1, 2012 4:17:07 GMT -5 malika said:

Also, we were talking about techno-religion, which is basically the Adeptus Mechanicus. Are these the 'space Greeks' compared to the Legion who are you basic 'space Romans'?

Yep.

Philip

[malika]

The relation between the Mekhane and Legion would be interesting to discover. If they are akin to the Greeks and Romans, we could see that the Mekhane not only had a great influence on the technological development of the Legion, but also on the Legion's spiritual lives: religion.

We kind of delved into the idea that the Persians were "most psionic" of the factions and the Legion the "least". At least that the Persians were more in touch with Psionic technology and such. The Greeks could have had Gods which were "weaponized" (the contemporary C'tan concept). The Legion could have absorbed these technologies of course, but their attitude towards them might be a lot more pragmatic than spiritual. As in that the Mekhane had a whole ritual around them, the Legion simply use the tech.

Of course this doesn't mean that the Legion are atheists, there is still plenty of room for religion. And with them absorbing whoever they conquer, it wouldn't be strange to see the Legion take over some Mekhane religious aspects.

[malika]

Food for thought...