The Chime of Eons - The Great Devourer (First Bite!)

“An alien threat has risen from beyond the abyss, a swarm so vast that it blots out the stars. This horror fights neither for power nor territory, but rather to fee a hunger so insatiable that it will eventually devour the entire galaxy.”

- Inquisitor Kryptmann

"The Tyranids are without a doubt the most rapidly evolving creatures in the galaxy. The Magos Biologis of Mars have observed developmental DNA leaps between broods originating from different hive fleets that would take other beasts millions of years to achieve. It appears that the Tyranid 'Norn Queens' or primogenitor organisms aboard the hive ships are capable of modifying their progeny in response to the environment and life-forms they encounter. Newly harvested genetic codes are assimilated, the prey's defensive measures are examined, and improved creatures are bio-engineered to overcome that resistance. Over time the myriad improvements to the hive fleet's genepool are melded with others, strengthening the entire race"

- Magos Biologis Alder Garrick

"That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over, what the **** are we supposed to now, huh, what are we gonna do?"

- Hudson, Aliens (1986).

Welcome back to The Chime of Eons.
The races of the galaxy of the 41st millennium are facing an extinction level threat in the Hive Fleets, one that is far beyond the scale of anything they have dealt with before.

The gamers of the LCG are looking at a change in the game of great moment as well, with not only the introduction of a whole new faction, but also brand new core game concepts, such as the dual-commitment of Warlord and Synapse Creature, and the first faction built from the onset to construct "mono decks".

And as for this poor amateur fluff-loving web-scrawler, there's a truly epic task ahead. Not only are we looking at a number of new cards almost equivalent to three warpacks in one go, but we're also breaking open the lore of an as yet unexamined faction, and looking at non-Tyranid cards that reveal new lore as well.

Yep, its epic tasks all round, but we're all up to the challenge. Load your boltguns with hellfire rounds, and get ready for first contact!



TYRANIDS - The Ever Evolving Lore

In many ways, the tyranids are what The Chime of Eons is all about. This is a faction that has a massive pool of lore attached to it from the core wargame and from multiple franchise-associated products, but whose "canon" has changed time and again to reflect GW and the customers' changing tastes in bioengineered monstrosities.The lore of tyranids is a grand work that has been built piece by piece, and where the journey to where we are now is a story in itself.

So where does this story begin? 1987 and Rogue Trader, right? That's where we always begin...

Not this time.

Truly, to understand the heritage we have to put on our scifi-convention T-shirts on and rave about how clearly this work is a complete rip-off of this work. We scifi fans talk about this sort of thing a lot, but in my own mind its all about inspiration and cross-pollination of ideas, not theft of concepts. Imagination builds on imagination, and art grows.

So, for the sake of argument, lets put our start point as Starship Troopers, written in December 1959 by Robert A. Heinlein. Sure, we could look back further or pick a different point, but for me, this is where things because recognizably "tyranid".

In this novel, citizens of a highly militarised disturbing dystopian future find themselves at war against a threat of such scale that it threatens their extinction. They have technology, discipline, near-religious devotion to their state and macho men with guns. Hell, the book pretty much invented the idea of powered armour exoskeletons, and the MO of the Mobile Infantryman is pretty much the MO of the Space Marines, albeit with slightly better tech and longer ranged weapons.

The enemy is bug-like, with chitinous armour and scything limbs, and has a technology base that is largely based on biology and evolution. The key to defeating them is in taking out the brain bugs that co-ordinate the chitinous horde.

This book is rightly lauded as a scifi classic, and equally is considered contentious and controversial in many ways, with detractors calling it a celebration of fascism and militarism.

If none of this sounds familiar so far, you've probably not been following 40k closely!

Next, lets leap forward in time to the acclaimed and beloved films Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). These are great films in many ways (and I have a Smart Gun trained on those who disagree) but the same theme of infantryman versus bugs appears, especially in the second film.

Without a doubt, at least some of the people involved in the creation of 40k was immersed in the same science fiction culture as all the other British geeks of 1987.

Tyranids appeared in that first book, receiving almost as much page space and word count as other 40k staples like the Eldar and the Orks. Of course, that book also gave a lot of coverage to the Slann and Jokaero as well, so there's a lot there that barely exists in the current lore. This was a book crammed full of imagination, much of it unrefined and as yet undetailed, and much of it likely deliberately derivative.

This is a Rogue Trader era Tyranid:



The Gigeresque influence here is clear in the model's appearance, but its a classic sculpt, and it set the basic shape of tyranid models from that point onward. Six limbs, the elongated head and maw and the monstrously alien appearance were all there from the start,

In a section entitled "Tyranids and the Hive Fleets", this alien race is mentioned as being scattered through interstellar space in the western part of the galaxy. Certain ideas were created at this time that have lasted through the lore to the present day: the tyranids are cosmic locusts, leaving worlds bare and barren of all life. They harvest biomatter to act as raw material for their wholly biological technology base. They are based on hive ships that form a hive fleet, with a hierarchy of slave organisms subservient to Tyranid Warriors, in turn subservient to Hive Tyrants.

However, a lot of things have changed too. Notably, the above miniature was a little bit shorter than a human, and aside from superior speed and skill, they were somewhat comparable to humans in statline. The exceptional toughness and strength of tyranid organisms came later. If anything, the model in the current line most reminiscent of the old Tyranid warriors is the Termagant.

Also notable was that of the "many slave races" there was only one described: the Zoats.

Zoats were centauroid creatures, better adapted to planetbound activity than the spindly void-adapted tyranids. They were one of the few slave races able to act independently, and indeed their service to the tyranids was only sustained by a special slave-enzyme that kept their wills in check. Freed from exposure to this, the zoats could build their own empires, develop powerful psychic powers and act in their own interests. Also, while this wasn't mentioned in the Rogue Trader book, their ongoing fluff was expanded to have them as the ambassadors of the tyranid race, interacting with and manipulating other races in the interests of the hive fleet.

Zoats seem to have entirely left the mythos and canon of the tyranids. The general accepted consensus is that somewhere along the way GW decided they wanted to make tyranids more alien and unknowable. The tyranids of the current fiction are represented as a threat so alien that they cannot be communicated with, negotiated with or bargained with in any way. They either aren't capable or willing to recognize sentience in anyone else, and they exist wholly to devour.
Zoats put an altogether too accessible face to this imagery, and so they've been retconned from canon and there's no sign now that they ever existed. Between first and second edition, they were excised from the army books. In third edition a background story was offered discussing their extinction. After that they weren't mentioned again.
As GW always does, there's no mention of what their "official status" is: I prefer things that way, as the 40k universe is a big enough piece of fiction for every fan to form their own mental picture of what it looks like!

Some may know that Genestealers were also in the core Rogue Trader book, but notably these were not associated in the fiction with tyranids... not yet anyway! There's a story there that we'll return to later.

For the evolving Tyranid fiction, the first time they received significant focus and treatment was in 1990, with the board game Advanced Space Crusade.

Digression time:

As older GW-geeks may recall, mainstream board game company Milton Bradley was contacted by Games Workshop in a bid to bring their IP to a wider audience. Two games were designed: Heroquest and Space Crusade, broadly introducing people to the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, but never using those names explicitly. Both were pushed with primetime TV advertising. Here's the Space Crusade one:



These games achieved their stated goal (well, okay, I'm just speculating, as I don't have access to those companies historical financial accounts, but as a young man at the time it seemed like this was the hot toy of the summer!) and Games Workshop decided to pull people deeper into the mythos, and to progress them onto more complex game mechanics.

Advanced Space Crusade showed us a group of Space Marine Scouts boarding a Tyranid Hive Ship in order to destroy its vital organs, and cripple it from within.

As a game, it was pretty decent, with some poor rules balance typical of the time in places, but overall a good experience.

As a setting and fluff expander, it was something awesome. It massively expanded the lore of Tyranids and the Hive Fleets, revealing way more about their manifold organisms and their operations.

Here's a few of the lore tidbits that didn't exist till that game:

1) Space Marine Scouts. Sure, we had Space Marines since Rogue Trader, but the idea of the more lightly armoured scout company was a new one.
2) The secret origin of Ork squigs. The lore section revealed that these were tyranid creations made from ork DNA, and had been "rescued" from the hive fleets by ork raiding parties. This is probably something that is now retconned, but its an awesome bit of obscure fluff.
3) New Space Marine Chapters entering the lore - the Lamenters and the Scythes of the Emperor.
4) Genestealers were revealed to be vanguard organisms of the Hive Fleets (more on this later).

The next few years saw Tyranid fluff expanding, mostly through the medium of White Dwarf magazine. The game Advanced Space Crusade also received an overhaul, with many of the same game components reboxed with a new rules set as "Tyranid Attack", which was undoubtedly a better game, but still cheeky as hell of Games Workshop to push as a new product.

Coming back to the 1993 Codex Tyranids for Second Edition, this information was incorporated and assembled into a thing of coherence, and the foundation was set for modern Tyranids. The shape of the army list, the core of the lore and the underlying nature of the Great Devourer was established. While the fluff has been iterated upon continuously since then, thats been a process of growth and expansion, rather than complete redesign.

However, when the third edition codex was in 2001, something did change. The core fluff was pretty much unchanged, but suddenly the miniatures and artwork for Tyranids looked really damn cool.

What happened?

March 31, 1998 an obscure game that I'm sure you've never heard of was released, by the name of Starcraft.

If you've been on the same bits of the internet as me, you'll hear idiots who say that Starcraft is basically just a rip-off of Warhammer 40,000. The Protoss are Eldar, the Dominion is the Imperium, the Zerg are Tyranids. You'll also hear idiots who don't understand the linear nature of time say that the Tyranids are just ripping off the Zerg.

I'm not even going to go into the lore of Starcraft - there's whole encyclopedias of information on that online!

Well, actually, both groups of idiots kind of have a point. Starcraft is a great original IP, but Blizzard Entertainment would be mad to deny that it has elements that are derivative of Games Workshop's stuff. And yes, the Tyranids were before the Zerg, but it'd be very silly to say that the smart guys at Games Workshop didn't look at the rip-roaring success of Starcraft and wonder how they might cash in.

So, of course, we saw Dawn of War, which was a copy of Starcraft with 40k hammered onto it, but which was also a great game in its own right.

Back in the wargame, we had Codex: Tyranids for 3rd Edition. Hormagaunts were introduced, which were more or less zerglings with an adrenal gland upgrade, and the army turned into one with a big swarm backed up with a few big units. Tyranids went from looking like buck toothed alien geeks with big penis spikes into looking like mean snarling spiky monsters that could almost have been sculpted from zerg concept art. Names changed too, with the adorably titled Screamer-Killer and Hunter-Killer turning into the Carnifex and Termagant.

Games Workshop seemed determined to borrow the coolness of Zerg as payment for Blizzard borrowing the concept of the Tyranids.

To me, as a fan of tyranids, it was frustrating in a good way. Basically, it was frustrating that my much beloved Tyranid collection suddenly looked liked ass next to the amazing new sculpts that were pouring out of Games Workshop at the time. But it was also awesome and cash-spend inspiring, as attested to by the fact that fourteen years on I still have boxed-and-cellophaned Tyranid releases that I swear I will get round to painting one day soon.

For me, since 2001, the Tyranids haven't evolved much more. The concept has been tweaked and polished, everything has got prettier, the big models have got bigger and the game has gotten better balanced. However, GW being GW, even though the game looks and plays better than it ever has, we're not quite at perfection yet.

Now, in 2015, we see FFG (to me, a rightful part of the growing IP) bringing their take on the Tyranids to LCG tables...





THE GREAT DEVOURER - The Tyranids of Now

So let's step away from how tyranids reached their current incarnation, and take a look at how they are depicted in current 40k fluff. More specifically, let's look at how the LCG handles them relative to this.

The Tyranids are described as a race of "ravenously hungry aliens". They're not just a presence in the interstellar void, but now rather an extragalactic threat that has travelled across vast distances to close with and consume our galaxy. Its strongly implied that many other galaxies have fallen before them.

Their mode of war is to continuously learns and adapt, assessing threats, absorbing DNA and changing to find the most efficient way to victory. They're described as being without number, and unimaginably vast threat that might not be possible to defeat even if every sentient race in the galaxy were to cooperate to defeat them.

In this depiction, I admit I have a bit of a problem with the way that 40k depicts each faction. Every threat is always described as being utterly fundamental and existential (Chaos, Orks, Tyranids, Necrons), or else of little consequence compared to the might of the Imperium (Tau, Dark Eldar, Eldar). Its always seemed to me as if GW has little sense of scale, not really understanding how big the galaxy is, nor what sort of population numbers we need to be talking about.

Take for example the description of the Hive Mind. In the fluff, this is an "unfathomably vast intelligence" that holds together the Tyranids and their fleets, slaved to its gestalt will. Its implied that the many hive fleets that have harried the galaxy from all directions (Behemoth, Leviathan, Kraken and so on) are all just tendrils of a greater fleet that is encircling the entire galaxy.

Lets stop and think about that for a second - an alien fleet that is big enough to surround a galaxy.

Then in the latest codex, this mighty Hive Mind is described as a great entity that stretches across hundreds of light years of space. Now don't get me wrong, thats an impressively big number in terrestrial terms, but the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. Also, we're told that this entity has stripped other galaxies clean, and we know that its a pretty small galaxy, as galaxies go. At another extreme, take Hercules A which is 1.5 million light years across.

Essentially, a mind that can stretch across hundreds of light years is far far out of sync with what is being described.
Then, we can look at the time spent for the tyranids to cross a third of the way into the galaxy, and compare that to the vast distances of intergalactic space, and essentially we're looking at needing serious engineering to suspend disbelief. We also have to think about the speed at which the tyranids have adapted and evolved in the setting (all those new units, in a space of a few hundred years) and then look at how basically crap they were in earlier editions. Can we really believe that previous galaxies proved so little threat that they never needed better units than that till now?

The only conclusion possible is that the creative minds of GW are great at thinking epic, but really bad at mathematics.

The fluff also describes skies turning black with falling mycetic spores, and billions of organisms being launched during a planetary invasion. The wargame then depicts whole dozens of miniatures engaging in battle.

Likewise, the fluff makes a big deal about the might of the Ultramarines (all one thousand of them) at great cost managing to fight Hive Fleet Behemoth to a standstill. We'll come back to that story when we examine the Swarmlord, but again the comparison of scales is wholly incongruous.

I'll accept, of course, that the Ultramarines weren't fighting alone, but the story described more or less paints things that way.

So, when I raise the old criticism of the scale of the LCG, I can't say that its something that is out of keeping with the wargame or with the fiction. Its just a shame that we're once again looking at a game where ten termagants is a huge horde that stretches the limits of the game's scale, whereas in the wargame and the fluff, ten termagants is roughly half a squad, something which a full strength squad of Biel Tan Guardians would likely gun down in seconds, and consider to be a trivial threat.

On the upside, in feeling, its satisfying to have Tyranids be a faction that has good swarm units, hive mind specialization rules and which will often be able to present numbers (of cards) that will seem like they are without number.

I'm a little disappointed in the changes to the core rules that have and haven't been taken up with this expansion.

Its a shame that the tyranids, who are very much interested only in the biomass total and DNA variability of a planet, are playing the same game as other factions of seeking strongholds and ancient technology. The Hive Mind has no reason to care about these things, as archaeotech is just the undigestable bit that sits on the bottom of the acid pool after all the yummy flesh has been reduced to protoplasmic soup, and a stronghold is just a shell to crack open to get access to the sweet meat-pods cowering inside.

The use of "synapse creature" as a back up warlord unit is mechanically interesting and satisfying, but not greatly true to fluff.

Overall, however, I think FFG have done well in a broad sense. We have a faction that plays in a very alien way, and which works as a threat that can adapt to circumstances, flood a planet with a horde of expendables, or present a big gribbly monster that can eat tanks. The 6/6 + Synapse starts present a significantly divergent game experience, and the concept of Infestation is an interesting one that helps add to the feeling of Tyranids over-running a sector.

The rejection of the Alliance Wheel, and the allowing of neutral non-unit cards is also very sensible, with the only fluff mismatch really being Promethium Mine: even Promotion can be re-conceptualized as a biological modification.

I've not had a chance to play these cards yet (as I'm not a proxy user in general), but from an overall fluff point of view, I'm pretty happy with what FFG has done here.

NEXT TIME...

Okay, so we've not made it far through the expansion yet.

Next time, we dig into the new Warlords and the Signature Squads!