White Dwarf 52: The Tomb Worlds Awaken

The official announcement of the Necron release is here this week, and with it, some interesting hints and changes to how the Necrons work as an army.

With the new rules come a new Overlord model as well as a Special Edition codex that includes 2 sided print outs of the datasheets for each unit, extremely reminiscent of Second Edition and Dark Millenium for those with long enough memories.

The new codex is 120 pages, so a bit longer than previous 6th/7th edition books outside Space Marines. Of particular note in the description of the codex is the Decurion Detachment, which we'll dig into a little more later. Additionally, the tactical objective cards also include 6 C'Tan powers which are apparently used at random in each shooting phase. That applies to all versions of the C'Tan, though presumably with varying power levels.

As we can see in the image above of the Cryptek Edition of the Codex, there are printouts of at least the various formations included in the book.

This week's White Dwarf also includes various snippets and even rules and a scenario for the Hobbit game, but I will skip over that for now.

Back to the Decurion, there is an article providing some of the fluff and background of the Decurion as a military force. A Decurion Detachment consists of one or more Reclamation Legions, up to one Royal Court for each Reclamation Legion, and 1-10 of the listed formations and selections from the list of Auxiliaries per Reclamation Legion.

The Reclamation Legion consists of 1 Overlord (or named Overlord or Catacomb Command Barge), 0-2 units of Lychguard, 1-4 units of Immortals, 2-8 units of Warriors, 1-3 units of Tomb Blades, and 0-3 Monoliths. The Reclamation Legion gains Move Through Cover and Relentless, as well as Enhanced Reanimation Protocols, which allows the Overlord and all units from the formation within 12" of the overlord to re-roll 1s for Reanimation Protocols.

This is kind of an interesting formation, and of particular oddity is the mandatory inclusion of Tomb Blades, a generally unpopular Necron unit. Given the structure of the Decurion, it is also interesting that this single detachment is essentially without limit, since each of the restricted element (Royal Court and Auxiliaries, are limited per Reclamation Legion.

The rules for the Reclamation Legion is followed by a Paint Splatter article showing off some techniques used to paint the new Necron Overlord model.

This is followed by rules for the Hobbit, and then a summary of the C'Tan powers. There are only hints given, but it describes that the C'Tan player chooses an enemy unit in the shooting phase as the C'Tan's target, then rolls a random power to determine how the C'Tan attacks. This randomness seems to hamper the various C'Tans, though we'll have to see what possible powers there are before deeming it too unstable for reliable use. It is interesting in that it clearly indicates that the Transcendent C'Tan and Tesseract Vault will be getting updated in the new Codex.

With this hint of what is to come from the Necron Codex, what changes are you expecting to read next week?