I must admit, I wasn’t (personally) originally so keen on rethinking Necrons, and especially in a direction that moves a lot towards the new background (I much prefer the 3E 40K material —for me that’s always been the seminal work).
But looking around at old threads and interacting with other BFGers on Facebook has changed my mind! I think there are some interesting holes that could be filled in the original GW Necron fleet (and I think it’s fair to say the original fleet rules were quite disruptive to BFG, so it’s not a bad thing to ponder how they might be done differently…).
It seems the trickiest thing is to keep Necrons unique as a fleet in such a tightly constrained system as BFG. If they have shields, standard armour, standard ordnance, are they much more than an über-gunned, über-speedy elite fleet? And if they are too different from the norm, will they be impossible to fit in and balance?
I had a look at HA Ray’s ideas (linked earlier) and I think some of them do look interesting—especially since they have the benefit of being actually used by people! The simplification (and toning down) of several Necron abilities is appealing. I do also like the idea of scarab swarms functioning like mines (with heal-y bits)! The launch bay idea seems to be an interesting twist, too.
I think some of the elements cut, though (like starpulse generators and nightmare fields) don’t necessarily need to be removed because they’re not in 40K, though—we don’t really have many examples of Necron space warfare. I’m also not entirely convinced that Ray’s proposed Portals mechanism makes more sense than the old teleport attacks system (will have to think some more on that).
Alas, though I my dislike many of the new ‘innovations’ of 40K Necrons, I find Tomblades particularly strange. Let’s take a Necron, stick them to a jetbike, and use them for interceptor spacecraft duties! But wait… don’t we already have Necrons stuck to bikes (Destroyers)? And why are jetbikes so good at fighter jobs all of a sudden when everybody else uses big planes? At least I take comfort in the fact that it makes somebody happy. I can always imagine BFG Tomblades as sleek interceptor craft in the same vein as Doomscythes (or, perhaps, even looking the same—but without seeing the Necron pilot).
The Singularity Cannon idea is interesting, too. I’ll need to think more on it.