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Can Imotekh be taken in an allied Necron detachment and not have his lightning storm hit his own allies (allies of convenience)?

It is a good question,

Rules as written creates an interesting situation as I can not see anything preventing a special ability from targeting your allies of convenience. There are only five limitations put forth and this lord of storms ability does not meet any of those five. It isn't issuing a charge. There is no psychic test or mention of it being a psychic power. Nor are templates or blast markers are used to calculate hits. One could try and make an argument over it being a 'shooting attack' but it doesn't follow any of the rules portraying to a shooting attack, so it is a stretch at best. Considering past debates on 'what type of attack is a special rule' have always come to the conclusion that they are simply 'special' unless otherwise stated.

So, from a rule as written perspective, it does see you have found a way to kill your own army... well done, I guess?

Personally, I would say it is an oversight and can safely be ignored. The situations where very unique special rules could be combined with another rule to create unintended effects are the most likely to be overlooked. As they tried very hard to make it difficult to target your allies of convenience with anything negative, while also making it so you can't target them with anything positive, it is very likely they never intended for special rules to be an exception to this policy. I can not say for sure, because the twisted logic of Game Workshop only makes sense to orks of course, but I do find it so very unlikely that this was an intended consequence of taking a HQ choice in an allied detachment from a pre-6th edition codex.

Though it does mean I will, just for the laughs, do a vector strike on my own allies at some point in the future so thanks for bringing this to my attention....

I am quite curious to what others on this message board think. I hope they are better at finding a way to deny the lord of storm ability from hitting allies of convenience then I am. This situation is one which might bring us a better understanding on how certain rules are meant to interact, assuming that it has been addressed in some FAQ or some paragraph so easy to overlook, as I often do have problem finding solutions in FAQ's and often get blindsided because of it.

From the main rulebook FAQ:

Q: Do attacks, wargear and special rules that automatically affect enemy units, such as Imotekh’s ‘Lord of the Storm’ special rule, affect Allies of Convenience? (p112).

A: Yes.

I did a search through that bloody thing using 'lord of' as the criteria and came up blank. Not the first time this has happened either, as often it keeps coming back with negatives when I try to do searches and that site causes all sorts of formatting problems if I cut and paste. I just ran a few more tests and found out it really doesn't like the 'space character' I have been using in some of my searches, explaining why I fail quite a bit. Wonderful, means the only way I can research those things is by reading through each entry manually. At this point I can only expect to be further blind sighted by FAQ's as I do not have the patience to read every sentence whenever a question is asked that isn't easily answered by the rule books.

But it is there, on page 9.