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I have been paging through the Necron codex trying to come up with some cool ideas since I think they are the army I want to play. I have some criteria for liking an army, however:

1) The army has to have a personality so I can theme battles and units and the like
2) It has to not feel lore-breaking to face a particular enemy, including my own faction (as you can imagine this rules out quite a lot)

So with Necrons, I haven't looked too much in the fluff but I like the "Newcron" style that is more "Tomb Kings in Space" than the old Terminator-esque murder-bots. I found a random dynasty generator online and made some rolls to see what came up. I got the following results:

Side in Secession Wars: Fought to dissolve the Triarch and gain independence
Followed C'tan: The Endless Swarm
Hated Nemesis: The vile Imperium that are but a pale imitation of the true rulers of the galaxy
Mental Damage: The Overlord himself is damaged and undergoing extensive repairs still and has not yet awakened. However, his royal courtiers rule in his stead each with differing ideas of what their master would want and whether or not they should even try to awaken him.
[Objectives:[/b] Regaining a glorious empire
Favored Conversion Subject: None. For one reason or another you don't seek the return to flesh. Perhaps you see fit to simply work to repair the negative effects of your current body, perhaps you simply see no downside or that flesh is weak and unworthy, or you may think you still have your last one. Regardless, you have no interest in changing bodies.

So from this I did some further research. The only things I found on the "Endless Swarm" is that the Silent King hated him/her/it, which fits in well with my dynasty having fought against the Triarch. The best result is the scheming courtiers as this will let me use existing special characters and re-purpose them. Hating the Imperium and wanting to restore the empire makes sense, and I'm not sure what to make of the "conversion subject" one because I honestly did not know that trying to become "human" again was a thing with Necrons. That all seems to gel together, and also means that I can fight anyone including other Necrons (clearly dynasties that need to be persuaded to the cause that my dynasty is the one that should rule) which is huge to me from a fluff perspective. Going further, I came up with the idea that the dynasty is newly awakening, and there's a lot of inter-personal conflicts and backroom dealings among the nobles; each courtier has his own agenda, and the others are just pawns to realize it, and they are all basically playing each other and they all know it, but know that they still need the others until the time is right. Very Machiavellian, if Machiavelli was an insane quasi-Egyptian immortal robot. Similar comparisons could be Warring States Japan, Three Kingdoms China and G1 Decepticons (think Starscream always trying to overthrow Megatron, in fact this one is one of the main "ideas" that sprung into my mind). This seems to "fit" into the 40k universe but provide a feel to the army that I can use to make it "mine" while still remaining decidedly Necron.

Now, I'm curious about the general level of Necron consciousness. From a cursory read of the codex, Warriors are little more than lobotomized servants; you can give them simple commands and they'll do exactly that until you tell them otherwise, or they'll be destroyed. On the flip side, Lords/Overlords are intelligent. What about in between? Immortals or Deathmarks or Praetorians for example? Are they intelligent? Can they speak (I'm guessing Warriors cannot, maybe simple one-word phrases like "Die")? I didn't happen to notice anything mentioning that beyond Lords. My reasoning again lies in fluff, because while I like the concept of an Overlord pointing to his armies as a silent, all-conquering, immortal legion, I think there could be some level of communication and intelligence going on at least among the higher-ranked units. Praetorians and Lychghard, for example, seem like they would be almost as intelligent as the Lords. Deathmarks too seem like they aren't mindless, but I'm not sure if it's only the Warriors that are "zombies". Also, what about things like Wraiths? Their fluff seems to have been retconned from what I have found from being potentially psychopathic killers entombed to constructs that repair.

you are forgetting the machine part of their consciousness. The warriors are not mindless in the conventional sense and have a certain amount of intelligence to them, as they can react to their surroundings and operate in a way that attempts to accomplish their goal efficiently. They lack sapience, which is the ability to think and act independently, critically, and with wisdom and rationale. they are "slaved" in the sens of terminals and workstations are "slaved" The specialized units that are not nobility are more sapient, but not to the level humans are, they can use limited wisdom, experience and judgement, but usually only in channels associated with their specialty or assigned role. Its only the nobility that reaches true sapience and free will, and subordinates are slaved to the masters. so think more like advanced robots with limited AI, and that would give you an idea.

As far as wraith, spiders, scarabs and other canoptic constructs, they are entirely mechanical in origin so they run exactly like an advanced robot would, it would only do its assigned tasks by executing complicated subroutines. They also have a limited form of AI to respond to developing situations while their master's slept, but that AI only really allows them to perform functions of maintenance ad defense, they cannot develop emotions or hobbies, so they are still truly machines. But that could also be said of anything less than court level. I hope that helped.

Praetorians are definitely on the higher end of consciousness. Lychguard, Deathmarks, etc. have more consciousness than say warriors, but precisely how much I am not certain. Whether or not they would have conversations and what form this would take is hard to say. The Overlords effectively have "kill switches" or overriding command protocols embedded in most non-HQ (and, I suppose, it is possible the other HQ as well) Necrons. As for Wraiths, they are machines...pure machines, like scarabs, spyders, etc.

While consciousness is limited to varying degrees, comparing them to zombies and skeletons in Fantasy isn't actually a great one to make. The reason being is that all Necrons, the machine servants, and even the Tomb World computer have a degree of AI. They are capable of action without being directed by the Necron leaders. Fantasy zombies and skeletons crumble without magic sustaining them (Vampire Counts) and the skeletons in the service of Tomb Kings, although they have a degree of independent "life", (i.e. they don't instantly crumble), they still require direct commands from whatever power is controlling them.

With all that being said, as with most things in 40k, we are talking about something on a galactic scale. Furthermore, being that the Necrons were dormant for millions of years, there is an incalculable number of opportunities for things to go wrong, code to evolve, etc. Meaning, you could have completely insane HQ or, on the other hand, an Overlord that yearns for flesh and misses the days of civilization, so he organizes his court and followers into more of a mimicry of "living" races, holds conversations, idle talk, etc. All this meaning that the fluff is quite open for you to theme your army as you wish, within reason of course.

Awesome, thanks for some of those clarifications. Helps me out a bunch.

It should be noted that, culturally speaking, the artisan and mercantile classes of Necrontyr society were all, universally, turned into Warriors. Those were trades not fit for the ruling class (why learn to paint when you could be the noble patron of some working-class Michelangelo?) and, thus, are now entirely lost to the Necrons, since Warriors lack sapience.

I found Lash Udrra ( spelling ? ) of the endless swarm compelling because of the name !

--- But, then, like you, I never found any info on the subject except the name, and the part about the Silent Kings hating him / her / it.

I cooked up this idea of a female Necron lord , who was extremely vain , and a crony of Lash uddra . This is where , " The endless swarm " part comes in ;

my extremely vain female necron lord actually had the same sort of machine body as does your typical Necron, but, thanks to Lash Uddra , she had an outer , false , skin composed of millions of microscopic scarabs endlessly buzzying around , so that to all appearances she seemed to be a conventional humanoid female. This addition to her Necron body did have a curious side-effect though, it made her excessively fidgety and restless , and......err.....lustful. She still hated humans and Eldar , but she would never the less seduce any that fell into her clutches and use them in a peculiar way best not to name here.

Curiously, no sooner had I come up with this idea than I found a figure on Ebay, a female Tomb kings figure, but armed with a necron Scythe , and with two oversize scarabs ( oversize relative to the figures scale, ) at her feet on her base , and her body is the typical Necron green and gold.
I pretend the mummy wrappings are actually a ripple effect , or TV / radio static effect, of all those millions of micro scarabs swarming around her giving her female form , and the appearance of skin.