Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I hear what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree that the Necron redesign pushed some boundaries—especially in terms of power scale. I initially hated that my murder robots were weird sentient but not sentient? But I think there’s room to see the C’tan situation as less about Necrons outgodding gods, and more about vulnerability and opportunism.

Even in older lore and tabletop gameplay, C’tan shards could be defeated—not because they’re weak, but because they’re fractured. The concept of splitting these godlike beings into shards is what makes their containment plausible. Necron technology didn’t enslave whole gods; it trapped broken remnants. That distinction feels important.

And from a narrative angle, it offers the Necrons agency. Their sentience emerging from beneath oppressive control adds emotional and strategic depth. They’re not more powerful than gods—they’re survivors who fought their way out of bondage using intellect, betrayal, and high-risk tech. Hiding behind the guise of mindless automata waiting to make their move.

It’s the mythic archetype: Prometheus outsmarting Zeus, not overpowering him. That shift doesn’t have to break the setting’s power balance—it could enrich it if explored carefully. There’s a lot of tension still to mine between dynasties, C’tan shards, and the Silent King’s vision.

Except no one else can do this, so having one faction you can play a wargame with being able to undermines the point of the game.

They used tech to break the c'tan and then used tech to trap them. They shouldn' have had that tech in the first place.

 Hellebore wrote:
Except no one else can do this, it's only mythic if it's achievable by anyone, not specifically the one alien race necrons.

They used tech to break the c'tan and then used tech to trap them. They shouldn' have had that tech in the first place.

Humans could do it... If they were still innovating.
Eldar could do it... If they had a cohesive and forward-thinking society.
Tau could do it... Just give 'em time and safety.

Necrons are oldest faction that uses tech. Nids are possibly older, but they're biological.

Totally hear you—but I’d argue it is mythic precisely because it’s rare. The Eldar weren’t just “another race with Webway tech.” Myth doesn’t mean universal—it means exceptional, legendary, the kind of feat that gets whispered across millennia.

And the Necrons were uniquely positioned. They were ancient, desperate, and had access to the science of a time before most factions were even a twinkle in the Materium. That desperation—the deal with the C’tan, the biotransference, the eventual rebellion—is their myth. If anyone could’ve pulled it off, it wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling.

Plus, the tech used wasn’t out of nowhere. It came after they were already enslaved and fragmented by the C’tan—driven by survival and vengeance. It's a story of a species clawing back agency in the face of cosmic horror, not just flexing overpowered tech.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Except no one else can do this, it's only mythic if it's achievable by anyone, not specifically the one alien race necrons.

They used tech to break the c'tan and then used tech to trap them. They shouldn' have had that tech in the first place.

Humans could do it... If they were still innovating.
Eldar could do it... If they had a cohesive and forward-thinking society.
Tau could do it... Just give 'em time and safety.

Necrons are oldest faction that uses tech. Nids are possibly older, but they're biological.

The necrons did it when they WEREN'T old. They encountered the old ones, lost a war, encountered the c'tan and in some mysterious way their combined power defeated the old ones and doomed the necrons, and then somehow their technology that couldn't defeat the old ones now could subsequently defeat their c'tan gods who they originally needed to defeat the old ones they previously couldn't defeat with their technology.

The lovecraftian primal nature of chaos and c'tan sits as an ever present threat because they can't be defeated. They are primal forces built into the fabric of reality a fact of life. Chaos a product of the existence of life and the warp, c'tan because of energy and entropy in reality. That's how its been for decades. If we are retconning them into just aliens that can be super punched into submission then 40k has degraded far further than I thought.


The only thing gained by giving necrons super god punching technology, is to make that faction look cool. It does nothing but negative things to every other faction and the setting as a whole. I don't think making necrons ROXXOR is worth the issues it causes for everything else.

Ah yes, I forgot that we had the detailed timeline of Necron history pre-transference, and can safely say they were only thousands of years old and not millions.

What about the ancient enemy? The enslavers.

Everyone feared them and they are still around.

They have to be a threat, if everyone mentions them with, "Oh gak, them!"

 Hellebore wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
Except no one else can do this, it's only mythic if it's achievable by anyone, not specifically the one alien race necrons.

They used tech to break the c'tan and then used tech to trap them. They shouldn' have had that tech in the first place.

Humans could do it... If they were still innovating.
Eldar could do it... If they had a cohesive and forward-thinking society.
Tau could do it... Just give 'em time and safety.

Necrons are oldest faction that uses tech. Nids are possibly older, but they're biological.

The necrons did it when they WEREN'T old. They encountered the old ones, lost a war, encountered the c'tan and in some mysterious way their combined power defeated the old ones and doomed the necrons, and then somehow their technology that couldn't defeat the old ones now could subsequently defeat their c'tan gods who they originally needed to defeat the old ones they previously couldn't defeat with their technology.

The lovecraftian primal nature of chaos and c'tan sits as an ever present threat because they can't be defeated. They are primal forces built into the fabric of reality a fact of life. Chaos a product of the existence of life and the warp, c'tan because of energy and entropy in reality. That's how its been for decades. If we are retconning them into just aliens that can be super punched into submission then 40k has degraded far further than I thought.


The only thing gained by giving necrons super god punching technology, is to make that faction look cool. It does nothing but negative things to every other faction and the setting as a whole. I don't think making necrons ROXXOR is worth the issues it causes for everything else.

The lore doesn’t actually support the notion that the Necrons casually overpowered the C’tan with some sudden tech upgrade. It was a long game of betrayal, not brute force.

The Necrontyr were indeed a younger race when they encountered the Old Ones, and they lost that war. But after biotransference, they became the Necrons—immortal, soulless, and enslaved to the C’tan. The C’tan themselves were empowered by consuming the life force of the Necrontyr. So yes, the Necrons needed the C’tan to defeat the Old Ones, but that victory came at the cost of their autonomy and souls.

The rebellion against the C’tan didn’t happen overnight. It came after the War in Heaven, when the C’tan were glutted and weakened from their cosmic rampage. The Necrons didn’t destroy whole gods—they shattered them into shards using weapons that focused the energies of the living universe. These weapons were so dangerous that the Silent King erased all knowledge of them from Necron memory. That’s not a power fantasy—it’s a cautionary tale.

And the C’tan are still primal forces. They’re not “just aliens”—they’re sentient embodiments of physical laws. Killing one damaged reality itself. That’s why they weren’t all destroyed, but shattered and imprisoned. The Necrons didn’t become stronger than gods—they became desperate enough to risk annihilation to escape them.

So the narrative isn’t “Necrons got cool tech and broke the setting.” It’s “Necrons were broken, used, and betrayed—and in their moment of rebellion, they shattered their gods and paid the price.”

 Hellebore wrote:

The necrons did it when they WEREN'T old. They encountered the old ones, lost a war, encountered the c'tan and in some mysterious way their combined power defeated the old ones and doomed the necrons, and then somehow their technology that couldn't defeat the old ones now could subsequently defeat their c'tan gods who they originally needed to defeat the old ones they previously couldn't defeat with their technology.

The texts suggest that the Necrontyr were outmatched by the Old Ones for various reasons, such as the use of the Webway and partially the Old Ones' psychic powers. I think it is reasonable that this could be an insurmountable obstacle to the Necrontyr at the time. With the aid of the C'tan, the Necrontyr then somehow became strong enough to overpower the Old Ones. Exactly how this works has varied through the editions (I'm pretty sure at one point the C'tan were described as empowered by eating Necrontyr life force - it wasn't just delicious snacks - and this made them strong enough to crush the Old Ones), but I think it is not actually important exactly how it happened. One plausible explanation is that the material mastery of the C'tan helped the Necrontyr develop their technology to the quasimagical superscience they are now known for. This could then be turned on the C'tan, which operate by the principles that the Necrontyr had been taught. It all happened long ago, the witnesses are known to have faulty memory, and the whole business was orchestrated by someone literally called The Deceiver, so at least the in-universe narratives are extremely doubtful.

As others have mentioned, it is also likely that an enormous period of time (and technical and cultural development) passed between the Necrontyr initially losing to the Old Ones and the Necron and C'tan winning the War in Heaven, and subsequently turning on the C'tan.

I'd also like to remark on the inassailability of gods. Obviously, Chaos gods (or C'tan) don't work narratively if they are not extremely potent threats. However, I don't mind so much that they can be broken or bound, particularly when the powers involved have just fought something literally called the War in Heaven. It just serves to underscore the true cosmic potency of the factions involved. It's also important to remember that at least as far as the Warp is concerned, the "gods" are not really capital-G omnipotent gods, but more like extremely powerful manifestations of emotional archetypes. (Let's leave aside the silliness of something called "Chaos" being neatly divided into four neverchanging categories.) In the Age of Sigmar universie, Slaanesh has been imprisoned by lesser entities, and I don't think this is narratively disappointing (leaving aside what one may think of the AoS setting in general). I think the key is that such binding must either have happened back in mythic times (as with the C'tan), or be part of some prophesised distant future (as with Ynnead), as it becomes narratively silly when beating a god is a strategic option.

It's easier to win a war when none of your soldiers are crippled by mega-cancer and never actually die.

The main boon was Self Repairing Bodies. Wars of attrition tend to get tricky when your foe Just Won’t Stay Dead.

With the infrastructure supporting that little trick being, presumably, at its absolute zenith? Even a series of crushing defeats won’t erode your opponent’s forces.

You can’t destroy the C’Tan, only shatter them. Given the shards were carefully imprisoned, one can easily imagine an T-1000 style resurrection, given time. And destroying even a single Necron Warrior is a massive task in itself.

Even silly stuff, like the Celestial Orrery is a war winning or at least altering development. Opponent got series military infrastructure deep behind its line, heavily defended? Well, that took a lot of resources to create, and more to maintain. Whooops it’s local Sun just went nova, get out of that you swines. Even if used only once before the Necrons reckoned “Whoa, OK lads. Let’s maybe not do that again, because of all the fallout of removing a major gravity well” it could still change the shape of a galaxy wide war. And we by no means know it was only used the once. If even half a dozen stars were detonated, each with significant enemy resources around them? That’s a massive blow. And because you knew it was coming? You’re well poised to press the immediate advantage.

The problem with the Necrons that isn't shared by the otherwise similar Eldar is that there isn't any coherent reason for them to be less powerful now than they were when they won the War in Heaven. They just left and went to sleep until Warhammer 40k because Ward wrote himself into a corner. All of their stuff is still around and "they don't want to use their full power because they're afraid of how powerful they are" is not valid weakness, that's an anime fanfic character.

Also it doesn't really seem like they "paid the price". They're in a setting where the vast majority of people live under horrible violence and oppression and their biggest problem is existential angst and being bored with how non-threatened they are. They're super powerful and immortal and independent and can do pretty much whatever they want whenever they want. The only thing "grim dark" about them is looking scary. They aren't even real skeletons they're just skeleton-shaped robots, and they only attack people who go into their homes and mess with their stuff. They're the biggest Mary Sues in the game and it drives me crazy that people will complain about Tau or Ultramarines instead of them.

The reawakened Necrons have launched like so many wars of conquest.

That's their deal, the galaxy is there's from millions of years ago and the other races have taken it over.

The "grimdark" comes from the fact that they were of flesh and soul but sold this to win a bitter feud without truly thinking about the cost.
Now they exist as hollow shells and representations of themselves with no way to ever become mortal again, doomed to live for eternity, never dying, never evolving, slowly being driven mad by the weight of eons of stangnacy.
Those that remember their flesh or what they did during the Biotransference often go insane on the spot. Case in point the wife of the Skorpehk Lord from Indomitus. When they regain their free will after the War In Heaven, she realises she turned her children into mindless Warriors, deletes her reanimation protocols and obliterates herself. Her husband, the Lord in question, then goes mad from the realisation that he too destroyed his children and now the love of his life.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
The problem with the Necrons that isn't shared by the otherwise similar Eldar is that there isn't any coherent reason for them to be less powerful now than they were when they won the War in Heaven. They just left and went to sleep until Warhammer 40k because Ward wrote himself into a corner. All of their stuff is still around and "they don't want to use their full power because they're afraid of how powerful they are" is not valid weakness, that's an anime fanfic character.

Also it doesn't really seem like they "paid the price". They're in a setting where the vast majority of people live under horrible violence and oppression and their biggest problem is existential angst and being bored with how non-threatened they are. They're super powerful and immortal and independent and can do pretty much whatever they want whenever they want. The only thing "grim dark" about them is looking scary. They aren't even real skeletons they're just skeleton-shaped robots, and they only attack people who go into their homes and mess with their stuff. They're the biggest Mary Sues in the game and it drives me crazy that people will complain about Tau or Ultramarines instead of them.

Huh?
The Necrons had the C'Tan during the War in Heaven—and that’s exactly why they aren’t as powerful now. They shattered their gods. That wasn’t a clean divorce—it was a cosmic bloodbath that cost them billions of warriors and the loss of reality-warping allies who could casually supernova stars for fun. The shards they wrangled afterward are barely sentient fragments, not the full pantheon they once served.

And yeah, they went to sleep. But they didn’t wake up fresh and ready to conquer. They woke up fractured, memory-corrupted, and in many cases, insane. Entire dynasties are still dormant, others are feuding, and some are so degraded they’re basically haunted tombs with a kill switch. The Silent King didn’t hit snooze—he hit reset on a civilization that had just nuked its own gods and watched the galaxy collapse into warp-fueled madness.

As for the “existential angst” angle—have you read Twice-Dead King? These guys aren’t bored, they’re broken. They’re grappling with lost identities, corrupted engrams, and the horror of remembering they once had lungs and families. Their immortality isn’t a gift—it’s a slow erosion of self. They’re not Mary Sues, they’re cosmic revenants trying to claw meaning out of a galaxy that moved on without them.

And let’s not pretend they’re just passive skeleton-shaped Roombas. They’ve got planet-killer tech, time-warping weapons, and the ability to snuff stars with a flick of the Celestial Orrery. They choose not to use it all because they’re fractured, not because they’re afraid of their own power like some anime protagonist with glowing hair.

 Jammer87 wrote:
They’re not “just aliens”—they’re sentient embodiments of physical laws. Killing one damaged reality itself. That’s why they weren’t all destroyed, but shattered and imprisoned.

This is so dumb, another vibes-fi idea that could only sound cool to a teenager, and falls apart in your hands the second you begin to examine what it could actually mean in the universe.

Although it does remind me of something that speaks to both Hellebore's complaints and the complaint about Necrons beings Mary Sues, which is that apparently the Void Dragon (if not all Ctan) has been to (and in some cases casually destroyed) any number of other GALAXIES.

 Jammer87 wrote:


As for the “existential angst” angle—have you read Twice-Dead King? These guys aren’t bored, they’re broken. They’re grappling with lost identities, corrupted engrams, and the horror of remembering they once had lungs and families. Their immortality isn’t a gift—it’s a slow erosion of self. They’re not Mary Sues, they’re cosmic revenants trying to claw meaning out of a galaxy that moved on without them.

The mental aspect is probably not portrayed or delved into enough. The series Twice-Dead King did I think a reasonable job of showing this. The main character Oltyx spends much of the first book resenting his older brother Djoseras thinking Djoseras had been out to get him and not doing anything about their insane father who was succumbing to the Flayer Curse. However it turns out that due to his damaged memories giving him gaps or skewing his perspective, Oltyx had misjudged his brother, who had actually been trying to look out for Oltyx and save him by exiling farther away from their father. Djoseras for his part eventually admitted that his seeming passivity and being a stickler for protocol and ritual was deliberate, because it was the rock around which he had anchored his mind to keep from going insane himself. He was unwilling or unable to deviate from this, unable to bend the rules even slightly even though he knew their father was insane, because doing so would be the fatal crack in that rock that would splinter it and shatter his psyche. He spent his time scrimshawing his Necron Warriors because he was remembering each one, and chronicling their life and history into the carvings on their bodies as a way to honor their memory and also as a means of staving off further insanity. So although he seemed to have intact memory, it was at the price of being rendered passive and giving up freedom of action.

Another example is Trazyn who has confused memories of what happened before bio-transferrence. He believes was dragged in chains into the bio-furnaces against his will, but actually he was misremembering Orikan's fate and instead had been observing Orikan being dragged off. Or at least that is what Orikan contends. Maybe it is Orikan who was confused?

So basically even the seemingly sane Necrons are likely deeply mentally damaged or working under damaged or false memories of the past.

And of course, we find out in the end that Oltyx himself is not as well as he believes he is.

 Altruizine wrote:

 Jammer87 wrote:
They’re not “just aliens”—they’re sentient embodiments of physical laws. Killing one damaged reality itself. That’s why they weren’t all destroyed, but shattered and imprisoned.

This is so dumb, another vibes-fi idea that could only sound cool to a teenager, and falls apart in your hands the second you begin to examine what it could actually mean in the universe.

Although it does remind me of something that speaks to both Hellebore's complaints and the complaint about Necrons beings Mary Sues, which is that apparently the Void Dragon (if not all Ctan) has been to (and in some cases casually destroyed) any number of other GALAXIES.

Well its a fictional universe that some guys concocted to sell miniatures. I wouldn't examine it too hard - I'm not tracking those guys had multiple PH.Ds in physics, space warp technology or theoretical physics so using some kind of actual science to determine or discuss "what it could actually mean in the universe" is never going to get you to the answer that you want.

Ah yes, the Void Dragon casually destroying galaxies—clearly the only offender in a setting where every faction seems to have a “break glass in case of apocalypse” button.

Let’s not pretend the Necrons are uniquely overpowered here. The Imperium has Exterminatus protocols that can sterilize entire planets with a single command. The Tyranids consume biospheres like popcorn. The Eldar once had the Blackstone Fortresses—literal star-killers powered by psychic souls. Chaos? They don’t even need weapons; they can just think hard enough and reality folds in half. And the Orks? If enough of them believe something works, it does. That’s not science fiction—it’s metaphysical comedy.

The idea that factions only use their galaxy-breaking toys in emergencies isn’t a flaw—it’s baked into the grimdark DNA of 40k. Everyone’s sitting on doomsday tech, but they’re too fractured, paranoid, or distracted by cult rituals and civil wars to use it properly. That’s not bad writing—it’s the setting’s entire mood board. So yeah, the Void Dragon might’ve wrecked other galaxies. But in a universe where the T’au have planet-cracking railguns and the Leagues of Votann are hoarding ancient tech that could rewrite physics, the Necrons aren’t Mary Sues—they’re just one more flavor of “we could end everything, but we’re too busy being tragic, petty, or insane.”

You're right, there's no difference between a galaxy and a planet.

 Altruizine wrote:
You're right, there's no difference between a galaxy and a planet.

Damn, can you send this to my 3rd grade science teacher? I knew I was right.

Anything about destroying galaxies should probably be taken merely as a storytelling device or exaggeration, or politely ignored. 40k is pretty dumb when it comes to specific scales or numbers. As a narrative universe, it seems designed to support cool drawings, atmospheres, and short stories, and struggles to remain consistent for longer narratives. I don't think it is so interesting to criticise such individual details too much, as every faction in the game has its inconsistencies. The overall feel is more important, and I think Necron are still doing pretty well in that regard.

There's also another aspect to take into account: the warp can gradually change reality (and even time) as it bleeds into the world, and the warp had 60 million years to break the galaxy while the Necron took a nap. Maybe one reason they're so defective is because the galaxy doesn't work the way it used to? The Necron put a bunch of effort into stitching the warp-wounds rent by the War in Heaven (e.g., Cadia Pylons), only for other races to pick at them over the eons.

I'm sidestepping Hellebore's main focus here (sorry Hellebore) but I don't think any iteration of the Necrons has really worked. Not for me, anyway. Not the Newcrons, not the Oldcrons, not even the Oldercrons from late 2nd ed. They always felt shoehorned in and fanficcy. Much more so than the Tau. As oddball as the Tau are, it's a big galaxy and they're just another species who has recently popped up to make a splash. Necrons, though, were given big backstory loadbearing duties in the fluff and I don't think the execution ever lived up to the requirements.

The 3rd ed Oldcron codex did its best to be all spooky and Lovecraftian and paint them as the ultimate horror, but as other posters have pointed out, the Chaos gods already more or less had that sort of thing covered.

In fact Necrons were arguably a failed attempt to translate Undead from Warhammer Fantasy into 40K, much as the original Squats didn't succeed in translating Dwarfs to a compelling 40K archetype (at least at 28mm scale). Necrons hid the conceptual failure under cool designs and art and atmosphere, so it succeeded in marketing terms, but it was mostly surface gloss. That might be why they had a complete backstory overhaul into the Newcrons ... which I don't really think succeeded either, because the basic flaw was still there.

The trouble is, in WFB the Undead aren't just scary because they're walking corpses. They're scary because after they kill you, they'll reanimate your body and doom you to undead servitude. It's disturbing on a fundamental level and that's what makes them genuinely frightening. Dead people are coming to get you ... and they'll make you one of them ... and make you do the same thing to your loved ones. The wrongness is baked in.

The Necrons mostly lacked that primal, gut-level fear. Chaos imperils your immortal soul, a fate-worse-than-death concept that plays on deep religious and spiritual fears in the real world. Tyranids consume you and your entire planet's biomass to make more Tyranids, riffing on the animal fear of being eaten and the sapient fear of total extinction. Necrons ... kill you painfully? Eh, I've had worse. Trying to make them the biggest oldest baddest bad of the galaxy just made the problem more obvious.

So I mostly concur with Da Boss's view:

 Da Boss wrote:
I think Oldcrons were cool, and it was cool reading the background. But I felt at the time that it was a bit of a mistake tying everything together like that.

I think the Ctaan and the War in Heaven were a mistake. The Orks and Eldar both being bioweapons developed for the War in Heaven is a bit boring and makes both races a bit less in my view. Eldar should be their own thing, and Orks being a bioweapon created by the mysterious Brain Boyz for SOMETHING in the distant past is cooler when you leave it ambiguous.

The Necrons as a concept of creepy robots that come out of nowhere and do inscrutable things while killing absolutely everything organic are cool as hell. But making them be essentially Dr Who Cybermen under control of ostensibly Lovecraftian elder gods but with sadly comprehensible personalities and motivations is not that exciting to me.

My own headcanon is that Necron warriors ARE the Men of Iron - pre-Imperial human made androids. The Ctaan are an ancient AI sentience, perhaps a biotransference or perhaps a fully artificial being. They transmit as a light speed signal and infect machine intellects and turn them to their cause. That's what caused the War Against the Machine and why there is such a taboo against AI in the 40K universe (because it's not just the humans - the Eldar and Orks also don't make use of robots (tinboyz excluded!). Tau could be explained by simply not having encountered the Ctaan much.

Canotek constructs would be constructs of older, possibly dead races that have been co-opted. I also imagine the AI to have it's own culture which explains the weird sigils and that it modifies some of the basic androids to fit this.

I just prefer this as it also helps explain why the Necrons look like human skeletons and allows for a bunch of classic Sci Fi plots. The Ctaan as a weird signal in space that no one understands is to me much more lovecraftian than giant floating men who have a very understandable motivation: hunger.

I too would have preferred the Necrons to be the Men of Iron, now reawakened.

That would tie them down to more recent, but still ancient, galactic history: originating in the Dark Age of Technology and a key contributor to the Age of Strife. A matter of tens of thousands of years rather than millions. (Millions goes back much too far for credibility. Like WFB, 40K has a relatively short historical horizon that fits human timescales in which civilisations rise and fall, rather than the aeons of deep time that a hard science fiction universe would deal with. Going too far into the 40K past is like finding yourself backstage by accident and realising all the worldbuilding is just cloth and sawdust.) Eldar get to keep their status as the most ancient race bar the Old Ones, and have another reason to shake their heads at us foolish apes and our disastrous mistakes.

Necrons would have more of a direct connection to humanity--a danger of our own creation--that makes the returning threat more emotionally involving. You can have all the Undead Space Egyptian vibes you want (if you want them), while also bringing in the classic science fiction archetype of the rogue murderous robot that we're responsible for setting loose, instead of them just being another lot of aliens who happen to have robot bodies. That goes back a lot further than Terminator, into early pulp sf. "Robots forever reaching for the nearest axe," as Brian Aldiss once put it.

It expands on an interesting bit of early 40K fluff (the current distrust of advanced AI due to an ancient war with sentient machines, derived from Dune) without needing to forcibly superglue together the backstories of everyone from Eldar to Orks into one overly neat and tidy origin story. True, WFB did something like that, but the 40K galaxy is big enough to give the various races their own mysterious origins in space and time.

It explains why Necrons exterminate all life down to microbial life on their tomb worlds--having a purely mechanical origin they can't stand icky biology. The connections to the Adeptus Mechanicus still make sense. It would allow for personality or lack of personality depending on taste. Heck, it might even explain the old Chaos Androids from Space Crusade and Epic.

And it tones down the power level to "super-advanced because they're from the Dark Age of Technology" but not absurdly god-conquering or galaxy-destroying.


There was a quote regarding the Old-Oldcrons from late 2nd ed where the Imperial Tarot predicted, "Mankind falls at the hand of his father." It should have read, "Mankind falls at the hand of his children."


I'd go further than that, though. I'd make gauss-flayer guns not disintegrators, but extremely painful matter transmitters. They dismantle you, send your component atoms to a tomb, and rebuild you to be converted into a Necron. Possibly with emotions and personality wiped, possibly conscious, possibly quite insane, but stuck in a nigh indestructible body enslaved to the Necron cause. I admit that sounds a bit Cybermannish but it would qualify for a fate-worse-than-death to rival the Chaos gods without any nebulous stuff like being 'cut off from the warp'. Essentially it's a way to get that Fantasy Undead fear factor in there, in a more sci-fi guise. Like the Flatliner construct in Neuromancer--a hellish existence as a digitised, imprinted version of yourself. Maybe it's like needing to sleep and being forever unable to. I can imagine meeting the occasional Necron that tonelessly pleads for you to kill it while it's trying to kill you.


I'm onboard with Da Boss's idea of the C'tan being some kind of AI sentience, but I'll go a bit further and say that it was a human invention too. In fact, it's why working STCs are so rare--basically nonexistent in older fluff. They're rare because humanity had to destroy them to stop the Men of Iron. That's why the surviving Necrons are from tomb worlds at the rim of the galaxy: they alone escaped the purge. And it's why there's a dormant C'tan buried on Mars. You see, the STC system was originally known as STC-TAN ...

You can go with the Oldcron idea of the C'TAN systems still running the show, or the Newcron version where their mechanical servants rebelled and seized control. Either way, they're not godlike undefeatable entities but electronic sentiences. Super-Skynets. Maybe they think slowly yet inexorably, transmitting their thoughts at light speed from star to star. Their disparate parts act autonomously to deal with local threats, like the semi-independent arms of an octopus ... but their highest level of cognition takes place at the interstellar scale, taking years and decades and centuries for a ripple of updates and decisions to pass across the whole network. Vast, cool and unsympathetic thoughts ...

They're nothing like the gods of the warp, they exist purely on the material plane, and their minions would stand a good chance of fighting back against their masters, in a Sarah Connor Chronicles sort of way. (For those who never saw that pretty decent show, some of the Terminators operated on their own for long enough to interfere with Skynet's plans because they had come up with a better way to achieve the same goal, while others showed genuine signs of wanting to overthrow it.)


As I said, none of this may be particularly helpful for Hellebore's purposes. And there will be plenty of readers who think it's worse than official fluff, especially if the newer stuff is all you've known and you don't remember the pre-Necron days. Still, take from it what you wish.