The Necrons are one of those factions that got infinitely more interesting when GW decided they weren’t just Terminator knockoffs. The old lore had them as mindless killing machines serving star gods. The new lore made them a tragic, fractured civilization of immortal robots who hate what they’ve become and can’t agree on what to do about it. That’s a much better story.
If you’re coming to Necrons fresh (or coming back after a long break), here’s what you need to know about who they are, why they’re like this, and which dynasties are actually worth paying attention to.
The Worst Deal in Galactic History
Before they were robots, the Necrons were the Necrontyr, a civilization that drew the short straw on pretty much everything. Their home star bombarded them with radiation. Their lifespans were brutally short. They were obsessed with death because death was the only certainty they had. Their cities had more tombs than houses.
They managed to build a galaxy-spanning empire despite all this, but expansion brought civil war. The various dynasties started fighting each other. To unite his people, the Silent King Szarekh did what desperate leaders always do: he found an external enemy. The Old Ones, an ancient species that possessed the secrets of immortality, became the target. The Necrontyr went to war.
And got destroyed. The Old Ones used the Warp and psychic powers to run circles around the Necrontyr. The War in Heaven was a massacre, and the Necrontyr were losing badly.
So Szarekh made the worst deal in the history of the galaxy. He contacted the C’tan, godlike beings of living energy (the Star Gods), and accepted their offer: immortality and the power to defeat the Old Ones, in exchange for… well, the C’tan were vague about the price.
The price was everything.
Biotransference
This is the moment that defines the entire Necron faction, and it’s genuinely horrifying. Szarekh ordered his entire species into the bio-furnaces. Every Necrontyr, from the highest noble to the lowest citizen, was stripped of flesh and soul, their consciousness transferred into bodies of living metal called necrodermis. While this happened, the C’tan literally ate their souls. Fed on the life essence pouring off billions of dying Necrontyr like it was a buffet.
Szarekh went through the process himself. He emerged immortal, powerful, and completely hollow. The emotions, the creativity, the spark that made the Necrontyr people were gone. What came out of the furnaces weren’t the Necrontyr anymore. They were the Necrons.
And the worst part? Szarekh realized immediately what he’d done. He felt the emptiness. He understood that he’d traded his people’s souls for metal shells, and the C’tan had gotten exactly what they wanted while the Necrons got a curse dressed up as a gift.
The lore around Orikan the Diviner makes this even worse. Orikan was the one Necrontyr who warned everyone this would happen. He refused biotransference. They dragged him to the furnaces in chains. He was right about everything, and nobody listened.
Revenge on the Gods (and Then the Long Nap)
At least Szarekh had one last act of defiance in him. After the Necrons used their new immortal bodies to finish off the Old Ones, Szarekh turned on the C’tan. The Necrons shattered the Star Gods into fragments and imprisoned the shards. Masters became captives. It was satisfying, but it didn’t fix anything. The Necrons were still soulless. The galaxy was wrecked.
Szarekh’s solution was the Great Sleep. He ordered the entire Necron race into stasis tombs beneath countless worlds, to hibernate for sixty million years until the younger races (Eldar, and eventually whoever else showed up) grew old and weak enough to be easily conquered. Then he did something remarkable: he severed the command protocols that bound all Necrons to his will, freeing them to make their own choices. And then he left the galaxy entirely, walking into the intergalactic void alone as penance for what he’d done to his people.
That’s genuinely compelling character writing for a robot skeleton overlord.
The Dynasties That Matter
The Necrons are waking up now, and they’re not waking up unified. Sixty million years of hibernation, damaged stasis crypts, and the fact that Szarekh removed centralized control means every dynasty is doing its own thing. I’m not going to list all of them because there are too many, but here are the ones that are actually driving the current narrative.
The Szarekhan Dynasty is Szarekh’s own house, and since the Silent King came back from his self-imposed exile, they’ve become the rallying point for Necron unification. Szarekh returned because he encountered the Tyranids in the intergalactic void and realized the Necrons needed to get their act together or be consumed. The Szarekhan specialize in blackstone (noctilith) technology that suppresses the Warp, which makes them the natural enemy of Chaos in a very literal sense.
The Sautekh Dynasty under Imotekh the Stormlord is the most aggressively expansionist. They control at least eighty tomb worlds on the Eastern Fringe and Imotekh has basically declared himself the real leader of the Necrons. He’s openly defied Szarekh, which is a bold move for a guy whose species was nearly wiped out by internal division once already. The Sautekh are the dynasty you’re most likely to run into if you play Imperium armies, because they’re the ones actively conquering human worlds right now.
The Nihilakh are interesting because they’re the hoarders. Absolutely obsessed with their treasure vaults. They were isolationist for ages, but have recently allied with Szarekh and started actively fighting Chaos incursions. Trazyn the Infinite is technically Nihilakh, and his habit of stealing artifacts and people from across the galaxy (he’s got a Custodes in his museum, a regiment of Krieg soldiers in stasis, and allegedly a Primarch) makes him one of the most entertaining characters in the setting. Trazyn’s appearances in the lore are always highlights. During the Fall of Cadia, he showed up with a stolen artifact that helped activate the Necron pylons, then wandered off when things got boring. He treats galaxy-shaking events as opportunities to expand his collection.
And then there’s the Nephrekh, who I think have the most interesting long-term goal: they want to transcend physical bodies entirely and become beings of pure energy. They’ve developed tech that lets their overlords temporarily transform into living light. While every other dynasty is fighting over territory or grudges, the Nephrekh are trying to evolve past the whole material existence thing. It’s a wild ambition for a species that already lost their souls once.
I should also mention the Destroyers and the Flayed Ones, because they represent the Necron faction at its most horrifying. Destroyers are Necrons who’ve concluded that all life is an affront to existence and must be exterminated. Not conquered. Not enslaved. Exterminated. They’re nihilists with gauss weapons, and even other Necrons consider them dangerously insane. The Flayed Ones are worse. Something broke in their programming during the Great Sleep, and now they compulsively drape themselves in the skin and flesh of their victims, trying to remember what it felt like to be alive. They’re the most disturbing infantry unit in the entire game.
The Pariah Nexus
The Necrons’ most ambitious current project is the Pariah Nexus, and it’s the kind of move that could reshape the entire galaxy. Using massive noctilith constructs, the Necrons are creating expanding zones where the Warp is completely suppressed. No psychic powers. No daemonic manifestations. No Warp travel. No astropathic communication.
For the Imperium, this is catastrophic. Human worlds inside a Pariah Nexus zone lose everything that connects them to the wider Imperium. Psykers go blind. Astropaths can’t send messages. Navigators can’t steer ships. And there’s a more insidious effect: ordinary humans inside the null zones become passive and listless, their souls dampened by the anti-Warp field. The population just… stops caring.
For the Necrons, it’s perfect. They don’t use the Warp for anything. Their technology is entirely material. A galaxy sealed off from the Warp is a galaxy where the Necrons have an insurmountable advantage over everyone else. Szarekh is essentially trying to terraform the entire galaxy into a Necron-friendly environment by removing the one thing every other civilization depends on.
The 10th edition narrative focused heavily on the Pariah Nexus, and it’s some of the most interesting current 40K lore. The Imperium is fighting to prevent the Necrons from expanding the null zones, while simultaneously dealing with the fact that the null zones also suppress Chaos, which makes them weirdly tempting. Some Imperial commanders have quietly noted that Necron-controlled space is the only place in the galaxy where daemons can’t manifest. That’s not a recruitment pitch, but it’s also not nothing.
On the Tabletop
Necrons are one of the most forgiving armies for new players. Your warriors are cheap, durable, and come back from the dead (resurrection protocols let destroyed models stand back up on a dice roll). Your vehicles are tough. Your characters are excellent. And the aesthetic, skeletal robots with green energy glowing from their weapons and eye sockets, is instantly recognizable and fun to paint.
The model range got a massive refresh with the Indomitus box in 9th edition, and the newer sculpts (the Skorpekh Destroyers, the Chronomancer, the Silent King himself) are some of the best GW has produced. If you’re starting a Necron army, the Combat Patrol box gives you a solid core, and from there you can build toward whatever playstyle appeals: a horde of warriors and scarabs, an elite force of Lychguard and Praetorians, or a vehicle-heavy army anchored by Doomsday Arks and a Ghost Ark.
Why Necrons Are the Scariest Faction
I’ll make the argument. The Tyranids are terrifying because of scale. Chaos is terrifying because of corruption. But the Necrons are terrifying because they’ve already won once, they know it, and they’re just waking up to do it again.
Their technology makes everything the Imperium has look like it was built by children. Gauss weapons that strip matter apart atom by atom. Faster-than-light travel that doesn’t use the Warp at all. Resurrection protocols that put destroyed warriors back together mid-battle. And their anti-Warp technology (the noctilith pylons, the Pariah Nexus) means they could theoretically seal the Warp shut entirely, which would solve the Chaos problem but also kill every human psyker and Navigator in the process.
The Silent King’s grand plan, as far as anyone can tell, is to create a galaxy-wide network of Warp-null zones. Safe from Chaos, safe from the Tyranids’ psychic synapse, and completely uninhabitable for any species that depends on the Warp for anything. Which is everyone except the Necrons.
The only thing saving the younger races right now is that the Necrons can’t stop fighting each other long enough to finish the job. Imotekh won’t listen to Szarekh. The Mephrit are in a leadership crisis. The Nephrekh are off chasing transcendence. Renegade factions like the Flayer cults and the nihilistic Destroyers are more interested in killing everything (including other Necrons) than building an empire.
Sixty million years of sleep didn’t fix the Necrons’ original problem. They’re still a fractured, proud, argumentative species. They just have metal bodies and star-killing weapons now. Which, if you think about it, makes them even more dangerous than when they were unified. At least when Szarekh was in charge, there was a plan. Now there are hundreds of plans, most of them contradictory, all of them being executed by immortal beings with no patience for the living.
For novels, Robert Rath’s The Infinite and the Divine is the essential Necron book. It follows the rivalry between Trazyn and Orikan across millennia, and it’s funny, clever, and surprisingly emotional for a story about two robots who hate each other. It completely changed how I think about the faction, and if you read one 40K novel this year, make it that one.
The ancient machines are waking up. They disagree about almost everything. Szarekh wants unity. Imotekh wants empire. The Nephrekh want transcendence. The Destroyers want extinction. And somewhere in a museum on Solemnace, Trazyn the Infinite is probably stealing something that will become important in about three codexes.
The Necrons are patient. They’ve been waiting sixty million years. They can wait a little longer. Everyone else should be worried about what happens when they stop waiting.
