Warhammer 40,000 and the Necrons

Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop miniatures wargame published by Games Workshop. It first appeared in 1987 as Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, and it has run through ten editions, with an eleventh arriving in June 2026. Players collect, assemble, and paint small models of soldiers, tanks, and monsters, then move them across a table and resolve battles with dice and a rulebook. Around that game sits one of the deepest fictional settings in science fiction, sustained by codex army books, novels, and video games. The official tagline reads: "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war." The phrase did real work; it gave English the word grimdark, now used well outside the hobby. The setting is roughly the year 40,000, the close of the 41st Millennium. It is deliberately hopeless. Reason has decayed into superstition, science into ritual, and the galaxy is host to daemons, mutation, and constant death. Rick Priestley, who built the original setting, has cited Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Herbert's Dune, Milton's Paradise Lost, and the British comic 2000 AD as influences.

The setting's central faction is the Imperium of Man, a galaxy-spanning human empire and a paranoid, authoritarian theocracy. It is ruled in name by the Emperor of Mankind, the most powerful human psyker ever born, who united Earth in the late 30th Millennium and set out to reclaim the galaxy for humanity. That project collapsed in civil war. Betrayed and mortally wounded by his favored son Horus during the Horus Heresy, the Emperor has spent more than ten thousand years interred in the Golden Throne, a life-support machine that keeps his soul anchored to a withered body and consumes a thousand psykers' souls a day. He is worshipped as a god. His will projects across the galaxy as the Astronomican, a psychic beacon by which ships navigate. His greatest soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, eight-foot bioengineered warriors grown from his genetic material. In the modern timeline a vast warp storm called the Great Rift has split the Imperium in two, and the resurrected primarch Roboute Guilliman now leads its defense.

The Warp, also called the Immaterium, is a parallel dimension of pure psychic energy that underlies all reality. Every emotion and thought of every sentient creature ripples into it. Over aeons those currents congealed into the Chaos Gods, the Ruinous Powers: Khorne, god of blood and rage; Tzeentch, of change and sorcery; Nurgle, of disease and decay; and Slaanesh, of excess. They are sustained by mortal feeling and so are utterly single-minded. They wage an eternal rivalry called the Great Game, and at times unite under Chaos Undivided to bring down the Imperium. Their servants are daemons, made from a fragment of a god's own power. The Warp matters twice over. It is the home of Chaos, and it is the only route between the stars, since ships translate into it to cross the galaxy. The Warp was not always cruel; aeons of war twisted a once-calmer realm into a nightmare. That souring is tied to the Necrons' own history.

Before the Necrons there were the Necrontyr, a flesh-and-blood species born under a sickly, radiation-spewing star. Their lives were short and cancer-ridden, and the whole culture grew obsessed with death and dynastic hierarchy. They built a vast star-empire, then tore at it through endless infighting. To unite the dynasties, their rulers found a common foe: the Old Ones, the galaxy's most ancient and powerful race, whose mastery of the Warp the Necrontyr envied and resented. The war they started, the War in Heaven, was one of the bloodiest in galactic history, fought roughly sixty million years before the 41st Millennium. It went catastrophically. The Old Ones' command of the Warp and their living weapons broke the Necrontyr again and again, driving them to the galaxy's fringe to nurse their hatred. There, exiled and desperate, they encountered beings of pure energy living on the surfaces of stars. The Necrontyr named them the C'tan, the star-gods, and made a bargain that would unmake them.

The Necrontyr forged bodies of necrodermis, living metal, so the C'tan could take material form. Fed and embodied, the star-gods turned on their makers and terrorized them into service. Then the C'tan offered a final pact, championed by the one later called the Deceiver: physical immortality. Through biotransference, the Necrontyr would shed their dying flesh and have their minds poured into living-metal shells like the C'tan's own. Vast bio-foundries were built; the Cryptek Illuminor Szeras turned the C'tan's knowledge into a working process; and the population marched in under the orders of their monarch, the Silent King. The C'tan fed on the spiritual residue of an entire species as it was rendered down. The cost was the soul. The Necrontyr were gone, replaced by the soulless, undying Necrons. Most became near-mindless automatons; only nobles and specialists kept full personality. Reborn as machines and led by incarnate C'tan, the Necrons resumed the war and won, breaking the Old Ones. But the anguish poured into the Warp by that war helped twist it toward Chaos, a wound that outlasted every victory.

Two pieces of Necron technology define how they fight, and both flow from the same principle: matter and energy are theirs to command. Reanimation protocols are auto-repair systems woven through every Necron body. A wounded Necron knits itself back together in emerald sparks: reattaching limbs, reforming a shattered skull, witch-lights flaring back into dead eye-lenses. Damage too severe to repair on the spot triggers a phase-out, teleporting the mind and body to a tomb complex for rebuilding. There is a slow price. Each transference frays the engrams a little more, so a Necron that has died and reformed hundreds of times decays into a hollow automaton with no memory of who it was. Gauss weapons use the very same technology in reverse, breaking the molecular bonds of a target into raw energy that the Necrons can repurpose. A gauss flayer strips a victim apart layer by layer. On the tabletop these traits read as resilience and attrition: units claw wounds back at the end of a turn, and gauss fire shreds heavy armor.

Victory left the Necrons hollow and their empire in ruins, and a new power, the Aeldari, was rising. Rather than fight on, the Necrons turned on their C'tan masters; using a device called the Tesseract Labyrinth, they shattered the star-gods into shards and bound those fragments as weapons. Then they withdrew. Across thousands of Tomb Worlds, planets riddled with stasis crypts, the dynasties lay down to sleep, intending to wake after the galaxy's younger races had spent themselves. Szarekh, sick with guilt, freed his subjects from the command protocols that bound them to him and exiled himself into the void between galaxies. The Great Sleep was meant to last until the time was ripe. It did not go cleanly. Stasis decayed, dynasties woke damaged or feral, and by the 41st Millennium the Tomb Worlds are stirring across the galaxy, dynasty by dynasty, just as the Imperium reels from Chaos, Orks, Tyranids, and the rest.

The waking Necrons are not faceless. Szarekh, the Silent King, eventually returned from the intergalactic dark in the modern era, having seen a greater threat coming, and once more leads his people. Trazyn the Infinite is the obsessive archivist of the Necron race, a collector who pillages the galaxy for relics and living specimens, freezing famous warriors in stasis for his museum-world of Solemnace; on the battlefield he can snatch a fresh body when his own is destroyed. Imotekh the Stormlord, phaeron of the Sautekh Dynasty, is a brilliant and ruthless general who can call down lightning storms to blind and batter his foes before he strikes. Around them stand specialists like Orikan the Diviner, a chronomancer who reads and bends time, and Illuminor Szeras, the cold engineer of biotransference itself. Together they make the Necrons less a horde than a civilization: ancient, patient, and certain that the galaxy was always theirs to reclaim.