[Deep Dive] Evolution of the Necron, Rev 2.0

It's 1997, and I've been in The Games Workshop Hobby for sixteen months. I know, because I came in with White Dwarf 201, and now I had White Dwarf 217 in my sweaty little hand, and that's how my tiny twelve year old brain measured time back then. 

That's why it was The Games Workshop Hobby, too: I was firmly of the Kirby generation, the Big Box generation, recruited through the red pamphlet catalogue and the primary school playground... although the design of second edition 40K hadn't quite dialled down to "for the kiddies" levels and actually playing the damn game was a struggle.

This White Dwarf was a bit special, though, because of what it had on the front. A free miniature! A metal one! A heavily stylised skeleton robot guy, with a sort of Egyptian cape/mantle thing and a wickedly pointy, nasty, skiffy-bollocks looking gun.

First Iteration

The cover doesn't make a big hue and cry about this Necron Warrior, for such it is. It's just sort of there. But when you're in the magazine proper, you're introduced to a masterfully wrought few pages introducing the Necron Raiders. Though presented in the garish, overcolourful style of the period, this material is apocalyptic and revelatory, introducing through fragmented testimony a weird signs in the fields and cattle mutilations on the ranch kind of alien, a they left none alive and nothing standing, only in centuries to come will their deaths be spoken of kind of threat. Only half a page of this background is didactic, telling-not-showing what the situation is, and even that is sketchy: there was a civilisation, the Necrontyr, and all that remains of them is their tombs, and now it may just be that they exist again.

Oh, and there are rules. And scenarios. Scenarios you can play with one lousy box of Necron Raiders, which is all that I had considering the price of metal models and the aforementioned pocket money budget and also that it had just been Christmas and I'd spent it all on Chaos Warriors. Hold on to that "near miss" feeling, as it's going to be key to the story here.

The next month introduced the Necron Lord and the Destroyers, in an issue that featured, up front, Gorkamorka. This too is part of the story. Digganob, the supplement box for Gorkamorka, introduced the Pyramids to Angelis; in their shadow dwell the Ork-impersonating human cargo-cultists, the Diggas, and no-one else dares go near the maze of caves and crannies beneath the ancient structures, for fear of somethin' narsty that dwells below. It's a small grace note, but I love that it's there; it puts the Necrons somewhere else, easing them into the status quo on another front.

To my absolute delight, Angelis would crop up again in The Infinite and the Divine... as a perfectly preserved exhibit in Trazyn's gallery. Good taste.

White Dwarf 218 also featured the first battle report featuring the Necrons, and the recently-released Sisters of Battle. It's horribly asymmetrical by design, the Sisters are there to be wiped out by a far superior force, and maybe-just-maybe survive long enough to get a message out to the wider Imperium. It has a wonderful organic emergent hero - Sister Sledge, last woman standing, flamer-wielding martyr who just won't quit. Say what you like, retcon in all you want, grudgingly acknowledge that there were centuries of unrecorded or non-correlated incidents to draw upon: Sanctuary 101 is the first contact 'twixt Imperium and Necrons. Didn't hurt that if you had a box of Sisters, a box of Necrons and the cardboard Shrine from White Dwarf 216, you could probably do a passable impression of the encounter at home. I wonder why I didn't?

White Dwarf 220 follows up and concludes the emergence of the Necron Raiders with a scenery showcase - and this is proper DIY scenery, hot glue and plasticard stuff, messing around with Tonka toys and vinyl effect sheets (floor tiles, one presumes). The actual builds were a bit beyond the twelve-year-old Von, and one suspects beyond anyone who didn't have a mate with casting gear who could knock you up a quick set of detailed lead foundations, but still: the giant pyramid, the abandoned excavation vehicles, the drab and dusty terrain... it was heady, brain-firing stuff. This was the 1990s: I at least had only just been introduced to bases that weren't flock on the top and Goblin Green on the side!

Plans were, according to the article, afoot for "more flying vehicles" and "larger mechanoid life forms that fulfil a support role" but, barring the arrival of the very square first-generation Immortals and a Chapter Approved army list for early third edition, that's all we got for a few years. Interestingly, Rick Priestley observed that the Necrons had originally been written for third edition and he'd had the devil of a time rendering them backwards compatible for second. 

In hindsight, the original Necrons are clearly a fag-end-of-the-edition release, something the Studio were kicking around and put out in the quiet bit before third edition arrived in another eight months' time and changed everything. The fact that they did, though... the point I'm groping towards here is that the Necrons originated in the dying days of that DIY-focused, scenario-driven, make-it-up-as-you-go-along we're-not-going-to-talk-down-to-you period of early 40K. The background, too, presents a central hook and a lot of mystery and leaves you to create what you want in the white space it very loosely defines. It's all very Termite Art.

Second Iteration

It's 2002, and while I'm exiled from the hobby for a year "to concentrate on my GCSEs," the Necrons have returned. Codex: Necrons for third edition is, pardonnez mon Franglais, a fucking masterpiece. It takes the same approach as the "pamphlet" books for third edition and those initial White Dwarf articles: showing-not-telling for the most part, presenting in-universe documents with in-universe annotations and cross-references, showing how the scholars of the Imperium and storytellers of the Aeldari Eldar each held part of a puzzle that their xenophobia and arrogance would ensure they never completed. 

Only in the conclusion, with the appearance of the C'tan - the two of four who were out and about in the galaxy, introduced in one of 40K's best short stories (Andy Chambers' 'Deus ex Machinae') and one of its most definitely existent novels (Graham McNeill's Nightbringer) - did the background section break kayfabe and explain what the hell was going on. That keystone unlocked the rest of the back end of the book, and made it very clear that the Eldar knew what the C'tan were and the Imperium knew where they were, but nobody sane was capable of joining the dots.

The C'tan introduced a new kind of horror to the Necrons, fully rounding out the initial sketch, layering it in if you like. Necrons represent: where they come from. The originals, yes, have the deskinned T-800 look to them, the "I'll Be Back" rule making it quite clear where they come from, and I'm not going to take that away. But we need to talk about the Egyptian connection, and about tombs, and about robots, and about - sigh - Lovecraft.

See, the Necrons are the products of minds that grew up in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and that means minds that watched Doctor Who at an impressionable age. Priestley, Andrews and that lot were of an age to have seen 'Tomb of the Cybermen' on first broadcast. Patrick Troughton's Doctor stumbles on an archaeological dig, funded and led by the arrogant and hubristic Brotherhood of Logicians, who are convinced that they can unearth the long-dormant Cybermen and, through Logic and Reason, convince them to ally with the Brotherhood and bring a new age of Facts, not Feelings, to the galaxy. Sound familiar? Maybe if you dressed the Brotherhood in red, and gave them some dog-Latin to work with?

That story adds a qlippothic dimension to the Cybermen, previously a strictly science fiction kind of threat, all body horror and prices of survival. The Cybermen as ancient, sleeping malice, waiting to be awoken by their devotees, and in later stories they'll come to be fixated on the movements of celestial bodies: Voga, the Planet of Gold, and the comet Nemesis. Sleeping malice... devotees who don't know what they're unleashing... stars are right... this is all sounding familiar. It's very Necron, yes, but it's also very Mythos.

'Tomb of the Cybermen' has its roots in early twentieth-century pulp fiction and that has its roots in Victorian colonial archaeology, and Codex: Necrons (2002) picks up that inheritance and runs with it. The C'tan are an analogue to Cthulhu and all the rest of them - not so much evil as cosmically indifferent, existing on a scale we can't comprehend with needs only our enslavement and gradual extermination can satiate, bled through an aesthetic that had a commanding influence on the minds of generations.

All those early third edition narratives of someone - Adeptus Mechanicus or Astra Militarum Imperial Guard, usually, though it's a Rogue Trader in the Codex - stumbling on an ancient citadel, exploring and cataloguing, coming to understand the tragedy of a civilisation that reached too high and in so doing debased itself to the depths, and then awakening within those depths to deter the intruder with extreme prejudice... I mean, it's 'At The Mountains of Madness', innit? The Deceiver; Nyarlathotep; I look from one to the other, and the other to the one...

You have the supreme corruptive force of evil, the enemy within, in Chaos, you have the biological extra-galactic enemy without in the Tyranids, and you have the neutrallest evil of 40K in the C'tan. They are sentient, they are godlike, they have bartered with an entire species before: they could care about you, and they choose not to, and that's the most wicked thing of all.

Oh, and there's something in there about Warhammer Undead in Space as well. Tomb Kings, aesthetically, and as another fag-end project that the Studio was knocking around during the same late second/mid fifth edition period of the late 1990s, with similar inspirations, with a trace of the Vampire Counts in the "one very powerful centrepiece model" design of the C'tan. But what rounds it out, what completes it, is a deep well of "when you were a kid, you might have had a dinosaur phase, or you might have had an Egyptian phase," or if you were me you had both, with a side order of turn-of-the-century mummy's-curse stories and, more specifically, the cosmic horror and science fiction concepts that had already grown in that dry, dessicated soil.

I didn't collect Necrons this time around. I came back just a couple of months too late, in the Summer of Chaos, and it was the forces of the Dark Gods who ensnared me for my golden age of hobbying two nights a week and all day Sunday; by the end of the year the Army of Sylvania had dropped and that was the end of me, all hands were on deck for the ultimate expression of fantasy Gothic. I can't stress enough what a close call it was. Hold on to that "should have played third edition Necrons" part though; we'll come back for that later.

Third Iteration

If I had another photo of my old Necrons I would use another photo of my old Necrons.

It's 2011, and my time with the Games Workshop Hobby is coming to a close. I've been struggling to maintain enthusiasm for a few years - I don't even have a 40K army any more, having sold my Word Bearers and struggled to find the enthusiasm for Tyranids. But a clubmate - a shining light in the "live for the weekend on a budget of £4.50" gloom - is packing in his Necrons, which he sells me for an irresistible token price, right before the fifth edition Codex arrives.

Codex: Necrons (2011) is... divisive. Schismatically so. It's one of those high-profile top-down retcons that Games Workshop doesn't indulge in often, partly because of the screaming abdabs they induce in the player base. (See also: Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings splitting off, the finale of Storm of Chaos in 2004, and Squats.)

The 2011 Codex flipped the script on the Necrons. Instead of the silent, enthralled robotic army, lacking a mouth and forced to scream, doing the will of their C'tan masters, they became... well, Tomb Kings in space. A fractured, fractious hierarchy where everyone who'd risen from the grave with their personality intact thought they were the only ruler doing it right, each noble enabled by a court of hangers-on and cryptic wizards - or, should I say, Cryptek...

That kind of tortured wordplay is about the level the book is on, with the "hey, they're Egyptian themed robots" banged into the front of your brain without a trace of subtlety. Gone is the elegant tableaux of interwoven sources you had to piece together yourself - not that it was very hard, but you were encouraged to read between the lines, you know? Instead, we're back to full page "bestiary" entries and great slabs of didactic, matter-of-fact "lore." This is around the time that Rick Priestley, who wrote the original Necron Raiders articles, left GW and described the fate of 40K post-2009 thus:

"I think it became quite a literal thing. A lot of the mystery that I left in it has been defined. A lot of the subtlety that I’d engineered to give you a very rich and varied and detailed universe just got swiftly kicked aside."

A little birdie now enters our time together, a small sad nocturnal parrot who's clearly very confused since he insists on hanging upside down all the time. This little birdie tells me, quite rightly, that there's a change in the influences that are most prominent, to go along with the change of focus. This version of the Necrons has its feet in the Mummy films - the focal big-boss-epic-hero that you just have to have in a post-Priestley narrative universe is called Imotekh, for crying out loud - and my avian comrade insists on a comparison to the Necromongers from The Chronicles of Riddick, to which there is a definite similarity - it's the hierarchical aristocracy within the universe-conquering death-obsessed miltary cult that does it. Personally I think that sounds more like the Imperium, but what do I know?

The thing is, I like the 2011 Codex as a thing in itself. The decision to flip the script and have the Necrons as capable of bickering, politicking, doing internal diplomacy, and their motivation as reconquering the galaxy they saw as theirs rather than the utter annihilation of all life? From a storytelling perspective, that gives you room to tell stories about Necrons rather than stories with Necrons in them, and that's a crucial difference. As strong as the original Necron theming is, there's not a lot else you can do with it: you end up repeating the same narrative over and over, the fate which befell Lovecraft himself if you read through his complete works. 

Instead, it becomes possible to draw from that deep well of Cool Ancient Egyptian Stuff and create characters and narratives. There's space for the creative talent at GW to work, and for us hobbyists to create Our Dudes and have that mean something, rather than just being a palette swap on some metaplot. Your Necrons are yours in a way that goes beyond their colourscheme. 

Crucially, the retcon also gives the Necrons something unique. Alone of all the factions and species and "races" in the forty-first millennium, the Necrons have successfully killed their gods. That rocks. In a universe where the default perspective is the deistic theofascism of the Imperium and its dark mirror, the worshippers of the interventionist Chaos Gods, the Necrons choose to sack the whole thing off and put the divine in its proper place: at the end of a leash. No gods, only (metal) man.

Don't get me wrong: there was a cost. The C'tan being reduced to "shards", broken things employed as semi-lucid living weapons by their former slaves, may be a cool new story beat in its own right, but it ripped the guts out of that galaxy-spanning cosmic horror mythology puzzle I sang the praises of up the line there. I'm echoing the thoughts of other, more widely circulated contributors to the discourse here, but when the Void Dragon finally came along with a big cool sparky centrepiece model... it was just another release, because the apocalyptic significance of The Third C'tan Unleashed doesn't work any more when any podunk Dynasty can have one hanging around in the garage-crypt. That is a sad loss.

If this is the price I have to pay for creative space, as well as a dramatically more interesting version of the army list where almost every unit has at least a binary choice in its role and there aren't active deterrents from taking things that aren't bread and butter Warriors/Immortals/Destroyers, then it is a price I am willing to pay – but I am not unilaterally thrilled.

Fourth Iteration

Because I am of a certain age, gauss reapers still look wrong to me.

It's 2020. Indomitus has arrived, the ninth edition of Warhammer 40,000 contained within, and the Necrons are the featured antagonists for the duration. 

Despite lucking into a job lot of Necrons, I will not play them under the ninth edition rules set, because their rules give me a cluster headache. These rules have assigned both a cumbersome "know what bonuses you'll need in every turn before you play it" exercise in system mastery, and something suspiciously similar to Space Marine Chapters, in that the Dynasties established in 2011 now have their particular colour schemes associated with particular sets of rules. These haven't really gained masses of traction, since there are only about three novels exploring what it is to be a Necron and none of them really dwell on Dynasty issues, so tenth edition rather sensibly gave up on trying to make the F'etch Dynasty happen. What it did instead is... well.

This is a version of the Necrons for the age of superheroes. We've arrived in the post-eighth-edition galaxy, riven in twain by giant warp sharts and populated by immense centrepiece models of Fictive History's Great Men (and Post-Human Men, and Green Men, and Daemon Men, and A Girl Who Happens To Be Dead).

This is not a model of world-building, or storytelling, or history (fictive or otherwise) that I find especially compelling. It's so... groundless. Individual commanders should bob on the surface of deep currents, societal and psychic forces that no individual can hope to control or even to ride for long - such was the essential hubris of the Emperor, surely?

To put it another way, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka is interesting when he's Andy Chambers' Warboss from "assembling an army" articles and now he's been beefed up to the point where he's a serious threat to an entire planet, but the more he becomes the living embodiment of Orkdom, the Prophet of the Waaagh, the Herald of Ragnarork, the Beast Reborn, the more I'm just thinking "yeah yeah but he can't be everywhere at once so what's the rest of the galaxy up to while he's making everything about him?"

Enter Szarekh, the Great Man (now Great Robot Skeleton Man) of History who struck the bargain with the C'tan and became supreme master and controller of the entire Necron civilisation until he gave it up out of shame and naffed off to the intergalactic dark to Think About What He Did. Fine. Boring, since everyone has a Great Man of History these days and they're all apocalyptically significant even though at least one Primarch has returned as the last release of a game edition since seventh and it's all just part of the wallpaper now.

Now he's back, and he has a galaxy shaking plan that's suspiciously similar to the dark future predicted by the Eldar Aeldari myth cycle back in the 2002 book, except the Necrons are in charge this time and it's not as interesting because it's all being told at me in hundreds of words of direct address to reader instead of one elegant page of vision and illustration. 

He's the Primarch, the Everchosen, the Prophet, the Avatar, the goddamn messiah figure of the Necrons, and - because anyone has to be able to fight anyone else at any time for any reason in this universe that exists to sell toys to play war dollies with - his Command Protocols don't work any more and Your Dudes can tell him to get bent if they want to.

All of this is very interesting to write about, I'm sure, but I don't see what it has to do with my 1000 point knockabout games, or how I'm to really play with it in that context. I'm only tangentially sure what it has to do with the 3000 point game I could theoretically play with... three more boxes of stuff under my belt. 40K is played at the scale of individual engagements on individual planets, but books like Pariah Nexus don't really bed in at that microcosmic level. They're preoccupied with macrocosm and paratext - big, sweeping gestures across sectors and history that are so big they change... nothing at all.

Sanctuary 101 hit hard because it was a small, gameable event. The Pariah Nexus is so big that even the Pariah Nexus campaign doesn't really connect with it - the scenarios and systems are all about hoarding blackstone, not doing anything about the Stilling. The problems exist on a scale we can't reach to solve, and they're only going to be solved by the same authorial fiat that wished them into existence to begin with.

That said: the current perspective isn't completely terrible. There's a good beat in the idea of a Necron civil war, with Imotekh leading a coalition of dynasties who aren't here for Szarekh's messianic bullshit - that'd make a good series of novels, even if it would end up being the Horus Heresy with robots. Undermining Szarekh is the only thing that makes him interesting. Necrons had a supreme authority figure who could do the Emperor's bit, and he gave it up. 

Much like killing their gods - and proving, as an Antipodean avian of my acquaintance has it, that enough gauss cannons shots can kill anything in this horrid galaxy - it suggests a civilisation which has seen it all, done it all, made all the mistakes the rest of the galaxy is making and moved beyond them before your species crawled out of the primordial slime.

That, at least, is pretty cool.