The good news is that the other effects here are considerably more attractive. Methodical Destruction returns from 8th, allowing you to pour firepower into a unit you really want dead right now, and no longer even requiring a successful wound to go through from your first volley to trigger.
Finally, Sautekh retain their roster of named characters, several of whom have gotten big boosts to their effectiveness. Previously, the Sautekh warlord trait and some of the characters were duct tape desperately trying to hold together a terrible faction — now it might turn out you simply have better options. There is still stuff to like here though, so expect to see them tried. New and exciting for the Necrons, we have custom dynasties.
Two lists of traits Dynastic Traditions and Circumstances of Awakening are provided, and you have to choose one effect from each list. The Dynastic Traditions list contains a lot of repeats of one half of the named Dynasty traits. Most notably, all of the following are available:. Having these powerful, workhorse effects available immediately makes it more likely these will get used, but obviously the second half needs to pay off as well.
This just does so much and is exactly the kind of effect that produces the most value in top level play. I expect to see this heavily tested alongside the best of the named Dynasties. Speaking of which…. On to the next exciting topic — Necrons get a mighty 12 more stratagems than they did last time around, including a mix of returning favourites, some improved, and whole new tricks.
First up, in the drop downs below you can see lists of stratagems that are:. Returning Stratagems. Removed Stratagems. Necrons get what appears to be the standard extra warlord and extra relic strats. These both cost 1CP per use, and can be used:. Relic wise, the Veil of Darkness has been slightly nerfed but remains a near must-have, and there are some good generic weapon options.
All together, very useful. The other pre-game upgrade option is Hand of the Phaeron. While useful in some builds, the fact that MWBD is CORE only does mean this is far from and auto-take, especially with how juicy a lot of your other options are, but worth keeping in mind. Are there tools to help with that? Yes — especially if you like using rapid fire gauss weapons. With any gauss weapon, including the new reapers, you can also pop Disintegration Capacitors , auto-wounding on unmodified 6s to hit.
You can combine this further with the upgraded Solar Pulse , which now strips a target of cover for the whole phase rather than just against one volley. As a final treat for those who love to kill stuff at range we have Techno-Oracular Targeting. After you hit with a ranged attack, you can spend 1CP to just auto-wound. No further complications. Hit someone with a gauss destructor? Proportionally, this is expensive for what it does, but the ability to buy certainty when it really matters is always a valuable one.
For 2CP, this lets them ignore invulnerable saves for all their attacks in the phase, helping to add to how utterly horrendous they now are.
Flayed Ones can give themselves -1 to hit in any phase, but the really exciting one here is Whirling Onslaught. This gives a unit of Skorpekh Destroyers or a Skorpekh Lord -1 to wound rolls against them for a phase. At T5 or 6, this is the perfect sweet spot for this effect, as it lets them push S4 or S5 for the lord attacks to only wounding on 6s, and even most really nasty stuff to need 4s. Combined with being able to take bigger units of Skorpekh in the book and them picking up a discount from their Indomitus Cost, this makes them look exceptionally spicy.
Great job past me. Always fun to have. Several units get some options here. Ophydian Destroyers can burrow back into deep strike to return on the following turn, while Tomb Blades can advance and shoot without penalty, treating Rapid Fire weapons as Assault when they do so. The old trick of Deathmarks to intercept deep strikers has now also been re-packaged as a stratagem available to both them and the new Hexmark Destroyer. Interesting stuff. Wraiths and Tomb Spiders are both melee units priced to move now, and this makes both of them quite a bit better.
My absolute favourite stratagem from this book, and going straight into the big leagues of high-quality strat names with Long, Uncontrolled Bursts, we have Revenge of the Doomstalker. Necrons now get three sets of choices here — warlord traits and relics like everyone else, and then the new Cryptek Arcana, giving access to a bunch of purchaseable tools for your mystical robot wizards to further enhance their capabilities. These are mostly pretty similar to what they were before, and honestly several of them end up looking like a bit of a downgrade.
Enduring Will -1D is unchanged and Eternal Madness re-roll melee wounds is improved very mildly, now being always on rather than just in the first round of combat. Honourable Combatant is fixed at 2 extra attacks rather than d3, but also otherwise stays stable. Thrall of the Silent King is also mostly the same as was, but again gets a boost from being purchaseable and there being new options to combine with it, most notably the Canoptek Control Node on the Technomancer.
Immortal Pride gets re-written and is, sadly, way less good. A substantial downgrade on both halves sadly, and probably not that great.
I expect you mostly take either the Sautekh, Nephrekh or Szerakhan ones on your Warlord, buy your biggest melee nasty Enduring Will and maybe throw out Thrall of the Silent King when you have a use for it. Most of these return from the previous edition, but quite a few get changed, some for the better, some for the worse. Getting a more substantial actual improvement, the Gauntlet of the Conflagrator , which rolls a dice for each model in a target unit and does mortals on 6s, gets increased range in line with other flamers, and can now be fired every turn.
If hordes continue to rise, this could see the odd bit of use — it can be slapped onto a model for just a command point, so why not. Rounding out the upgrade column, Voidreaper has been changed.
First up for new ish relics is the Voltaic Staff. I expect to take this on my Catacomb Command Barge the ideal wielder pretty much every game. The other new toy is more of a comedy option, being a relic Tachyon Arrow. Is it worth your slot? Probably not. Getting a bit of a downgrade, we start with the Veil of Darkness teleport the bearer and a friendly unit , which picks up a CORE restriction on the unit riding along.
Still a mixed story overall, but better than the warlord traits, with the addition of the Voltaic Staff being a huge boon, and the Veil and Orb having plenty of serious use cases. Last out of the character toys, the four fancy flavours of Cryptek now have a list of 12 special wargear options that you can buy them with points.
Five of these are specific to Cryptek types with the greedy Technomancer double-dipping , and seven are generic. These do all sorts of stuff. The three that I think stand out are the following:. Nearly to the units, I swear. Thunderbolt and Meteor are basically your bread and butter powers, so the plan of starting with one of those in your slot and switching to Cosmic Fire with Strange Echoes once you close is better than ever, as those two see the biggest boosts.
Last thing before we move to the unit roster is faction Secondaries. They still have categories like any others, and the rule about not double picking from the same category still apply. There are four here and three of them are at least plausibly pretty good and one is niche. Purge the Vermin is like an inverse Engage on All Fronts — from turn 2 onward, you get 2VP for each table quarter that there are no enemy units wholly within. Just through attrition, it feels like it will sometimes be really hard to stop this.
The Treasures of the Aeons is another one with powerful mid-late game scoring potential. After deploying, your opponent picks three objective markers, and at the end of your turn you get points for holding those — 2VP for 1, 3VP for 2, 5VP for all three.
Obviously how good this is changes a bit depending on the map, but on missions like Battle Lines , Vital Intelligence and Sweep and Clear it feels great — and will also reward you with double scoring if you choose to go for the mission secondary on the last one. Finally, in Shadow Operations you get a decent action secondary in Ancient Machines. Each time you complete this, you get 3VP. Overall, having these additional options is great, which does kind of circle around to how these will be handled at events in the early part of 9th.
OK, cool robot time. Something to say before we dive into it is that, in a cause for much rejoicing, the way points are done has been changed from 8th. For Necrons, this massively simplified looking at prices, especially as a lot of their options are interchangeable. As a general thing for this section, all the Overlord tier characters, named and generic, now have four attacks rather than their sad, pathetic three from 8th.
If you can find 50 more points, however, can I recommend the Catacomb Command Barge. The magnificent aerial command unit also has a Tesla cannons trapped underneath, so is a good unit to proc Malevolent Arcing. Moving down the hierarchy, Lords are still kind of embarassingly terrible at everything, being stuck at 3A with no invuln.
Over in the land of fallen nobility, the Lokhust Lord returns from the old codex and the Skorpekh Lord from Indomitus. The Skorpeh Lord is pricier and slower, but has a far more flexible offensive loadout in exchange. Crypteks have been split into four different datasheets. We start strong with the Technomancer , and while a lot of these are cool, this guy does a tonne of stuff supporting multiple archetypes.
There are lots of ways you can make him do more than that though. You can optionally upgrade him with either a Canoptek Cloak or a Canoptek Control node. This is vastly more flexible than it used to be, and can be super helpful for getting a wounded character ready to re-join the fray.
This is an incredibly potent buff, and especially good with the spiicy Canoptek Doomstalker. The Psychomancer is a debuff thrower. If you beat it, you get to pick one of four debuffs, including stripping off Objective Secured, making them unable to perform Actions, slowing them down or suppressing Overwatch in your next turn.
All of these are quite powerful, and depending on where the metagame ends up around secondaries there could plausibly be a place for this. They also pack two different weapon options which are both pretty cool in their own way, and actually has a built-in invuln unlike the rest of these fragile chumps. Finally, the Plasmancer. In the initial phase at least, dust off your Technomancers which you definitely have if you played 8th and smash the buy button on a Chronomancer.
Starting off with the previous biggest cheese of the Necrons, Imotekh gains a lot. The motives of Necron nobles and royals are often muddied by the pursuit of personal power, making accurate divination of an individual's intentions -- and therefore of the campaigns conducted by their undying legions -- nigh impossible. Only now, as more and more Tomb Worlds awaken, is a pattern becoming visible to those whose mission it is to stand watch upon the trackless reaches of the galaxy and beyond.
Piecing together scattered accounts of skull-faced reaper-machines rising from the dust of Dead Worlds the length and breadth of the galaxy, the xenos -savants of the Imperial Inquisition are faced with a stark realisation. What at first appeared to be unrelated alien raids serving no overall purpose were, in fact, the heralds of a disaster of galactic proportions facing the Imperium of Man.
The Necrons rise from a Tomb World. The Necrons are still a shadowy presence rather than a full-fledged force in the galaxy of the present time.
They strike out of nowhere without warning, wreak havoc and leave before any major reinforcements can arrive. The origins of these various attacks and their motives are unknown, though it is known that the current Necron forces in the galaxy are only soul harvesters, not the full-fledged fighting machines of the C'tan.
They seem to attack from nowhere often simply appearing at nearly any location in the galaxy, no matter how well-defended. Once in the recent past they touched down on Mars , simply passing by the Imperial Navy fleets protecting the Sol System unnoticed, and ultimately casting doubt on the impregnable status of Terra itself.
The Necrons reached the Red Planet's surface and explored its subterranean Noctis Labyrinthus , perhaps in search of one of their C'tan masters, believed to be the entity known in the legends of the Adeptus Mechanicus as the Dragon of Mars , before being destroyed by the agents of the Imperium. This incident, however, is a heavily guarded secret within the Imperium of Man , which greatly fears that the Necrons may awaken the entity which may be the C'tan called the Void Dragon which inhabits a stasis tomb beneath the sands of Mars.
At the same time, the Imperium has been unable to capture a Necron in an attempt to learn their secrets; entire Necron forces simply vanish into thin air using their phase technology -- and they always take their "dead" with them. The Necron forces come from Tomb Worlds as yet uncharted by the Imperium.
Their phase technology allows them to deploy anywhere in the galaxy, almost instantaneously through unknown means. In defeat, they "phase-out" and return to their associated Tomb World for repairs.
Any Necrons that have fallen in battle can be repaired there and re-animated, so their losses thus far have been minimal. Should a Necron be totally annihilated in battle, then they are truly beyond phase-out or repair, but again, often so little survives that the scientists of living races have nothing to study.
The Necrons may have infiltrated the Imperium to an extent. Their elite anti- psyker troops, the Pariahs , are an unholy cross of Human mutant and Necron technology. It is believed by some Adeptus Mechanicus savants that the Necrons had the Pariah Gene engineered into what became the Human gene pool over 60 million Terran years ago. This gene has since manifested itself in the agents of the Culexus Temple , the specialised anti-psyker assassins of the Officio Assassinorum.
Recently, however, there has been a dramatic decrease in the use of Necron Pariahs in Necron armies, and the Ordo Xenos believes that these troops may not have proven as effective as Necron commanders had once hoped and are being phased out of the Necron dynasties' order of battle. Necron forces fighting against the Aeldari of the Saim-Hann Craftworld. Of all the galaxy's great powers, only the Craftworld Aeldari see the Necrons for the threat they truly are to all of the other sentient species -- and even they cannot be sure how many Tomb Worlds slumber in the darkness.
After the War in Heaven, the Aeldari took up a silent watch for any sign of Necron reemergence, and set watch on worlds they suspected of nurturing hidden stasis tombs. Many such worlds were seeded with life and adopted as homes by Asuryani Outcasts and Exodites , whose descendants would maintain the vigil. Where this was not possible, suspected Tomb Worlds were marked on a great crystal map so that their locations would not be lost as the millennia passed.
Yet, as the ages of the galaxy passed, the Aeldari became distracted by their own plights and thus forgot the duty they had sworn to uphold for their lost patrons, the Old Ones. By the time of the Fall of the Aeldari in the 30th Millennium -- the terrible birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh -- the slumbering Necrons had been all but forgotten.
Only in the Black Library and amongst a few outspoken segments of Aeldari society did the vigil continue. Necron legions overwhelming the Asuryani of Craftworld Alaitoc. For the Aeldari, the Necrons are a nightmare come to life. The children of Isha hold soullessness to be the very worst of all fates, and the Necrons therefore provoke an abiding terror that the Aeldari can never truly suppress.
For the Seer Council of the Alaitoc craftworld , however, a time of terrible vindication is at hand. The Asuryani of Alaitoc remembered their ancient duty whilst their peers forgot. They recovered the fragments of the great map from one of the Crone Worlds of the Eye of Terror , spread their networks of Outcasts and Exodites ever wider and waited for the ancient enemy to return. So it is that whilst most Asuryani craftworlds are re-honing half-remembered strategies from the War in Heaven , Alaitoc is reaching its hand, assailing the Necrons on their own territory, sabotaging their Tomb Worlds and bringing the fight to their legions of undying warriors whenever the opportunity presents itself.
In the 41st Millennium, Humanity is widespread throughout the stars of the galaxy and encounters the Necrons with some frequency, but there is no mechanism by which the experiences of one embattled world can be shared with the wider Imperium of Man.
Even if there were, by what means would the data be catalogued? Hundreds of Human worlds are depopulated or destroyed every year, and if their fates are noted at all by the Administratum , the cause of their demise is rarely discovered. There is no single repository of information in the Imperium, no established central historical record -- in a galaxy-spanning civilisation so shrouded in ignorance and superstition, it would be remarkable if it were otherwise. Some Imperial scholars hold that the slaughter of the Sisters of Battle stationed at Sanctuary in M41 represented the first contact between Mankind and the Necrons.
Such individuals do so in ignorance of the many millions of encounters that, though predating the Sanctuary event, went entirely unremarked upon because no one survived to make note of them, the records were lost or deemed mythic, or simply took place on a world where the inhabitants made no distinction between differing alien perils.
More so, it displays the classic arrogance of those who assumed that the boundaries of their knowledge are, in fact, the boundaries of reality. What follows is a list of the most pertinent recent events in the history of the reawakened Necron race and its encounters with the other intelligent cultures of the galaxy:. A schematic diagram detailing the current hierarchy and inner workings of the Necron Sautekh Dynasty. Even in life, the Necrontyr civilisation was one of strict protocol and process, governed by nobles whose rule was absolute.
This rigid hierarchy became more entrenched during the transition from flesh to machine, and the awakening Necron civilisation is far more complex and stratified than the one that once ruled the galaxy. Every Necron belongs to a royal dynasty, one of the great houses of the ancient Necrontyr Empire. Allegiance to a dynasty was once purely a matter of family and tradition, but it is now entrenched through conquest and programming. Every Necron noble is truly individualistic and, whilst they might share a common set of customs and loyalties, they rarely have a unity of purpose beyond that imposed by their superiors.
Accordingly, whilst several neighbouring worlds might owe allegiance to the same royal dynasty, the agendas they pursue depends entirely on the whims and goals of each Necron Overlord or Lord , rather than the broader traditions of the dynasty. Before the coming of the C'tan , there were many hundreds of Necrontyr dynasties. Some wielded vast political and military power while others were vestigial and broken, mere echoes of once-great noble houses. Through the Wars of Secession , the rebellion against biotransference and the C'tan, the War in Heaven and the Great Sleep , many thousands of royal dynasties were destroyed.
It is impossible to say how many survived, save that they number in the hundreds, or possibly thousands. Those dynasties listed below can be considered the most powerful of those that remain and are currently known to the Imperium of Man.
The armies of a Necron dynasty roll over the forces of the Astra Militarum. The highest of the Necron nobles are the phaerons , the rulers of entire dynasties, including many planetary systems.
Beneath these monarchs are the Necron Overlords , who rule clusters of Tomb Worlds within their phaeron's domain. Lower still are the Necron Lords , each charged with the keeping of a dynasty's single core or fringeworld.
So deeply are these titles mired in Necron tradition that they are universally constant across all of the dynasties. However, the titles of subordinate nobles and functionaries, which make up advisory councils and specialist convocations, are subject to an almost infinite variety. The ranking structures within the Necrontyr armies and fleets have remained constant, no matter how vast and disparate the dynasties have become.
For example, every time any Necrons go to war, the title of nemesor is bestowed upon the overall commander of the battlefield or campaign, similar to a Human general or admiral. This allows Necron armies from across the stars to join forces, even if they have never met, and suffer no decrease in efficiency.
This entrenched command structure helped ease the transition of Imotekh the Stormlord from nemesor to phaeron of the Sautekh Dynasty. Gravs, vymarks and thantars are but a few of the titles given to lower tier Necron nobles; almost identical in terms of rank and responsibility, the only real difference arises from which dynasty the individual hails. Many Necron titles are hereditary, dating to the earliest days of the Necrontyr -- some were relatively later inventions, crafted as a means by which nobles of lesser rank could be rewarded for their service.
As the sphere of Necrontyr dominion expanded ever further, the scope and application of titles passed far beyond any form of central control. Each royal dynasty created ever more elaborate titles based on its own traditions as a means of self-justification. Like many civilisations, the more grandiose or long-winded the title, the more likely it was merely an attempt to disguise low status.
This tanglework becomes particularly byzantine when a phaeron from one royal dynasty gains sway over a world from another. The resulting protocol is tedious beyond the endurance of living creatures, but for the Necron nobility it is merely another way of whiling away eternity. To make matters worse, if a phaeron is deposed or destroyed, their replacement will sometimes insist that all existing ranks be amended to reflect the traditions of their own house.
To take such a step, the incumbent must be entirely sure of their own position, as a challenge to tradition is sure to rouse discontent within their own court. Every phaeron and Overlord is served by a Royal Court, which assists in the administration of Tomb Worlds and the execution of military campaigns.
A Royal Court consists of a group of Necron Lords, Crypteks , and in the courts of phaerons, Overlords, who owe fealty to the ruler through oath or family bonds. Through flesh is long since a memory for the Necrons, ties of blood remain as important as they ever were to the Necrontyr. Each Necron Lord will also be served by their own lesser courts. Only nobles of the very lowest ranks do not have courts of their own, yet even these mimic their betters by keeping a circle of untitled advisors from the most acceptably sentient of their vassals.
Of course, given the paucity of wit in such advisors, these courts are but shadowed mockeries of the real things. However, in the ongoing battle for status and proper protocol among the Necrons, even a laughable court is considered better than no court at all. Identity matters only to those who have the ability to think: my Immortals and Lychguard, perhaps; my Lords and Crypteks, certainly. For the remainder of my vassals? Well, suffice to say that the concept of glory is wasted on the inglorious.
The size of a dynasty's Royal Court is not only important in terms of political status and prestige; it also determines a Necron noble's military status.
The larger the Royal Court, the greater their seniority and the more troops under their command. Even a noble who lacks for a Royal Court commands a legion of Necron Warriors , a few phalanxes of Immortals and Deathmarks , as well as a phalanx of Lychguard. Added to this are forces not aligned to any particular dynasty. Triarch Praetorians , the surviving agents of the vanished Triarch ruling council, fight alongside any nemesor whom they judge to have the best interests of the dynasties at heart.
Nihilistic Necron Destroyers can be lured to a battle with promises of carnage and slaughter, whilst Crypteks can be retained through acts of patronage. Few Necron nobles, no matter how desperate their plight, deliberately seek out the aid of the devolved Flayed Ones , although as these charnel creatures inevitably turn up to Necron battles of their own accord, this reluctance is of little account.
The more senior a noble's poistion in a dynasty's hierarchy, the greater the number and quality of the troops they have authority over. Furthermore, a ranking noble also has indirect command over all the forces controlled by the members of their Royal Court, who, in turn, have authority over the forces controlled by their subordinates, and so on.
As even the smallest of Tomb Worlds has at least two-score nobles of lesser rank, an Overlord can commonly draw upon at least a hundred legions of Necron Warriors, should they have need. All Necrons, noble and common-born alike, are bound together by the symbol of the ancient Necrontyr Empire, the Ankh of the Triarch , as depicted above. Each of the royal dynasties also has its own glyph, the designs of which have remained unchanged over the aeons.
Necron nobles bear the dynasty's mark, normally upon a death mask, cloak or sometimes as a stylised detail on personal weaponry or tokens of office. The most arrogant of nobles bear a glyph upon their breastplate in place of the Ankh of the Triarch, though to do so is to defy tradition and protocol.
Only nobles of the highest rank are permitted to bear their dynasty's glyph in its fullest form. Those of lesser rank bear only elements of the glyph, symbolising their position relative to a royal dynasty's heart of power. A handful of nobles do not bear a glyph at all -- some hail from royal dynasties destroyed during the War in Heaven , while others were stripped of rank and status for some long ago transgression.
In either event, such a noble is considered untrustworthy at best, with treachery either in their past or in their future. Dynastic glyphs are unique to Necron nobles. The common soldiery, such as Necron Warriors and Immortals , are largely considered to be interchangeable chattel by their noble masters. As such, they are thought unworthy of direct association with the proud lineage of a particular dynasty -- although the colours of their necrodermis death masks and armour sometimes echo ancient Necrontyr heraldry and thus indirectly reflect their allegiance.
In contrast, Necron war engines, such as Monoliths and Doomsday Arks , are often marked with dynastic glyphs -- they are considered to be the personal weaponry of a particular noble and therefore warrant a higher status than even the Necron Warriors that crew them. Glyph of the Atun Dynasty. Glyph of the Charnovokh Dynasty. Glyph of the Maynarkh Dynasty. Glyph of the Mephrit Dynasty.
Glyph of the Nekthyst Dynasty. Glyph of the Nephrekh Dynasty. Glyph of the Nihilakh Dynasty. Glyph of the Novokh Dynasty. Glyph of the Ogdobekh Dynasty. Taking the form of a vast, armoured leech with a Warp vortex in place of a head, he summoned his daemonic legions and plunged headlong into the Necrons.
Battle raged in the darkness. The Necron armies were undone when Beublghor's tunnels began to shift and flow into new shapes. Beublghor and his innumerable Bloodletter armies crushed the isolated Necron strike forces one by one. The Necrons of the Oltep Dynasty were obliterated, and their metal skulls are still heaped deep within the planet's cold womb. Glyph of the Oroskh Dynasty. Glyph of the Oruscar Dynasty. Glyph of the Sautekh Dynasty. Ruled by its Phaeron, Nemesor Varagon Drakvir, Xonthar has been aggressive in striving to reclaim that which was lost and many worlds have felt their wrath.
In battle Drakvir is accompanied by his Royal Court, foremost amongst whom is Overlord R'zhan R'drah, Regent of Oblivios, a necessary, but untrustworthy, second in command, who musters the Xonthar Decurions when Drakvir is otherwise engaged. Their haughty attitude has ired the egomaniacal Drakvir, who now readies his dynasty for total war. We taught the galaxy these things long ago, and we will do so again. A defender from the Imperial Guard is overwhelmed by the assault of the Necrons of a newly awakened Tomb World.
For many of the galaxy 's myriad intelligent species, the re-emergent Necrons are but one terror amongst many in the darkness between the stars. Even within the Imperium of Man , the Necrons are only dimly understood, with just a handful of individuals aware of the true scale of the threat they represent to Humanity 's dominion over the galaxy.
Just as Necron society is rigidly hierarchical, so too are its Tomb Worlds. The most important are the crownworlds , oldest and proudest of all the Necron-held planets and the sites from which their dynasties and planetary clusters are governed. Crownworlds were once hubs of galactic power in the ancient days of Necron might, buttressed by tithe and tribute sent from elsewhere within the territory of their ruling dynasties.
With access to such great resource-wealth, crownworlds were able to construct the most reliable stasis-crypts for their inhabitants. As a result, crownworld inhabitants that have weathered the slumbering millennia, without falling afoul of external circumstances, have done so in excellent condition -- though this only dampens the tragedy for the Necron race when a crownworld is lost to galactic calamity.
Next in importance for any Necron dynasty are coreworlds , planets which together form the heart of a dynasty's interstellar territory. The rulers of coreworlds would inevitably be the close kin to the regent of their dynasty's crownworld, ensuring a bond of dynastic loyalty endured between the often diverse planets. Though neither so majestic nor so mighty as crownworlds, the coreworlds were great powers to be reckoned with in their heyday and, barring disaster, are so again in the 41st Millennium.
Finally, Necron fringeworlds are planets of tertiary importance to their ruling dynasty, not viewed as being of high enough status to be numbered amongst a dynasty's coreworlds. Fringeworlds were often poor or distant colonies of a dynasty, able to contribute to the wider realm only in terms of manual labour or as a location for penal institutions. Some fringeworlds will once have counted amongst the coreworlds of a different dynasty, but have since been conquered or otherwise subsumed into the dominion of their current ruler, thus descending in status.
There is no such thing as a "typical" Necron Tomb World. Each answers only to the will of its noble ruler, and thus their proclivities define everything from its grand campaigns to trivialities such as architectural styles and forms of address between noble ranks. Nevertheless, there is one common cause that binds all Tomb Worlds: the rebuilding of the Necron dynasties of old, and the return of the Necrons to their rightful place of supremacy over the whole of the ignorant galaxy.
The Tomb Worlds listed below represent no more than a handful of the many millions spread throughout the galaxy. Each revived world has its own idiosyncracies, and the number is ever-growing. Who can say how many far-flung outposts of Mankind have their foundations set upon a planet long ago claimed by an immeasurably older civilisation, its inhabitants blissfully unaware of the slumbering horror at their planet's core.
Mandragora was always an important world, a hub for the Necron armies that did battle on the eastern rim of the galaxy. When the War in Heaven ended, Mandragora's stasis-crypts were filled to capacity with some of the finest warriors that the Necron dynasties could command.
Mandragora's defences were second to none, as befitted a world of its status, and it survived the Great Sleep intact and safe from the attentions of plunderers. So did Mandragora emerge from hibernation not only hale and whole, but with vast Necron legions at its command -- a situation its new phaeron , Imotekh the Stormlord , was quick to exploit.
Ordering Mandragora's Dolmen Gates reactivated, he sent forces to seize the many coreworlds from the Ork hordes of Warboss Snagratoof. With the Orks driven off or destroyed, the reclaimed Tomb Worlds were then awoken, swelling Imotekh's forces further.
Since then, the armies of Mandragora have proved an ever-present threat on the Imperium 's eastern borders, and one that continues to grow. Due to a devastating fault in a dimensional stabiliser array, the crownworld of Gheden is half-phased into a pocket dimension for all but a few solar hours of its stellar orbit. What was first thought of as a catastrophe has since proved to be a great boon to the Necrons of Gheden, as their world is now almost entirely impervious to assault.
Deep beneath Gheden's surface lies the Oracle Chamber, where the bulbous head of an ancient alien prophet gifted with psychic precognition is kept alive through a combination of stasis field technology and temporal stabilisers. The prophet's thoughts are projected as multifaceted holographic images which, in theory, show events yet to unfurl.
That said, the creature continually rails against his ghoulish imprisonment and obfuscates the images so that they mislead his captors as often as they are truthful. The Tomb World of Thanatos is a hollow planet, and hidden at its heart is one of the galaxy's greatest treasures -- the Celestial Orrery.
Crafted by artisans of the Oruscar Dynasty long before the onset of the War in Heaven , this web of hologram and living metal is beyond price for its artistic value alone. Yet the Celestial Orrery is far more than mere decorative finery. The tiny pinpricks of glowing light suspended within the impossibly intricate holographic matrix record the positions of every star in the galaxy. Snuff out one of these lights and its physical counterpart in the real galaxy will go supernova long millennia before its destined time, bringing fiery oblivion to all nearby worlds through the use of technology far beyond the understanding of Mankind.
Such an act cannot be performed without consideration, however, as each star destroyed in this fashion upsets the fundamental forces of the galaxy, setting off a catastrophic chain reaction of events. Only with further manipulation of the Celestial Orrery can these forces be returned to their proper balance, and this invariably takes many thousands of Terran years of constant and precise micromanagement.
With so much power at their fingertips, it is well that the Royal Court of Thanatos is not given to maniacal displays. Rather, they see themselves as the gardeners of Creation and dispassionately use the Orrery in a precise and sparing manner, pruning the galaxy only out of need to prevent it from becoming wild and overgrown.
Alas, this restraint is not something universally respected. Unending war rages across Thanatos' barren continents and in the skies above, as the armies and fleets of the Oruscar Dynasty seek to prevent the Celestial Orrery from falling into the incautious hands of aliens and other Necron dynasties alike. In the extreme northeast of the galaxy lies the region known as the Ghoul Stars. Here, on worlds lit by cold rays of dying suns, tread creatures out of primal nightmares: Cythor Fiends, Togoran Bloodreeks and other creatures so alien as to seem born out of the supernatural.
Yet even here, one horror outpaces all others -- the Bone Kingdom of Drazak. Drazak is a world that serves as a haunt for the Flayed Ones , those cursed Necrons blighted by a terrible disease that has given them an irrational hunger for organic flesh. They stalk Drazak's desolate streets, fighting over gobbets of rotting meat and shards of bone, desperate to sate the clamour of their deluded senses. Fron his throne of splintered bone and tanned skin, Valgul rules over this charnel kingdom, his one good eye ever fixed upon retaining what small measure of order he can.
Seemingly, Valgul remains untouched by the Flayer Virus that has consumed his people, but what truly sane creature would willingly live amongst gibbering Flayed Ones? Perhaps he remains from a sense of duty, or maybe his personal madness merely takes another, more subtle, form.
Valgul's rule is not founded on reason -- the devolved nature of his subjects makes such notions laughable -- but is grounded in his ability to provide the gory bounty in which his subjects delight. Every few solar months, when no more meat remains -- whether because it has been torn into fragments too tiny to scrabble over or simply due to inexorable rot -- Valgul announces a new Time of Bounty, and despatches the fleets of Drazak to raid nearby worlds. These reavers of Drazak seek not riches nor conventional plunder -- only "red harvests" of gore and cooling blood.
Though nominally a Tomb World, Trantis is, in truth, but a Necron fringeworld , and the satellite of the much larger and resource-rich Imperial world of Mandal. Since revival, the Necrons of Trantis have been a terror on Mandal's Human farming and mining communities. Striking always in the hours of darkness, low-flying squadrons of Night Scythes flit over the landscape, deploying small forces of Necron raiders to plunder and pillage.
It is not uncommon for entire Human settlements to be overwhelmed and harvested within a single night with only a large and barren crater to show where people once lived and worked.
Mandal's communes are so far apart that whole solar days can pass before a disappearance is noted, and certainly too distant for help to be dispatched once a raid begins. The inhabitants of Mandal have thus learnt to dread the onset of dusk. As darkness descends, a curfew begins, blast doors are sealed and sentries set. Yet every few nights another Human settlement vanishes without warning and without trace. Ironically, Trantis was only ever intended as a Necron way station for resources and raw materials.
It lacks the ability to use more than a fraction of the plunder taken from the planet below and was to ship the excess to other nearby coreworlds. Since the Great Sleep , however, Trantis' portion of the Webway has become sundered from all others, effectively isolating it from those Necron worlds it used to supply through a Dolmen Gate.
Accordingly, Trantis is slowly drowning in plundered resources for which it has little use. Yet still the raids on Mandal continue In the final hours of the War in Heaven , one of its greatest battles occurred above Zapennec , the crownworld of the Sarnekh Dynasty.
There, Zapennec's royal fleet fought valiantly to repel an Aeldari assault of almost incalculable size. The battle was a brief one, but no less deadly for all that. Whilst the surviving Aeldari retreated, leaving the planet itself unharmed, its orbit was, from that moment, clogged with the spiralling and blackened wreckage of the once-proud fleets.
So soon after the battle did the Great Sleep descend, that the Necrons of Zapennec had no time to clear their skies. Thus did they enter hibernation with their planet shielded by a spinning shroud of wraithbone and living metal necrodermis wreckage.
So would things remain until the 41st Millennium and the return of the Sarnekh Dynasty's most notorious outcast, the self-styled pirate king Thaszar the Invincible. Awakening on Athonos , the Tomb World to which he had been exiled, and driven by some urge he could not identify, Thaszar returned to Zapennec. Finding its people deep in hibernation, he inveigled his way into the Tomb World's master control program, its Tomb Mind.
In short order he convinced the Tomb Mind that he, Thazar the Invincible, was no dishonoured noble returned from exile, but in fact the rightful phaeron of the Sarnekh Dynasty!
For good measure, he then ordered that this updated status be engrammatically encoded into the minds of the Tomb World's slumbering Necrons. So did the outcast of Zapennec become its ruler, and those who had banished him become his servants.
Under Thaszar's command, the ancient and noble crownworld of the Sarnekh Dynasty has been made over into the Reaveworld. In the shroud of orbital wreckage surrounding the planet, Thaszar has access to all the raw materials he will ever need to build a Necron pirate fleet the scale of which has not been seen for 60 million Terran years; in the reprogrammed Necrons of Zapennec, he has crews and captains of unfailing loyalty.
They benefit from largely good shooting — if only at shorter ranges compared with other shooty armies — but also surprisingly good melee, in the form of the new Skorpekh Destroyers, plus a number of decent buff characters, such as the Technomancer and Chronomancer.
Neat and tidy: Our guide to Warhammer 40K detachments. They can also field a number of interesting tactics, including a few that are potentially game-changing such as the Expansionist battle traits that buff movement, and improve the Objective Secure rules for the troops with it.
Owing to their reliance on close- and mid-range weaponry, Necrons like to take advantage of the new, smaller table sizes — sitting on objectives and whittling away at foes as they weather the storm of return fire and melee.
The main unique special rule for Necrons is Reanimation Protocols. This is a powerful rule that triggers in melee and shooting phases, allowing for exceptional durability. As previously mentioned, Skorpekh Destroyers are the hot pick: tough to kill, strong in melee. Take them in a unit of six, and these feisty, many-legged blenders are almost a must-have unit for any Necron force. The bottom line is simple enough: although Necrons are fairly technical, they are forgiving due to their durability, and the brute force of their weaponry.
Box, they build into far better starter armies. A good next move would be picking up the Recruit starter set , which comes with a Royal Warden, a unit of Necron Warriors, and some Scarabs. If you want to go melee, Skorpekh Destroyers.
Long ranged murder? Take a Canoptek Doomstalker walker — one of the coolest looking models in the range. The galaxy is yours for the taking. There are no truly bad choices in Necron armies, so, with a strong core, you can simply build out however you want. As with most armies, Games Workshop shows off a variety of paint schemes for the various Dynasties in the Codex, and via the Warhammer YouTube. As of their introduction as part of the 9th Edition starter, Necrons have been designed to be fairly easy to paint — more so, even, than their older models.
They take a heavy wash and a drybrush over metallics really well, especially if you chuck a spot colour like a bright green, orange or blue on their weapons. If you want to go a different way, my top tip is to separate the armour panels and the innards — for my necrons I focussed on dark panels and brassy metal innards, with white heads as a nice eye-catcher.
I also dusted up my forces with some weathering powder, liberally applying it with a soft brush and spray-varnishing it in place, in order to convey the feeling of them having been buried in the sands of a dead world for millennia. Alternatively, you can go bright and bold;there really is no limit with these hulking monstrosities. There you have it.
A quick start guide to the immortal Necron dynasties!
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