Designers' Notes
By Andy Chambers, Pete Haines, Phil Kelly, Graham McNeill & Andy Hoare

In the Necrons Designers' Notes, the Warhammer 40,000 Games Development team individually discuss their perspectives on the Necrons. Follow the author's links below.

Andy Chambers / Pete Haines / Phil Kelly Graham McNeill & Andy Hoare

Origins of The Necrons

Andy C: It's hard to go back far enough to put a finger on really where the Necrons originated from. They first appeared in WD217 as a set of miniatures. This initial outing was in an effort to introduce a new force of alien raiders with a very limited selection of miniatures - just Necron warriors and Scarabs by master fabricator Dave Andrews. The background story for these early Necron raiders revealed them to be the remnants of an unbelievably ancient race known as the Necrontyr.

The ruins of their tomb-temples had been discovered on many worlds as the last apparent remains of a highly advanced race which had become extinct tens of millions of years before. Such scattered clues as could be found about the Necrontyr revealed little about them, and the explorations of their dead worlds had been filed away in the immense data stores and repositories of the Adepts of Terra and Mars and forgotten. Only when the depredations of skeletal raiders at the fringes of Imperial space came to light was the connection made to an alien race which should be, by all rights, long dead.

All went well and the Necrons proved rather popular, leading to the addition of the heavily armoured Immortals, fast moving Destroyers and a commander in the shape of a Necron Lord. Then came Warhammer 40,000 3rd edition and a long, fallow period for the Necrons while the other races had their Codexes updated and lots of new miniatures. Through all this the Necron players have persisted with rather appropriate implacability, doubtless knowing that they were onto something good.

Chapter Approved got a steady trickle of reports on fighting with Necrons and suggestions for the army, leading to several Chapter Approved updates in White Dwarf. All the while, the Necron Codex and plastic Necron Warriors lurked on the edge of the virtual event horizon that is our long-range plan. Fortunately, even before the Tau were fully underway, plans were being drawn for the return of the ancient Necrontyr.

Out Of The Tomb It Crept

The contrast between the Necrons and the Tau couldn't have been greater. The Tau, a young dynamic race with a kind of optimism, which is frankly out of place in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The Necrons; ancient beyond belief, the unquiet vestige of a long-forgotten race which ruled the galaxy when mankind still thought bashing rocks together was a really smart idea. For the Tau we had emphasised the near-future feel of their technology and outlook to give them a distinct feel. With the Necrons we considered the same things. They were evidently unthinkably old, inhumanly patient and their technology could achieve miracles unapproachable even by the Eldar. Their background as raiders had included various dark hints about their motivations and origins but nothing concrete was known.

I tried writing a short story, Deus Ex Mechanicus, centring around an Adeptus Mechanicus explorator team investigating Necron tombs. As part of this I hit on an idea of why the Necrons looked the way they did - the death mask face and skeletal bodies would give a clear message to any race:

As is often the way, this helped trigger something in Jes Goodwin's brain and he started work on concept sketches for a new look, sleeker Necron warrior which looked like it was forged by aliens to scare the life out of people. He also came up with the idea of using tinted crystal plastic rods as power sources in their weapons, something which has become a great little feature of the new miniatures and their larger construct, the Monolith.

But this all still left the most fundamental questions about the Necrons unanswered; who made them, what did they want, and where were they now?

The C'tan

	The original Emperor of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Rick Priestley, taught me an invaluable lesson early in my career. When you have a big, ever-expanding back story, it never pays to be too tidy with it. If you leave some plot threads unfinished and some enigmatic mentions unexplained you always have new elements to bring forward at a later date and players have plenty of material to bring into their own games if they like.
The Nightbringer		The Deceiver

A good example of this is the C'tan. Back in the second edition Rick included a mention of the 'quiescent perils of the C'tan' nothing more than that, except that 'they lay beyond the gates of Varl.'

There was something which I always liked about that little phrase so I gleefully dropped other little mentions of the C'tan here and there with the vague notion of doing more about them one day, most notably the C'tan phase sword of the Callidus assassin and its mythic power to defeat any kind of armour or force field protection. To be honest I do this a lot and its one of the real pleasures of the ever-expanding Warhammer 40,000 universe when one of these seeds bears fruit.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. In writing Deus Ex Mechanicus (published in Inferno! #20) I had put in a villain of unsurpassed power to really bring home the capabilities of the ancient Necrons, and to show a little of their potential contempt for the races which had inherited the galaxy. In the course of writing, this entity grew to be more than just another Necron, rather it was the master and they were its slaves. When we were making proposals for a new Warhammer 40,000 race (Tau and Kroot winning out in the end), I had included one for the C'tan, masters of the Necrons.

Inevitably, the two ideas merged and the C'tan popped into full existence as the Necrons' 'gods', the powerful beings that had transformed the ancient Necrontyr into the Necrons. This gave the Necrons what they needed, a motivating force and a sense of personality - the kind lent by a potent Necromancer or Vampire Count to a fantasy undead army. The last few blocks were falling into place and the Necrons were becoming more and more of a fully rounded race.

To cement the C'tan and Necrons into the Warhammer 40,000 background we worked up a suitably cosmic struggle for supremacy at the dawn of time. The C'tan and their Necron slaves had battled against the Old Ones for the fate of the galaxy millions of years ago, a war in heaven that shattered star systems and wiped out entire species. The C'tan were victorious but forces unleashed in the conflict threatened to rob them of their prize. To avoid the ensuing cataclysm, the Necrons and their gods withdrew into their stasis tombs to wait in the shadows until their time came to rise again.

Andy Chambers / Pete Haines / Phil Kelly Graham McNeill & Andy Hoare