The 40k Lorecast - Episode 101 - The Silent King Returns

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

On today's cast we return to the Necrons with a focus on Szarek the Silent King. We open with a recap of the Necron history but this time with a focus on the Silent King and his role in it. We then move toward his adventures in the void of space and what he found out there. From there we take a turn into the true nature of the Necrons, through the infinite wisdom and character of Trazyn. We then close with the actions of the Silent King upon his return to a galaxy that is completely on fire.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast with me, John Barsati and Bradchester. This guy. On today's cast, we'll be jumping back into the necrons with a focus on the silent king himself, his return to the galaxy to really just honestly set up a deep dive for our jump into Pariah Nexus in the coming weeks. Spoiler alert. When's our podcast to actually go live each week?

Every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern. Good job, Brad. And it focuses on the lore of the 40K universe. I'm so smart. A lot of you have commented and. followed it. Please keep doing that. It is awesome. It really helps push us out. We've grown to the number one Warhammer podcast, actually, globally. So go team. If you like the cast, I want to hear more from Brad and I, click on the link in the show notes to our YouTube page of the 40K

lore cast. There you'll find old versions of the show converted over to imagery, our live Q&A sessions and our other shows. History of 40K, which is also available on Spotify. And coming soon, Brad and Brian hosting two old men and their handler discussing more of a competitive side of the Warhammer 40K universe. In our show notes, there's also a link to our Patreon. Massive thank you to everyone who's already contributed there. That's how we're able to do a lot more. We've got better equipment. We've got more offerings. It's thanks to our Patreon. Our Patreon, we only have one tier. It's $4.99 a U.S. dollars a month or $16,252.84 Indonesian rupees, for those of you in Jakarta and Bandung, I can see that we have listeners there.

So thank you. You all thought I was going to with Bali, you went out with Indonesia. Nah, Jakarta has better food, and it's more interesting culturally than the place people who like yoga go to go on vacation. I love the fact that you can never stop yourself from alienating someone.

Yeah, the problem is we've got hundreds of thousands of listeners, and I just want to start removing them one at a time by being like, John picked on me. Lastly, we also have a link in our show notes to our Discord. Please join our Discord if you're looking for a place to interact more around Warhammer, 40K. Great spot for fan theories, the lore itself, literature recommendations, movies, everything. It's an incredible place. And it's also where you're going to see most announcements from Brad and I,

if we're going to be going somewhere, if we've made change to our Etsy store, if we've made any changes that kind of would benefit any of you, or sometimes we even go there for advice on future episodes and future casts. So we'd love to have as many of you there as possible. But with that, onto the cast. Let's start off with a recap of the Necron Great Sleep. We've covered the necron's in detail, but that was over a year and a half ago now. So I want to do kind of a short rerun through their history, just for those who don't want to have to go back and listen to when we were still trying to figure ourselves out. Be honest, not some of our best work earlier. We found ourselves?

Well, for the most part, I'd just say that stutter didn't help. I'm kidding. I'll edit that out. But the challenge was, I think it's a little bit cleaner now. So the Necron's were originally called the Necron Tier. They were one of the first sentient races in the galaxy that achieved high levels of technology. There probably were others, but they got killed by said Nacronter. Because Nacrienture didn't master the wheel.

They had faster than light travel, phase shifting, for instant teleportation across the galaxy, weapons that could destroy stars, and a lot more. Wait for it. Nanotechnology. They did have actual nanotechnology. Yeah, this was written in the late 90s, early zeros. Yeah. The Nacron tier, though, and this is really important for the rest of this cast,

were an extremely aggressive race. They viewed every other species as not deserving to live in the galaxy with them. They were not a benevolent race that was conquering and uplifting people. They were destroying everything in their path. Hell the grudge, and I'm going to use my term that you hate, Pallano Moss types of anger and vengeance.

Still not to spell it. Sent that to you. I know. For all my Stephen Erickson readers. Yeah, just quick insight. As I'm making the YouTube videos, guys, I have to put in subtitles. and Brad says Talana Moss, and I didn't know how that was spelled.

And there was no Google search that helped me with. That's why I had to text him at like 7 a.m. on a Saturday. What the hell is this? How do I spell it? Anyway, so the Necron tier were doing kind of well. They were conquering the galaxy, doing their thing. And then they met the old ones. And the old ones are definitely the most infamous species in all of 40K.

They are- And fantasy, to be honest with you. Oh, I forgot they're in fantasy. Yeah, I forgot about that. It's in a weird way. Them in fantasy is a little bit loopier because they are the sloan in fantasy. Kind of, yeah. Or at least the slon of the descendants, yes.

There we are. They were an incredibly advanced species that also had the ability to reach into the warp. Oh, pump the brakes on that, big boy, because we need to pause, talk about the fact that the warp, slightly different place at this point in time. The warp was a serene, endless ocean of power that they used to craft and make whatever they wanted. and they were using it pretty much at their will to do everything, recreate reality. They were actually doing that. But this is not the warp of modern time 40K, not even remotely. Yeah.

So the old ones were the inverse of the Necron tier. They were actually not a very populous race. And they were instead spreading around the galaxy, uplifting small races. We don't really know, although I can call that out. They created the orcs. Come on. The old ones are recorded as being this uplifting race,

going around the galaxy and helping fledgling species come up. The only problem I have with that is only one person who wrote that down, it was the Eldar, and they are one of said species. So the old ones might have been, just saying,

the old ones might have been horrible jackasses. True story. I mean, they also didn't exactly treat the Eldar great, because they went, hey, we want you to be these poets, these beautiful peoples, these artisan. And then they went,

oh, yeah, we're going to have to put that in the back burner. you need to fight right now tomorrow. And so yeah, to that note, let's talk about the Necron Tier. So the Necron Tier, while incredibly advanced, they all hailed from a system with a highly radioactive sun that left them with this busted genetic code that shorten their lifespans. And somehow, despite all the technology, like phase shifting,

they couldn't figure how CRISPR works. They could destroy his son. But it's just true. You know, my kid had a bone marrow transplant, which I'm not going to get into here, but that is something I've been through. And they were able to handle his genetic issue. and the Necronterre could destroy a sun and couldn't figure this one out.

So anyway. I'm saying next thing you're going to say is that in the far future, people are going to actually be able to deal with things like, I don't know, night fight. So there's no way they could have that technology. It is odd. They skip some kind of key parts of technology. But anyway, the Necrontier meet the old ones.

And they discovered this incredibly advanced race that was on par with themselves. And so they asked the old ones to cure them of their genetic curse. and the old ones looked at the Necronterre and then kind of looked behind them and just saw this giant swath of destroyed worlds and enslaved people and just went, nah. To me fair.

Yes, they said no and yes, the Necrantier were doing some terrible things, but also you clearly have a button over there that you could fix all of our problems with our people dying. And you said, no, you gotta know I'm gonna attack you tomorrow morning, right? Yeah, which is what happened.

If you guys haven't seen the Michael Jordan documentary, and I took that personally, that's literally what the Necron Tier did at this moment. The Necrontier decided, fine, we're taking that technology from you, and they attack. Fun story on that. The Necron Tier had no access to the warp. They're not warp sensitive. They didn't even know the warp existed, but they found out the warp existed pretty quickly when they tried to attack the old ones. They found out two things existed.

The warp and the webway. Yeah. Because the old ones kept showing up everywhere instantly to kill the shit out of them. And the old ones put on their boots and mighty ass kicking and sent them packing all the way back to their original system. Yeah. And where the old ones may have made a colossal mistake here is that they decided not to kill the Necron tier. They thought that by bashing them into the corner of a galaxy, they would teach them a lesson they learned from their ways, which for the record never works. It never works ever.

Let me recreate what happened of the Necron tier. Oh, I'm so much madder than I was before and I'm going to figure out any way possible to kill them. And also, you basically told the Necron tier that might is right and they already believe that. And so now they're even more. Miter is writer.

And now here we go. I need that as a shirt now. Miter is writer. No, because it'll, unfortunately, that one will get used by the wrong group and I'll have to take it down. I'm just saying. Why does someone have to wreck everything?

They always do. It's one group and they always ruin everything. Anyway, on to that note, the C-Tan. We don't know how old the C-Tan are. They may have been one of the first races in the galaxy. It's impossible to know because, again, the only history we have from the C-Tan is from the Deceiver. So we're all going to kind of write that stuff off to, I don't know, maybe.

You're not going to say we got an accurate history from the guy named the Deceiver? Yeah. That's crazy, John. So the C-Tan were the species of, of energy kind of gods. They had no form. Yeah, but we say Stargots, make sure they had no form. Their form was energy.

And we're not even sure how sentient they really were. Because at this time, where they force of good, force of evil, force of neutral, it's unknown. They would just attach themselves to a sun and feed on it. That's all that we know. The crazy thing is the Necrotterre tried to communicate with them. And it took them a long time. This wasn't like, hey, I figured it out in the movie in the afternoon. This is a thousands of year project.

Of them, just to get them to acknowledge they exist, basically. It is funny because they've been trying this for a couple thousand years. And we don't know how many C-Tan they were originally, but we know originally the Necrontier found one of them. And his name was Mephetron, which translates to the deceiver. Not a good opener, guys. I mean, this is kind of that. They made this about in movies where someone discovers a God.

And it turns out it's the devil is the one they discovered first. And it's not going to end great. Long story short, again here, if you want to know more about this, guys, you can go back to our earlier casts. But long story short, the Necron, the deceiver convinces the Necron tier that they can defeat the old ones using a process called biotransference. And in biotransference, the Necron tier would transfer their bodies temporarily was the key piece of this into these metal husks, metal robots, which would make them immortal. And from there, they could then go conquer the old ones. And it was living metal that would regenerate.

They're like, this is how you're going to win the war. However, what it actually was was a pest dispenser for their souls. Yeah. By the way, this lore has changed a little bit because when I say it's temporary. The lore does move around this a little bit. Sometimes it was supposed to be temporary. Sometimes it would be permanent, but it was supposed to be so bad. No matter how you want to slice this apple, this was bad.

We'll talk about this because the silent king kind of knew about this. But the regular people thought they were getting a flashy cool necrone body. And I was going to just be my regular. and instead you had command protocols and half your soul and or more got ripped out. Yeah, as they did this transfer, the C-TAN, not just the deceiver, but other C-Tans came down. And they actually floated over top of these factories and then consumed anywhere from like 10 to 100% of the soul of the being that was being transferred in. And that actually became a better source of food for them than they'd ever had before when it was eating off the start. So these necrons now awaken.

They're trapped in a robotic body. They're fully aware of what has transpired and that they've been tricked. But body are still pretty useful this time. So they decided to go on a vengeance circuit first after the old ones. And this becomes known as the war in heaven. And if the necrons and the C-Tan just begin assaulting the old ones, the old ones in order to defend themselves, grab the Eldar, who they'd been molding to be this great,

species of artisans that were going to spread love and compassion. Artisans and poets. Yeah. There was this giant hippie commune that was going to save the galaxy and create kindness so the warp would never get disrupted because the galaxy would only be full of happy things and told them, hey, go grab a gun. We got stuff to do. And at the same time, created or uplifted the crook.

We don't really know how the quirk happened, but the predecessor of the orcs, but they were a lot bigger and a lot meaner. and also the Jo Caro, who just are just this annoyingly forgotten part of 40K lore that most of us will never let go, because their lore is too awesome for us to let go. Come on, Black Library. Magic weapon monkeys. Yeah, we need a Joquero Black Library book. It would be epic, and I would enjoy it massively.

This war rages for hundreds, thousands, millions of years. We don't know. Absolutely no idea. Yeah. It could have been a weekend. It could have been millions of years. It wasn't a weekend, but it was definitely. I'm just saying we don't know exactly there.

Because sometimes they bring it up in writing and they treat it as a long time. And some people write it as millions and other people write it as thousands of years. Yeah, I go off that the Necron Deep Sleep is written to be 60 million years old. And most of the stuff are the old ones entering the galaxy is 65 million. So there's about a 5 million year piece there, but we don't know when what happens during it. This is about how I look at it. But the long story of the battle is that the old ones bail out in the galaxy, but before the Necron's and the C-Tan could fully achieve their victory,

the Silent King decides to take his opportunity. Now, why this matters. Necron society was structured like that of ancient Egypt. Not the real version, but the fantasy version, like all things within 40K, you know, we talk about it being designed like feudalism in England, King Arthur feudalism, not, you know, historical. writing for you to listen because that stuff's depressing. And the whole society was run by what was called the silent king. And he's called the silent king because he never speaks. He led a triumvirate

with him and two other people. And the other parts of the triumvirate would speak on his behalf. They were like the voice of the emperor is now. Exactly. But they were meant to be an equal part ruling. It's just the silent king was the figurehead who never spoke. Which is, it's cool. I think from a lore standpoint, I kind of like this. The silent king was chosen. by a noble families of the Necron Teer. The idea is that both the king and the members of the Triarch would hail from different families within the Necronter, with each family getting its own place

to have a key representative in government. In this way, there was a semblance that the Necronterer were a public, but there's a dark truth to this, which is the Necron Teer suck. Yeah, they all. They're insanely petty, insanely jealous. I don't know which is worse,

the jealousy or the pettiness, because they've spied themselves pretty frequently. No one's more willing to cut off their robotic nose despite their face than the necrons were. But the issue they ran into is that in reality, the necronteer were only looking to advance themselves in their own agendas. They didn't get all the other species in the galaxy, but they also didn't care about other necronteers. Subterfuge murder were normal, and the truth is, only the most ruthless members of the necronteer could achieve a high rank. And for this reason, the Silent King tend to come from the exact same dynasty over and over and over again. But I do want to add to that that the Silent King is not a Nepo child.

He knew his stuff. He also said he had to be a badass. He had to be ruthless. He had to be wildly informed also to stave off other plots against him. And he had to bow down all of the dynasties and get to. them in line. So over time, the dynasty that the song came from is Cesaric, S-Z-A-R-E-K-H, which has either a silent K, a silent H, or both. I'm not sure. The English language is really rough with some of these things, and I'm not sure if it's a silent K or the silent H is the one that I hate more in the language.

But I do hate both of them, and I know we have Swedish listeners who are probably going to agree with me on this one, because I'm sure it drives them insane. But the C-Saric, dynasty became the largest and most powerful because, again, every silent king came from them. So they're the biggest ones. This is the dynasty that actually interacted with the deceiver. The silent king is the one who authorized the biotransference to the deceiver. And also the most popular thing. It didn't understand that. It was. That's the thing. We can dive at this in a second.

Because the only group we know of, and I'm not going to ruin the book here, but there's only one pharaoh. and his name was Neferov, who rebelled against the C-Tan to stop the biotransference. Read the infant and the divine. Yeah, read the infant and the divine if you want to know more about this story. It's a fantastic story. I'm not going beyond it, beyond that, because there's too many spoiler pitfalls there. But for the most part, people agreed to it because they were being promised immortality. Now, the extra piece on this, though, is that the silent king and the pharons did know that they would have more control over their popularity.

this after biotransference. What no one knew... Command protocols. Yeah, sorry, the command protocols. And what no one knew outside the Silent King was that actually would all fall into the Silent King. The Silent King realized that in their hunger to destroy the old ones and seize the galaxy, the C-Tan would over-extend themselves.

And they did. The Necruans are all about the numbers. They are figuring out, they're doing the Dr. Strain. getting 65 million possible things. How will we possibly win this? And he ran every possible way that he could, well, screw them over. He wanted to take back. You're like, hey, we're going to get this.

We have a chance to kill these guys and take their power and, which they did, enslave the Catan. They're star gods. The Citan are star gods. They're immensely powerful. There was no way for the next. to get their vengeance unless the Catan were somewhat weakened. And what the Silent King realized he could do was wait.

The Catan were overconfident and began really pursuing the old ones, then into the Eldar, to consume more and more souls. Because remember, they've just finished eating all of the Necron tier. There's nothing left for them. They need new souls to consume. And the Silent King watched as they spread themselves and chased further and further until all of a sudden the necrons counter it. attacked. And they realized pretty quickly on, by the way, that killing a star god was not easy,

but they put their entire force into this. And what they were able to do was shatter the star gods into shards, which something GW does a lot, by the way, everyone breaks into shards. Yes. But the bigger thing on the shards is they created ways to contain them and keep them away from themselves. That's why when you're playing a game on the tabletop, you're playing a shard of the Nightbringer, a shard of the deceiver, a shard of whatever. And you can only bring one. That's actually why you can only bring one. Because if you put two C-Tan shards near each other,

they would actually merge. And that power would be so much that it could start, it would require an incredible force to undo. And they have huge, their huge vehicles are gigantic, powered by these shards also. Cool models, by the way, when they have them lightning kept inside.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. The transcendent C-Tan school is hell looking. So I'm talking about the actual. Oh, the Titan. Yeah. The issue, though, is that the victory they went for was not short or easy. While the Necrons fought the C-Tan, the Eldor, Cork, and Jochero were not sitting around idly.

So the Necrons are fighting for millennia, this multi-front war into the C-Tan and to the Eldar, into the Crook. And they are taking wild losses against the Catan, like crazy. Yeah, but they did succeed. In the end, they do defeat the C-Tan, but there's an issue. And the Silent King looks around and he runs the calculations, as Brad pointed out earlier, all the necrons, they play math to a level that no one can really play math. And they realized that the galaxy belonged to the Eldar. There was no stopping that.

The Eldar had the numbers, the technology, and the capabilities. And trying to stop them would just be tantamount to suicide. So they needed another plan. The necrons ran the math, and the elder and realized because they're a beings of flesh, they will eventually fall to anarchy and destroy themselves. And all of us, yeah, no, wait, who's dead on? All their simulations showed about 60 million years, the elder would fall.

And they were like maybe 22 years off from being dead as prediction, by the way. But the flip side is the necrons are immortal. All they had to do was go, wait. So the silent king devises this plan. And its worlds would use their fade shift technology. to teleport into the cores of the world that were hollowed out, and they would just power down, for lack of a better phrase, and hide there. And this slumber and wait for this to go away, and with an alarm clock.

And the alarm clock said 60 million years click. This became known as a great sleep. Of note, the Eldar did not like this plan, and the Elthar have spent 60 plus million years trying to find these said Necron worlds and destroy them. They'll crack them in half, by the way. The elder were not like, let's exercise the necrons out of the planet. No, we're going to make that planet not a planet anymore. Yep.

And they also took a lot of offense to the necrans. They're not big fans. The Silent King, though, did not join his people. Instead, he took a small retinue, getting that word finally, of necrons. That's John. I'm so impressed right there. I do like this. It's called a small retinue.

And then like two lines later, it's written out that, well, it's of hundreds of thousands of warriors because the silent king would not travel without a large retinue around him. He's above that. He's not a weak person. And he went on what was described as a self-imposed exile to figure his next steps. He cruises effectively into dark space. Yeah, exactly. So the silent king felt that biotransference he put his species through was like the ultimate act of betrayal, both by the C-Tan but also by himself. And this is described well, I think, in the infant and divine again. So if you want to read more about what that experience was, but the transference of their consciousness to the machine bodies of the necrons

took away all their sensations outside of mental ones. So they couldn't taste, they couldn't touch, they couldn't smell, nothing. They couldn't feel wind blowing, temperature changes, food. So the only thing they had left were their minds, which is also why for the overwhelming majority of species, their minds were all but wiped by the C-Tan. They were just mindless automatons, really. So the necrons could only experience, like, the presence of life, but couldn't interact with it.

And what made it a lot worse for a lot of the, this goes away, this next bit varies by who you're talking to, but one of them can also remember. And the song king's one of them. He can remember being a mortal being. And he also remembers the feelings of being a mortal being. So then he always have the longing for that. Yeah, there was a nice one in Infant, the Divine. They're talking about the feeling of the sun on their back, the wind blowing, those types of things. now it's the digital readout.

And the Silent King hated this, and he wanted to reverse this process for his people. On the upside, though, they were all immortal and they have an infinite lifespan, so you can kind of figure out how to do it. We'll be right back after a quick break. Because he blamed himself, the Silent King before he left

destroyed something called the Command Protocol. The Command Protocol allowed him to order all the Necrons to do whatever he wanted. He effectively could thrall all of the Necron's race into his control. But after the events that transpired, he felt like he didn't deserve that power and decided to free the necrons from captivity

and then took his ship out into the dark space. He vowed never to return to the Milky Way. 60 million years later, he's back. And he also wildly is bummed that he took away his command protocols. Yeah, that turned up to be a horrible decision. Awesome for the galaxy, terrible for him. And let's be fair, he had a pretty good reason to return.

out in the dark realms of the void of space, he found something. And something is the tyranids who could have... It's all 100% the tyranids. Yeah, we know it's too. He calls out the tyrantids, but I'm saying it could be the old ones devolved into the tyranids, but that's not exactly...

It's again, fan theory. We're not sure. Yeah. So the Silent King found the tyrantids out the dark reaches of space and knew they were heading towards a Milky Way to consume it. And there is a popular fan theory. on the tyranids, that the tyrants are either devolved remnants of the old ones. So the enslaver plague, which is when the enslavers came out of the war and being eating the old ones,

damaged them so badly that they end up devolving in some corner of the galaxy into this, or the tyrantids were some last-ditch effort by the old ones to save the life of the galaxy from the C-Tan and the Necrons, creating basically the ultimate bio-weapon, but then again, inslaver plague got a hold of them, and the experiment ran amok. They are the ultimate bio weapon. We'll cover that late. Yeah.

But the sunking knew he had to stop the tyrians. The main reason why is because in order to reverse the process of biotransference, he had to have suitable hosts to transfer into. Probably humanity. Definitely not tau. Probably humanity. Also, there wouldn't be enough tau. It's also pretty big on his things to do list when you go,

hey, if I free my people and the tyranids conquer the galaxy, there's nothing left. So that's going to be a bummer. Yeah, the tyrants are going to consume all of the biomass within the Milky Way, which is going to make that biotransference thing kind of hard. Right. Yeah. So the interesting thing, the necrons, though, and this is my opinion, but I'm still right about this. The necrons actually could have just stayed asleep and woken up and conquered the galaxy

because the tyrantids don't affect them. The tyranids, they can't consume the necrons. If they consume a world, it doesn't really matter. The necrons need minerals. They don't need biology. Elmast. Yeah. The tyrantids consume the galaxy.

They'll run out of biomass to eat, which will weaken them, at which point, like the C-Tan, the necrons could just wait and attack and kill the tyrants off. But they would inherit a galaxy that's just all devoid of life and it's just blank rocks. And so the Silent King returns to the Milky Way. Hugh up the Danny Glover Pizza Bee, where he comes in from community,

it just sees everything on fire and everybody laying on the ground. The galaxy, well, in 40K, it's only war. It is not great. Yeah, the math masters of Necron's got a lot right, but they missed a few pretty critical details. The song can comes back to a galaxy age in pure turmoil.

His diviners were dead on predicting the fall of the Elthar, but they didn't predict how that fall would happen. and what it would do. Which is fair. They don't touch the warp. It's hard for the Necron Mathmasters to figure out the birth of Slanesh when they don't know

any of this stuff exists. They also didn't plan for the other races. And humanity is probably the biggest miss in the Necron divining, candidly. Well, to be fair, the emperor was their biggest miss. Yeah. That throws a big wrench.

There was a high variable that they did not throw in. humanity was humanity. Humanity with the emperor was significantly different. Exactly. And humanity was destroying a lot of the plans that the necrons would have had. First off, they're colonizing worlds that necrons are on, which isn't that big of a deal because when the tomb awakens, they could just annihilate them. But humanity also had a bad tendency to screw up their colonization efforts, as we've discovered before, where they just mine a little bit too deep or destroy the planet with a bad power cell. So they're also blowing up planets.

And for the necrons, that's a big deal because humanity breed like guppies. The necrons are a limited supply. So every tomb world that gets destroyed, there's no replacing it. Every necrone tier who is transferred to a necron, they don't have any more of them. So it's a permanent loss. The bigger issue, though, is for the necrons is not the humanities destroying necron worlds. It's that humanity's making the warp into what it is more modern day, just massively disrupted.

The Silent King and the Necrons can't touch the warps. Now all of a sudden, he comes back to a galaxy that has more warp going through than he could ever have even mildly consumed. Off the charts for him on this. Because it's affecting the real world. His was, it's a source of power that they use against me.

He comes back to, wow, the warp is actually ruining places in the galaxy. And also he's going back to, by the way, the Eldar weren't thrilled to see the Necron start waking back up. So he comes back into a galaxy to an Eldar who are like, look, we've taken a big L and we're in big trouble, but we will happily take you with us. Like full stop. So the things aren't going well for us, but I'd like to also make them bad for you.

Yeah, the Eldar going extinct, so are the Necrons. That was their viewpoint. The Orcs has got to be fun where good news, they're a lot smaller than they used to be and a lot less powerful. Bad news. There's quadrillions quintal, I don't know, I can't do these numbers, more of them. And they're pretty onery. I'm going to go with this, John. There's several. Yes. There's also the Tao, not talking to talk crap guys. Yeah, I am, but the Tao just aren't large enough to really matter. They do. The Tao, in 40K, the way I look at the Tao is the Tao ruin people's plans. That's what the Tao do really, really well. They're not big enough to

conquer anything, but they're big enough to screw up something that was really important you were trying to do in one area because the Tao get involved. Much like the Votan probably will be in the coming codexes. The Votan will be someone who will get in the way of a lot of these plans because they're just both the town that Votan just don't have the numbers that the Necrons or the humanity or the Eldar do. And just for you, John, I had to look it up and make sure I was correct. How and the Necrons have met each other twice. Yeah. And I assume both times to try to have diplomacy. No, both times they were fighting against Tyrannians. And one time they left and the other time they smoke-showed them and then left.

Fair enough. Let's talk about the tomb worlds themselves. This is one of the biggest problems that Silent King has. The Necron Great Sleep was something that was done completely as a theory. They planned and prepared to place their entire species in deep sleep that the necrons only could assume it would work. The Necron Tier had used stasis pods to conquer out of the galaxy, That's when their bodies were mortal. These are new robotic forms.

We're basically turning off the power and then seeing, what if we plug the computer back in 60 million years? Also, we have to leave the jammers on or whatever you want to call it there, because they have to hide. Yep. The other are looking for them. They can't just go, hey, we turned it off. They're like, they're right there.

Yeah, exactly. We're miles below the surface. We can blow a planet up. I'll do this on my way to do something else. Yeah. And so with all this, the awakening of the necrons was challenging really at best. And what I mean by that is that I would argue the necrone awakening for the necrons at least, I would classify as a colossal failure. In the way that they would have predicted it.

Okay, I'll give you that. Yeah. It is not a failure. The process of life, but the necrons plan around. this whole deep sleep was the necrons would go to sleep. And then 60 million years, all of the tumors would come online at once, phase back up to the surface and go conquer the galaxy. And instead, the vast majority of them, like probably 99% have not all fully awake.

Maybe not 90% 80 plus percent. I would say there's a lot of months. But the thing is that not only they not wake up at the exact same time, but because of no command protocols, we talked about the bickering and infighting. Yeah. They weren't ready to go. It wasn't a unified, let's go team Necron. It was, let's go team, whoever's standing next to me.

Let's get the most power we can get. What happens is it becomes haphazard. Some wake up fully. Some don't wake up. Also, a lot of them are damaged. Some of them begin to wake up and they just fail to fully come online. So millions of years, sitting dormant, really isn't ideal. But the worst parts were the flare virus and destroyer occurs.

And the destroyer curse. Both of these were completely unpredited. These appear to be machine code corruptions, which just will happen if you wait long enough, where worlds would come online. And in the case of the flayer virus, the beings only wanted to kill. They wanted to hunt down and kill mortal beings. That's it. You could not sway them.

You could not stop them. And they would do that until they just died. And there's the destroyer curse, which is basically the same thing, but was more of a mind corruption. So focused into destroyers, too. became called destroyers. And they do it. Because the destroyer curse could happen to a lord. And then when it happened, you became a, that one's supposed, both these are supposedly

lebo or curses from the C-Tan. But what this leaves is a Necron society that's awakening and is disjointed, which leads us the biggest problem, which Brad was handing on to earlier. The culture of the necrons themselves is a problem. And the reason's a problem is that the necrons are no different from the Necron tier in that the Necron tier kind of dicks. It's... Kind of?

Yeah. Well, I mean, a society that's built entirely on superiority and elitism, I guess you could describe as kind of not cool. Benzo Berenson thinks these guys should get their shit together. So the most important thing we can talk with in Necron's is, yeah, from a superiority standpoint, they believe they are superior to every species in the galaxy, but they also feel they're superior to every other necron that they meet. The necrons are loyal not to their species, but to their dynasty first and foremost,

and then probably their actual tomb world. And those two can invert a little bit here and there. We could talk with the kind of esoterically, by the way, but I said, I'm just going to talk directly about some bits from the infant of the design where Trayzan is a fantastic example of what's wrong with necrone culture. It means somebody doing wildly his own thing. Yeah. And I'm doing this mostly because everyone keeps talking.

me when you talk about Trazen, and I can't talk about Trayson as much as ruining that whole book, so we're going to do it this way. So, Trazen, real quick, folks who haven't read the book, and you all should, is an overlord from the Nialik dynasty. Trazen, unfortunately, woke up well ahead of his plan time. We don't know when he woke up, but from his collection, it's during the gold nature of technology or earlier. Trazen's been around for a while.

Trazen awoke to a galaxy that was just full of shiny new things. unfortunately for Trazan, and fortunately for the galaxy, he awoke with a very small tomb world, so he couldn't just go and conquer the galaxy solo. In his mortal life, though, Trazen was a scribe and an archivist of the Necronterre. Basically, he likes trinkets. I think they were to be Indiana Jones, but he's not. Yeah. I think that all of the Necron's do have leftover viruses from the Ketan.

Yeah. It's possible. Because Trazen's OCD about the fact. that he wants all of these things that he now considers interesting, fascinating. And it's not because he's trying to understand he just wants these trinkets. They have to be his. The key thing I want to point out about treason is treason made no effort at all to awaken any other tumourals. None.

Didn't care. Did not care about the master plan. Didn't care about anything. Just cared about treason. And he did something that. is very British. He decided to British museum the entire galaxy by just stealing anything and everything. He has built this collection of pocket dimensions in which he stores things he finds interesting. His museums. Yeah, it's a very long list, guys, but the ones I like is he has a crook.

He has multiple gene stealer cults, or at least he had, an enslaver, a custod, the Vastroian firstborn regiments, plural. Plural. Yeah, the troop of harlequins. Troop of Harlequins. Yeah, not a Harlequin. Troop of Harlequins. Ursacchar Creed is currently in there. A clone of Folgram and a whole lot more.

I'm not going to dive too far into him because, again, it's a very good book. And it's the same reason we're not going to do much on Eisenhorn. It's because I just want you all to read them. I think it'll make your lives better. But I want to talk a bit more about a key part of his collection, which really shows the selfishness of the Necrons, is his Necron collection. Trazan has a significant collection of necron artifacts, which on the surface makes sense. The archaeologist woke up. He's going to go through and make sure he preserves as much necron society as possible.

Trayson went to other tomb worlds and Rob stuff didn't awaken them, often took the means to awaken them and stole that. Yeah. He also destroyed a few of them. Well, actually, we don't know that. So, Trazan acquired artifacts, not by chance, in which case a Necron tomb world may have had a meteor crack the planet open, and he was able to go in and grab stuff. Yeah, but he also effectively has the awake button for two or three different tomb worlds. Yeah, it's an important artifact. Yeah, Trazen actually might be the most chaotic neutral character in all of 40K.

Oh, he gives zero Fs. Yeah, because he's so selfish, destroys everything in his path, but it's not evil. He's just got a plan, and the plan is collect. That's it. M-41, though, the Necron Tomb Worlds do begin to awaken. So despite Trayson running around all over the place, around M-41, he has to slow his roll-down a little bit because all other tomb worlds come online. And as a Tomb-World's awakened, they immediately set their sights on expansion.

they would be quickly conquer any interlopers so anything on the planet or in system those are gone right away the great thing for humanity eldar definitely the imperium is the necrons started doing what necrons do which is in fighting instantly before we even knew that the necrons existed they were already fighting each other because the negrons are showing up blacking out entire systems because they can do that for communication. So before we even knew they were there, and again, I'm saying I'm part of the imperial apparently, we start, they had already been in huge system-wide fights

with other dynasties. And they tried to compete with each other. Because remember, when the necrons went into the deep sleep, it was done so by the silent king. And so their tomb worlds and also they did was very strategic. The idea was they spread the tomb worlds around the galaxy where there was good mineral or technology or sort of resources to be had

so that they would then awaken, they could then utilize all those resources as a collective to raise up the species and conquer the galaxy. But instead, they woke up without any said leader, and the dynasties just started looking around going,

I'm awake first, and that dynasty over there has a bunch of stuff that would really help my dynasty out. I'm going to kill them. And that's exactly what they did. They went over and just started pillaging other necrone tomorrhals.

We don't know how many necrons have been destroyed by the necrons, but it's not a small amount. Yes, it's not a small. They've talked about this a lot in the necrone codices, especially, and they've also talked about it in a couple of the actual novels, which is the necron empires don't think anything of the Imperium. So they're way more worried about fighting each other

because they think in the end, they're just going to wipe out these non-progressed. And they're mostly true. If you look at the conflicts between the Imperium and the Necrons, the Imperium has to bring a 20 or 30 to 1 ratio in order to handle the necrons. The necrons know, oh, these things are gnats. When we need to, we'll just go destroy them. But it's not a we need to.

It's an I need to. When I need to, I'll go destroy them. So the Silent King returns to the galaxy and he finds his people, are actually under threat, not just from the outside, which he expected, but also from the inside. And this is kind of a problem because the Silent King's not a hugely popular figure amongst the necrons who, now that the command protocol's gone. Now they're sitting there going, oh, now this isn't exactly by the way Canon guys, it's just the Silent King implies us by his next actions. My viewpoint is I don't think he could run back and say, good news, guys, the guy who ruined our entire species and curse us

a crappy existence is back and he's here to lead us, probably wasn't going to go over very well. No. But the problem is that the Silent King does have something really important to tell them. But he really can't. Oh, there's these things that

are coming into the galaxy that are going to destroy all of us. Oh, too late. Everything's already on fire. Yeah, the entire place is on fire. Also, who broke the sky? There's not hole in the middle of the galaxy. We're at the rift at this point in time as they get When he starts to incorporate, when the silent king actually makes real effort. Oh, yeah.

He comes back before the rift. The rift is nine. He comes back before the rip, but he starts actually mobilizing and getting people together once we get the rift because they have, they make in the eighth edition or ninth edition codices. They talk about the fact that the necrowns have a plan for closing the rift. Oh, yeah. We're going to be getting to that on our next episode.

Thanks, Brad. Way to go in the foreshadow. All right. So the silent. I don't know that. I'll wait a minute. So the Silent King, in effect, is forced to now slow play his next move. He is a master of strategy.

And the first thing he does is cloak his identity. Because his original plan of running back and saying, hey, everyone, listen to me, was just not going to work. The necrons are way too fractured and not enough worlds are awakened, even standing as a territus, let alone all the forces of the galaxy. So he needs to manipulate the other species in the galaxy to turn their attention of the necrons, just to position themselves. as at a minimum of speed bump against a tyrannist that come to the galaxy.

Meanwhile, he has to go align the necrons as best he could. And that wants some really serious subterfuge because, remember, he has no control over them. If another powerful Necron overlord detects him, they would probably try to kill him because he's the greatest threat to their power. Oh, 100%. Because he over... He outranks them. Outranks them so badly.

Yeah. So the Silent King sends his... his agents around the galaxy. While he has disabled the command protocols, he has a luxury if he knows where all the tomb worlds are. And I'm actually not sure if anyone outside of him knows that because it's obviously the Eldar don't, but I'm not even sure if amongst the necrons if they know where they all are. Yeah, that was kind of the vibe I got from the reading, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong on that one. But I know he knows. He does know where they all are. So he begins activating tomb worlds that he knew would be loyal to him. Now, loyal is always.

is a question, but these dynasties were loyal to him in the past due to their history, and he may or may not be able to affect things during the reanimation protocols. And I say may or may not, he totally can. So he's also manipulating the reanimation to not necessarily enthrall them to him, because I don't think he had that much power, but at least to make them more loyal to him than they would have been otherwise. And I think he also reawakened a lot of things that were in the path of the Ternans to get them to be in the way.

Exactly. Oh, very much so. He also begins using cryptex and weaker lords to influence some of the currently awakened dynasties to see things in the way that would benefit him. Mostly, he's just trying to eliminate the really selfish dynasties and trying to uplift the ones who are more likely to align with the Necron species as opposed to their individual dynasty, or even just their tomb world in some of the cases that get pretty rough. He also, though, these are the stories that I hated, is where he tries to use thralls. of other species to interact with other species of the galaxy to kind of manipulate them. The Eldar ones weren't. He didn't even try. That would have been, I think that would have been funny if he'd been like, oh, the Eldar would have been like, because the Eldar really, all right, let's just call this out.

Okay, so it's written that he tries to influence other species of the galaxy. Let's go through his options. Option one, Eldar. No. Yep. Option two, orcs. Zero, negative, actually. Yeah, not so.

You actually, you'll get more diplomacy done with the Eldar than you know of the Orks. Number three, chaos, probably not going to go great. And then the tau, which again, why bother? It's what five systems? It's not going to be enough for you to actually care. So the only thing that something really was trying to do is Mipa humanity, because that's the only way you're going to fight a massive horde of tyrannids is with an even more massive horde of humanity.

And for 200 years, he does this scheming and acting behind the scenes until he decides to declare himself and hi guys, I'm here, to all necrons and telling them all to come join him. And this was met in a really cool necron way. When the Salon King comes back and says, hey, guys, I'm here. I'm ready to lead you again. All the Necron dynasties went, yay, we're so excited to do that. And immediately began scheming behind the scenes on how to kill him. Yeah, that's one of the better parts of this is he's just like, everyone's falling in line,

but he's smart to go, except none of them are actually. falling in line, are they? Damn it. The Silent King does pull off one important thing, though. He reinstalls himself as the head of the Triarch. He installs two shills as the other parts of the Triarch. He now has uncontested power.

I was about to say, it's a triarch. It's not. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Triarch, I think it's more like the Silent King and two wacky waving filly of infatible two band guys. They are pointless. Yeah, they are there simply to go, yeah,

what he said, that's it over and over and over. It is a hype group. Yo, silent king, whoo, woo, woo, who. But by doing this, what does help him is that because he is now technically, he is the head of the triarch, necron dynasties can't outwardly resist him. Because in order to do so, he could actually turn all the necrons on them. They do have rules as a society. And if someone stands up against a silent king,

they have to go kill the silent king themselves. But in that process, every other Necron dynasty will fight them. So it gives him a bit more space. And I'm going to say all that. And now we're going to talk about Emotech the Stormboard. Who's also not on board with all of the Silent King's plans to get back to even reversing this. Yeah. So the largest Necron dynasty in current 40K, I don't know if it was historically.

I was known current 40K is a Saltek dynasty. They're also one of the most. awakened. So at their forefront is the overlord emo tech known as a stormlord. And he's called that because he likes to use arcing energy attacks against his foes, which was awesome in eighth edition, by the way. It's really lame in 10th. But eighth and ninth, he had some cool attacks. Yeah. He's also one of the people that's one of the few lords that's on purpose right away with, I'm going to conquer the galaxy. Yeah. He does infight, don't get me wrong, but he's more focused on we are going to conquer pretty right away to him.

And I'll be honest, all the necrons are afraid of him. It's actually covered in infant and divine, Oricon the diviner, he hails from this dynasty. And when he brings up, like, do I need to go tell Emotech, people back down pretty quickly because they know Emotech gets in a mood from time to time and it's not a happy mood. Where Emotech's important, though, is that he didn't want to go back to the former form of the Necron tier. He saw this new form, this necron form, as being superior. Because he was immortal.

And with it, he could conquer the galaxy. And he's also had several upgrades since that. Yes. But one of my favorite things on Emotech, though, is he loves being a Necron and being able to fight. Because his favorite form of conquering is to duel the leader of his opponents. Whoever he's fighting, this has been humans, orcs. I don't think he's pulled it off with Eldar, but maybe he has. I just, my memory is not 100% on that one.

He's had some great duels because of the fact that he instantly heals. He regenerates at a wild rate. Which his opponent doesn't know till they hit him. And what he will then do is he then beats his opponent to almost like an inch of death and then will leave a large wound on them and not kill them. Because he wants them to live the rest of their lives knowing that Emotech is the superior warrior. It doesn't help, though, because again, it does this create people who now know how to fight the necrons. all over the galaxy and definitely want to kill him.

But that's a side note. And he's also cheating. The dude regenerates instantly. He lets me, he's actually, they make note of that. Sorry for everybody who likes him attack. He's super cool, but like in his duels in the stories, he gets beat up quite a bit, but he just instantly regenerates. So he just wears people down.

Yeah. His entire system is, I'm just immortal. What? Yeah. So once a silent king reveals himself. Emotech, like all the other overlords, fall in line. Not because he agrees with them, but because he knew he had to get as close as possible to the Silent King.

So he could kill them. Yeah, John, if you're going to stab somebody in the back, you got to be close to their back. Yeah, it does help. So Emotech outwardly was a big supporter of the Silent King, and we're going to cover our next cast that no, because Emotech actually believed that he was the great unifier of the Necrons. The Silent King had his chance, and he screwed that up.

And so Emotech was going to unite the necrons by conquering the stars with them. Now, let's jump back in. Let's jump back into the Silent King. And the last little bit we want to get to here are Necron Pilons. But in why they're so important, we've had Cadia. We've had, we'll talk about that in a second. The Silent King realizes that chaos is going to be a huge problem, huge, huge problem. Again, warp is spilling out into the galaxy.

We need to put some tape on the dam, you know. if we've got to fix this. Yeah. And the chaos corruption that was disrupting humanity was just too much to make humanity useful, basically. The chaos incursions are also pushing his tomb worlds and tying up his forces. And chaos is also consuming the mortal vessels that he needs for his biotransference. So he has to do some about chaos.

Now, the good thing of the Silent King is that he's been around for kind of a long time. And in that long time, early part of it, he had to fight against the warp. And he was there, and we don't know who developed it, but he was there when they developed a weapon to fight the old ones in the Eldar. So during the war in heaven, the Necrons developed a technology using Blackstone to contain and then shut down the warp. By placing these we're called pylons in an area, they would actually create a Faraday gauge, for lack of a better term here, of the warp. And for those of you who did not listen to the casts, that's what was on Kadia. So, Kadia had these pylons, which is why the Eye of Terror was what it was. It was actually a small ball of warp that was being held in place by the pylons on Kadia.

Well, that's the funny thing. The eye of terror is a hell was held in explosion. Yep. And the second Kadia was destroyed by Abadon, it exploded out, and this warp became the rift going to the galaxy. the silent king knows how to build these pylons and he knows how to build a network so he decides that oh by the way this also would help against the tyranids because the tyranids can't use their synaps when they're in the presence of these faraday cages my start using that term for them because it's better these warp faraday cages unfortunately also would turn off the astronomicon

and does horrible things of the eldar the eldar if you put the eldar near pylons you're basically putting them in a sensory deprivation chamber forever. It is not fun. You know, the Silent King did not care about? Any of those things, yeah. So he decides, this is what we're going to do. I'm going to shut the warp down, and I'm going to begin by building out these pylons, and I'm going to start pushing the warp back, which again, on paper sounds kind of awesome

for humanity, but has some pretty negative side effects. So as you guys can guess, we're going to bring. there. And we're going to break there because our next few casts are going to be on what the Silent King does next. It's called the Pariah Crusade. It's really a fun crusade to go into because it covers a lot of the new faces of 40K, Giliman, Call. There's probably some Tao in there. kidding. But it is, it's got a who's who's who because the Pariah Crusade overlap with the start of 9th edition. So we're talking about 2020 onward. The That's the last tournament packet we used.

Yeah, it was a tournament packet. The whole way we were playing the game was actually narratively tied to this area. So we're going to dive pretty heavy into it more like the way we covered the War of the Beast, more of a linear progression from one side all the way through. But yeah, I'm excited for this. So till next week, this has been John Varsati and Bradchester. This guy. See you guys then.