Flayed Ones

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Flayed Ones are Necrons who go about wearing the bloody flesh of their victims. They are getting their fashion tips from Chaos victims of the Flayer virus, a program error where they develop a desire to reclaim their flesh and blood existence by devouring the flesh of the living. It's the end result of the C'Tan known as Llandu'gor the Flayer, who was not sharded like the others, but completely destroyed. Still, he had enough warning to curse the Necrons who killed him to suffer the Flayer virus as a last "fuck you;" they spread the virus to others, who spread it still further, and so on for quite some time until the other Necrons caught on.

Flayed Ones are basically the Lepers of Necron society, feared and ostracized for their disease. Although instead of sending them to a Leper colony, the Necrons simply try to kill them to prevent the spread of infection before it fully emerges (that's disease control in Warhammer 40,000 for you); the ones that don't die end up in a weird subspace dimension where they hang out with other Flayed Ones until they sense bloody battle, at which time they warp out, kill everything with a pulse, and warp back there again once they're done. The "clean" Necrons don't mind this so much as long as the Flayed Ones fuck off as soon as the battle is up.

This new lore comes from the Fifth Edition Necron Codex. In Third Edition, Flayed Ones were just close-combat specialists who liked to play dress-up with the skins of their slain foes. The reason for this, just before the release of the 5th edition codex, was the Flayed Ones were Necrons who retained their emotions and went insane. The causes were either being AWAKE, IMMOBILE AND ALONE during the 60 million year long great sleep or that they wanted to reclaim their old bodies and that was their warped way of doing it. Unfortunately, their models and their lore were not updated well -- they went from "pray we kill you before we flay you" to "dance party."

On the tabletop

They mostly suck. They're Elites (one of the most competitive slots in the Necron army), they have one of the few 4+ armor saves in an army of MEQs, they can only do close combat but only have Initiative 2, they can't take transports, and they can't score. What they can achieve is based on their cheap price (same price as Necron Warriors), large squad size and their ability to Deep Strike and Infiltrate; basically, you field them (along with Warriors and Scarab Swarms if you want to play Necrons horde-style. But if you want to play horde-style, why are you playing Necrons?

See Also

• Never Forget You, a sad story about a Flayed One.