Wednesday 16 August 2017

A shotgun and a bottle of beer

About 25 years ago, I bought a few gangers for a game called Confrontation, which was the forerunner to Necromunda. I never played it (it looked incredibly complex) but I did paint the models - badly. I stripped one of them down, and started again.

He reminded me slightly of the bartender Ratz in William Gibson's hard-to-follow cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, who is described as having a mechanical arm and keeps a riot gun behind the bar. I gave my guy a bionic arm made out of plasticard, sprues and bits of spear, and a shotgun from the excellent genestealer cultists set. His beer bottle came from a set of bottles made by a company called Meng, who I think do bits for historical dioramas. I stuck him on a base from the Sedition Wars game.





And then time for painting. He got a fairly standard jeans-and-apron look. Neuromancer mentions Ratz's bionic arm as being made of "grubby pink plastic" and I tried to reflect that in the paint job, which I'm not sure comes across very well here. I also added some warning stripes to his shotgun. It's a popular look on Necromunda and reminds potential enemies that shotguns can be dangerous.


I'm pleased with the painting, and I like the variety of fairly bright colours. In particular, the shading on the apron and the jeans has come out well. I can imagine him being a suitably disreputable addition to the post-apocalyptic drinking scene.

2 comments:

  1. A great source of inspiration there, Neuromancer! Cool conversion Toby, and yes, shotguns are VERY dangerous :)

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  2. Thanks - one of the reasons I like Necromunda so much is that it looks like a cross between cyberpunk and Fallout 4. That personalised, small-scale style is definitely my sort of thing.

    And warning stripes, of course. Useful, and fashionable!

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