Small-Scale Necromunda - the Misadventure Begins!

It was a quiet Friday evening, and the usual crowd were drinking at Nitehawks, enjoying the ambience while stepping over the larger bodies on the dancefloor. Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion from beyond the city walls. A ship had crashed in the badlands!

Five heroes (in the broadest sense of the word) leaped into action. Quickly commandeering a nearby hovercoaster, they set out into the wasteland to rescue the flyers and salvage whatever they could find before the local chaos cultists stripped both ship and crew to the bone.

L-R: Captain Fancy, Maria Poppinata, Doombot X-7, Dave and Doctor Apocalypse

I'd got halfway through Blackstone Fortress, and was getting slightly tired of it, so I thought I'd try something slightly different. I've always liked stories where a crew of rogues have an adventure in space, like Serenity or Solo (or, to continue the alliteration, Space Captain Smith). While Hardwired is slick, the missions can get a bit samey, so I'm going to use the old Necromunda rules (not the new version), with a few tweaks.

The changes:

- Sides are chosen as usual. The heroes have 500pts to spend on gang members (heroes) and weaponry as usual. Heroes can be chosen from any of the six gangs, and gain skills according to their relevant tables.

- The other side (the villains) are bought with 500 pts. It is best to keep them numerous and basic - 10 juves with autopistols, say. The bestiary from Outlanders can be used.

- Bottle rolls occur after over 60% of a side has been taken out of action.

- At the end of each game, roll for injuries as usual. Reroll anything related to territory or being captured. The heroes get 50 credits to spend as per usual, although everything is available at the listed prices. The villains get 50 pts more in the next game, to represent reinforcements, and rising stakes in the adventure.

- At the end of each game, each hero who didn't go out of action can roll once on the advancement table. Obviously, this will cause them to change characteristics very quickly, but that's half the fun of it. I still fondly remember Ned Killy, the ganger who lost an eye, gained a wound and inexplicably became a marksman after one particular game.

And that's about it! I may tweak these changes as we go, but it should be entertaining.

Two Samurai and a Chaos Champion

Just a quick post, really. In the huge box of unpainted models was a set of Warlord Games' Samurai Heroes. I've painted the first two: a "standard" looking chap charging into battle, and a big fat bloke who seems to have forgotten his shirt.

Also, I found an old chaos champion. He was missing a weapon and an arm, so I added a plastic axe and shield, and filled the gaps with green stuff. Here is a truly awful WIP shot.

He's massive, even compared to other chaos models, and has that chunky crudeness that feels very "middlehammer" to me. That said, I like the model. I used less red on him than the other chaos models, in case he ended up as a generic mercenary warrior instead of a sworn minion of the chaos gods.

Overall, I like him, especially because he's one of the very few models where I've managed to get the eyes right.

Space Whale!

Time for yet another model that I've had lying around on my desk for months. By and large, I'm not a huge fan of the models in Warlord Games' Gates of Antares. They tend to feel a bit dull and generic. However, there are a few scupts that I really like, and one of them is the Isorian Tograh Transporter Drone.

I picked this thing up in a sale at the new year. It's normally the steep price of £35, which seems an awful lot for a four-piece resin model with no customisation. It's not all that huge, either: for a transport drone, it would have a lot of trouble transporting anything larger than Christmas cards. But it is a cool shape, and has an interesting bio-mechanical feel, with bone-like armour and things that might be wings, flippers or intake vents. I like the way it looks Gigeresque without being a big snarling monster.

I thought that it resembled a whale, so I painted it in dark blue on the top and light blue underneath, with a thin wash of purple ink to suggest living flesh. I added some bits of phosphorescence to break up the blue colour. I doubt it's meant to have eyes, but I painted some on, and I think they look quite cool. To be honest, I think this is the sort of model that would really benefit from an airbrush instead of a bit of torn sponge.

Cola Machines and 3D-Printed Laundry

Today we've got two (well technically three, but maths never was my strong point) pieces of terrain.

First up are two "Phoenix Fizz" vending machines, made by TT Combat. They are resin models with optional rear plates and doors, and can be assembled to have the doors open or closed. The styling is very 1950s, and they closely resemble the "Nuka Cola" machines from the Fallout computer games.

(A small digression here. One of the best books I own for terrain-making is "The Art of Fallout 4", which has concept sketches of loads of interesting machines, people and scenery in that game. It's like a "things to see and do" for wargaming terrain. If you can find a copy, I really recommend it.)

I painted the machines in Nuka Cola colours, together with brown bottles of normal cola and a sinister glowing blue bottle for "Quantum". The figure in the picture shows how to operate the machines. Remember to always wear eye protection. The Phoenix Drinks Corporation accepts no liability for splash damage.

The second bit of terrain is my first run-in with 3D printed stuff. It's a medieval laundry station, made by a company called Infinite Dimensions. The sculpting and design is great, but the 3D printing is a bit crude, and it's hard to disguise the fact that it's made out of thin layers put on top of one another, rather like the contours on an Ordnance Survey map. Seen from a distance, it's fine, but up close it's a little basic. I didn't want to stress the layers, so I didn't use any washes in painting it, as they would have seeped into the line marks.

Anyway, it'll do fine, and will be useful when the characters have to battle their way to a clean jumper, as so often happens in wargaming.

Sentinel

At an event last year, I picked up an Imperial Guard sentinel. It was the old plastic-and-metal armoured variety, without poseable legs, and it was going for £5 because it didn't have any feet.

I cast some new feet out of green stuff, using some old metal titan feet. The end result was quite good, but getting the old legs to fit onto the new feet, and making sure that the join was solid, was really difficult. I ended up making some shields for the feet (and one knee) out of ogre kingdoms fist armour, which gave it much more solidity. I think they work alright, as they might be some sort of crude additional protection added by the crew, to guard against attacks on the lower joints in urban combat and kroot-hound pee when the sentinel is standing still.

Beyond that, the roof was made of plasticard bits and pieces, and the bolts on the roof (which you probably can't see) are dots of superglue. That's about it, I think. Oh - the manhole-type thing on the base came from a kit of basing bits. That really is it!

Three Dwarf Adventurers

Now, on to some models that I really do like. Here are some random dwarves. I got the first two off ebay, and had the third lying around since I was 15 or so. I'm very keen on all of them. It seems to be the rules that elves always have to be beautiful and stylish, but dwarves are often quite caricatured, which makes for some entertaining miniatures.

Our first model (I'm making these names up, by the way) is Ambroth the Younger, son, confusingly, of Ambroth the Middling (Ambroth the elder became so old that he is now indistinguishable from a rock). He is a scholar by trade, but has joined the expedition to lend his limited magical skills to the group.

This is Girda, daughter of Mirda, a brave warrior and expert opera singer. Protected by heavy armour and extensive braids, she counts as a Templar under the Frostgrave rules.

Olaf is committed to maintaining high standards in a work environment by... holding a standard high up. He's a very old GW model. I'm quite fond of the colour fade on his shield.

I don't know who made Girda or Ambroth. It seems a shame I have no idea who sculpted these really good, characterful models. But still, here they are.

Muscles for the Blood God

Some while back, I converted some chaos-loving maniacs from the Khorne Bloodweasels (or whatever they are called) in the Storm of Sigmar AoS boxed set. Really, I just gave them some Pig Iron gasmask heads and swapped a couple of weapons over.

I dug out some old Necromunda models, including the plastic ones that came with the old boxed game back in the early 90s. I thought they would make reasonable Chaos cultists, so I had a go at painting five plastics and four metals.

These are some of the least favourite miniatures that I own. They come from a period in GW's history that I don't really warm to, between the quirkiness of Oldhammer and the technical skill of modern miniatures, when models tended to be rather hefty, lumpy things with chunky weapons and bulky cloaks. That said, there were some very decent models for Necromunda - just not these ones. House Goliath, with its big muscles and chains, looks rather like what would have happened if the Village People had swapped the traffic cop for a circus strongman. And of course, the plastics those days were just a bit rubbish.

"Young man, are you worshipping Khorne?"

Anyhow, I painted these guys, but not in much detail. Trying to find colours was tricky - the only group of people who look like this I can think of are lifers in American prison dramas, so I went with orange for the clothing. I used contrast paint for the guns and trousers. The skin was painted in the "tainted flesh" technique I've used on other chaos models, which uses a red undercoat. Some of them got washes in purple and strong tone for variety.

The unit was finished off with a champion that I made out of a mangled model of The Mighty Zug from Blood Bowl. It came missing both arms, so I added some chaos bits.

"There are many ways - to - please - the - blood god!"

And that's where I gave up. The plastics will never be good models, and the metals will never be my cup of tea. But they will work as utterly disposable cultist scum (probably of Khorne), and don't look too awful as a mob on the tabletop.

Next time, I'll be painting some models that I really, really like.