Before I lost my mind and started assembling a Necromunda board as decadent as it is wholly inconvenient, I took my first steps into Necromunda the way most sane people do – with a Necromunda gang. I told myself that I was to be sensible for once in my life and pick a nice, easy to pilot gang to make the gaming as convenient and enjoyable for myself as possible.
Aaaaaand then I made an Outcast gang instead.
Necromunda has no shortage of awesome miniatures. While any one of the five main gangs would have made an appealing choice in a vacuum, what really appealed to me was the vast array of supporting characters and oddballs. Lady Credo, Deacon Malakev, Otruum 8-8, the Corpse Harvesting Party – the extended Necromunda range is filled with a vast array of weird and wonderful techno freaks. While I could certainly see the appeal of an Cawdor or an Escher gang, I just couldn’t resist the pull of creating my own custom space weirdos to populate the underhive. Fortunately for me, Necromunda provides a few options for those of us who insist on going off script. One of these is the Outcast gang.
The idea here is that an Outcast gang is essentially bunch of nobody rabble following a powerful and charismatic leader. This leader can be any profile in the entire game, elevated to Leader status. And when I say any profile, I mean quite literally any model – Ganger, Brute, named character, whatever. You can pick a Goliath Gang Leader stat line or you could even have Kal Jericho himself run your Outcast gang. Want something a little more bespoke? In that case, there’s also four different Outcast Gang Leader profiles you can pick from – a shooty one, a choppy one, a leadership focussed one and even a psyker profile. As if that’s not enough choice, there’s one more option available – you can pick any one of the hired gun delegations to form the core of your Outcast gang. These cost a few more credits and there’s some specific rules about who counts as what. Take the Corpse Harvesting Party, for example – the Pale Consort counts as your Leader, the Bone Scrivener as a Champion and the two Corpse Grinders as Gangers. Whatever credits you have left, you can hire from the Outcast gang roster.
The Outcast gang roster itself is, frankly, a lot less interesting. The core of your gang are Hive Scum – a generic ganger profile with none of the strengths of any of the four houses – but they are cheap at a mere 30 credits a head before wargear. Stick a Reclaimed Autogun on them and you’ve got a warm body on the battlefield for a mere 40 credits. Aside from Hive Scum, you’ve got Outcast Champions – who have access to skills, better wargear and group activations – but their only other advantage over Hive Scum is a better Weapon Skill (3+) and a second wound. And that’s.. kind of it. There’s not a ton of flavour here – but that’s also kind of the point. Outcast gangs are a blank canvas. It’s a roster of common criminals following a powerful, charismatic figure and you get to decide their origin, culture and aesthetics. That was way too exciting a modelling prospect for me to pass up.
After much deliberation, I eventually settled on a concept for my Outcast gang. My Outcast Leader was to be The Lady, a mysterious figure believed to have been the daughter of a Spire Noble who is currently leading a small army of Skavvies on a holy crusade for liberation and control of the Underhive.
The Lady was indeed the daughter of a Spire Noble, sent on a pilgrimage to the Underhive to “see how the lower class live” as part of of a coming of age ritual. Accompanied by her household bodyguard – a beefy Servitor ‘Knight’ known as Sir Galahad – she made her way across the Underhive. What no-one could have predicted however, was that The Lady was an undiagnosed psyker – a Telepath – whose powers were greatly enhanced during the Great Rift. Unaware of her telepathic link to those around her, she was unexpectedly and suddenly stricken with intense grief for the suffering of those she encountered in the Underhive – and those poor unfortunate souls in turn felt a compulsive need to follow and protect her. Thus, her Crusade would slowly gather momentum as she picked up more followers from around the sumps and shanty towns of the Underhive while her sanity – and those of her followers – were slowly eroded by the unchecked psychic link between them.
A big inspiration for both the back story and the general aesthetic of The Lady was The Maiden Astraea from Demon’s Souls. I wanted an unarmed and unarmoured miniature that would be clean and pure looking to contrast massively against the grim looking and mutated Hive Scum. Additionally, I wanted her to look more or less immaculate – but for the hem of her skirts to be absolutely caked in blood – to symbolise her keeping her hands clean while countless civilians die for her crusade.
Believe it or not, it’s actually kind of difficult to find a clean, minimal looking female miniature from Games Workshop to use as the basis for something like this. I’d originally planned to use the new Bretonnian Damsel as conversion fodder, but at the time of release1, this miniature was pretty much impossible to get a hold of. So, instead I decided turn my gaze to Warhammer 40,000 and eventually found a suitable candidate in one of the relic bearers of The Triumph of Saint Katherine. These robed and hooded Sisters were suitably mysterious, had an air of femininity to them and didn’t have too much in the way of visible armour to remove either. I ended up going for the one carrying a big Valorous Heart icon, as it seemed like it would require the least amount of effort to convert into a dress.
I removed the Valorous Heart pin from her cloak, gave her a pair of feet from a Battle Sister to attach under her robes and cut away the connecting nib on her back where her power plant originally connected. Then I cut away at her power armours gorget and carefully filed away her Inquisitorial rosette as well as any trace of the power armour.
As for her icon, I’d originally replaced her affiliation with the Valorous Heart with a big Imperial Eagle vexilla from the Adeptus Custodes kit. Even at the time, I wondered if this oversized icon of the Imperium would read as a bit comical, but with no better ideas I pushed on with the rest of the gang. However, as time went on, I found I had a niggling feeling gnawing at the back of my mind that something was missing. Most Nobles in Necromunda – even the religious elite – still have some form of weird, techno body horror going on. Lady Credo has her robotic arm and servo skulls, while Lady Heara has a pair of servo skulls holding up her massive skirts. So, I decided to make a little techno companion for The Lady of my own – but being a religious figure, I made mine a Cherub. This one I converted from a spare Sororitas Incensor Cherub, replacing the skull head with a rather deranged looking head from the Empire Flagellants kit. Finally, I reposed the hands to have it hefting a power sword around for her. I figured attaching it to the top of the Imperial eagle icon would give the model a little too much height, so instead I built a sort of cybernetic umbilical cord using cabling from a Sorority’s Heavy Flamer to attach the cherub to her waist – giving The Lady a bit of a twisted maternal vibe on top of everything else.
This was the form that the miniature took all the way through the painting process, until about a week before I took her out for her first game when I decided I really didn’t like the silhouette of the model. After a bit of experimentation, I decided to rip out the banner entirely, repose her hand as if she had it outstretched for the cherub to perch on it and replaced the sword with a piece of parchment that was originally attached to the vexilla. I much prefer this model having no outwardly visible weaponry – relying instead on the death and sacrifice of her psychically deranged followers.
From a painting standpoint, I opted to paint her in bright, cold whites for the robes and with fair blonde hair in order to contrast her against the darker, warmer reds, creams and blacks of the rest of the warband2 – including her umbilical cherub, whom I painted in the same sort of way that I paint the cherubs in my Adepta Sororitas army. The final step was to cake the hem of her dress in blood, which I did by repeatedly toothbrushing Fuegan Orange Wash, followed by Blood for the Blood God and finally a 4:1 mix of Blood for the Blood God and Black onto the bottom of the model. I can’t say it didn’t feel a little bit wrong desecrating the nice white paint job I’d just spent an hour layering and blending, but what can I say? I wear my influences on my sleeve.
For the lady’s hulking servitor bodyguard Sir Galahad, I wanted something big and bulky with a massive weapon to contrast against the unarmored, unarmed noble’s daughter. Fortunately, Necromunda has just the thing for this – with suitable rules to boot. Enter, the Orgyn Servitor.
This kit – particularly the model with the Gorget and power fists – was absolutely perfect for my Bodyguard Knight model. Not only does he come out of the box already covered with plate armour everywhere but his upper arms and chest, but the size is perfect (large, but still only a 40mm base). The Ogryn Bodyguard profile also happens to be a great fit for this model – tough, armoured and even has built-in rules for loyalty. Of course, he’d need a few modifications to properly look the part.
The conversion work needed to turn this bug ugly Ogryn into the Lady’s faithful bodyguard was actually surprisingly quick and easy. First of all, I built the Ogryn with the power fists with all but his head attached. From there, I took out some green stuff and just sort of covered over as much of the exposed musculature as I could to turn it into a solid suit of armour. In some places, I had to shave down the musculature to get a nice smooth finish without protrusion. While I’m certainly no stranger to using green stuff for filling gaps and other patchwork jobs, I didn’t have the patience nor confidence to fully sculpt a chest piece, so I did my best to smooth it over and stuck a skull rosette from the Imperial Knight kit in the centre to cover up and distract from the green stuff. A quick rummage in my bits box also turned up a spare Death Guard Contemptor Dreadnought head which – along with a little bit of green stuff – was a perfect match in size and aesthetic for this conversion. At this point, I had an Ogryn in a full suit of Feudal looking powered armour – not necessarily something that reads as a cyborg knight. To finish the look, I added a Custodes storm shield and a sword from the Adepta Sororitas Paragon Warsuits for his heater shield and bastard sword combo.
The paint job for this model was pretty simple, really. Brown leather trousers and dark, grimy metal for the armour shaded with plenty Agrax Earthshade and Fuegan Orange and a couple areas picked out in brass to break it up. The only part of the model I really spent any time on were his little shoulder insignias, where I did my best to freehand some black and white checks on one and something roughly approximating Solaire of Astora‘s sun heraldry. There’s no good reason why I chose this as Sir Galahad’s personal coat of arms – it was just an easy little FromSoftware reference that I could approximate in that tiny little area on the shoulder pad.
Beyond the Spire Nobles of the Gang, we’re now getting into the meat of the project – the Hive Scum. I really wanted these guys to come off as pitiful little wretches – scuttling sewer dwellers, unhealthy even by Underhive standards and armed with whatever they can get their grubby little mitts on. The kind of characters that you might even feel sorry for, if they weren’t so hideous and cantankerous. For these guys, I took some inspiration from a model in my Inquisitorial warband – Cornyx the Pathfinder. This guy was pretty much a Skaven Clanrat with the tail removed, the arms replaced and given the head of an Empire Flagellant and was intended as a sort of Skavvie Mutant from an Underhive that was brought into my Inquisitor’s retinue as a tracker. I really like how uncomfortable a Flagellant’s head looks on the short, hunchback body of a Clanrat – so I figured I’d expand upon this model and make a whole damn warband of them.
The original models auto pistol was actually a kitbash of a Bolt Pistol with a meltagun barrel and a Chaos Space Marine’s belt-fed boltgun magazine. There was no way I was going to manually build 3 part weapons on every one of these guys, so I decided to look elsewhere. After a little humming and hawing, I settled on a mixture of small arms (pun intended) from the Hive Scum kit and the House Cawdor gang kit. Both of these kits come with the perfect sort of weedy, malnourished arms that suited the kitbash well. The Cawdor kit provides some extra rough and ready improvised weapons while the Hive Scum kit provided exclusively useful weapons such as shotguns available from the Hive Scum weapons list (funny that).
At this point I had never played a game of modern Necromunda and I had no concept of what is or isn’t a waste of points – which is frankly, the most ideal time to start assembling miniatures. Autoguns and lasguns are obviously safe bets, but fortunately there’s only so many of those in the kit so I was forced to get creative with pistol and close combat weapon pairings, as well as other more exciting additions like long rifles, big two handed axes and hammers and the occasional combi-flamer.
In the end, I built somewhere in the region of 20 Hive Scum with all manner of different weapon load outs. After actually playing the game, I discovered very quickly that I had built way too many of these – even after winning a territory that gave me a couple extra Hive Scum for free every game. I think, realistically, 15 Hive Scum is more than enough – 10 in your gang (the absolute max you’ll use in a game), 2-3 potential reinforcements and a couple of weapon upgrades. But hey, you live, you learn – and I’d rather have too many than too little.
Painting wise, these were actually quite a lot of fun. I opted for a red and black Blanchitsu scheme this time with warm, orange stained cream robes and rusty metals. I tried to do something a little different with the flesh, this time starting from a base of Heavy Warmgrey (a very desaturated pinky purple), washing with thinned down Warlord Purple and highlighting up to Elfic Flesh. This gave the skin an angrier, inflamed look instead of the pallid greenish hues that I normally go for. Once everything was finished, I gave them a thinned down wash of Streaking Grime and wiped most of it off – just to add a little bit of dark, grubby texture over everything. Even with so many to paint, these were genuinely pretty quick and painless and quite enjoyable to smash out.
And finally, we have the Gang Champions. Never having actually built a standard Necromunda Gang kit, I really wasn’t sure how much the Champions ought to stand out from the standard Gangers – and I may have gone a little bit overboard here. Compared to a standard Ganger, the Champions also had their Clanrat legs replaced with legs from the Empire Flagellants kit while their heads were replaced with helmet from the Empire Gryphon Knights kit – the open visors instead replaced with long, plague doctor mask visors made from green stuff. I’m actually really happy with the overall look of this and – particularly after painting – I almost wish that I’d put Empire Flagellant legs on all of the models. The extra bit of height makes them look more “human” and the robed legs gives them a little more of a religious vibe while still maintaining the hunchback posture.
Weapon wise, I wasn’t sure what to do here so I went for a mixture of all sorts of things. A bolt pistol/chainsword, a plasma gun, a grenade launcher and flail combo as well as a classic Heavy Stubber and a two handed Chainglaive. Once again, this was mostly weapons from the Cawdor Gang and Cawdor Gang Upgrades kits, but I did use a Grenade Launcher from Atalan Jackals3 and a plasma gun from the long extinct ForgeWorld Traitor Guard upgrade kit.
To paint, these were pretty much the exact same as the Gangers, only with a little more cloth and a little more metal – although the plumed feathers on the helmets were a bit of a nuisance to try and highlight, I suppose!
And that about wraps up my first Necromunda Gang, The House of Pity. This was a really fun little project to convert and paint and I’m really happy with how it turned out in the end, from concept to execution. I’ve got one more project for Necromunda in the pipeline before I move onto something completely different, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
Until then, thanks for reading and happy wargaming!
1 Actually, at the time of writing this blog post several months down the line, it’s still impossible to get a hold of.
2 We’ll get to them shortly.
3 Thank God for third party bitz sites.