Necromunda - Council of Crows complete!

Praise be unto the changer of the ways, the Council of Crows are ready for the upcoming Sump City Showdown campaign!

First off, gotta have the family photo! I ended up picking up a second box of the Corvus Cabal to make a few more gangers - While the predominantly pistol-and-axe guys looked great, a gang just needs a few members toting las- and autoguns! Also a couple special characters were added...

Leading the flock is Lord Macrorynchos, armed with his trusty flamer. I'm sure that at no time will he accidentally catch his wings on fire and plummet to his death...

Next in the hierarchy of the cult are two champions and a witch. Cadfan the Hidden Claw infiltrates onto the battlefield, carrying his trusty heavy stubber with him. Engelram is a pyromaniac like his lord, bearing a hand flamer and toting the cult icon. The cult's witch is known as The Korbinian and even among the deranged cultists he's seen as a bit of an odd duck. Well, raven.

The bulk of the cult is comprised of Helot Cultists, with Fichra, Velasco, Beltran, Korbl, and Merla acting as the firing line armed with a selection of rifles.

Hraban, Ravenna, Bertok, Hrokr, and Hrafn are all armed with various close combat weapons and refer to themselves the cult's Claws.

Magnon the Large provides some much-needed muscle to the cult, and also has possibly the worst pun name of any of my gangs to date. With all of the others being some raven or blackbird derivative name, I needed a real groaner. You see he's a Crow, Magnon.

...I'll see myself out.

Necromunda - The Council of Crows, Tzeentch Chaos Cult built!

I'm still going through the literal hundreds of pictures from the last couple Down and Out in Dust Falls sessions, hope to get them uploaded this weekend. That said, I've also been beavering away on a new gang for the upcoming Sump City Showdown campaign - A chaos cult, the Council of Crows!

As soon as I saw the Corvus Cabal for Warcry, I knew that I had to have 'em and turn them into a Necromunda gang - There was no choice, really! I'd pulled out a mess of Escher bits which seemed to be ideal as they also have a bit of a feathers and birds motif going on. Turns out they worked well together!

 

Started off by turning the winged guy into a Demagogue with a flamer. In game I'm going to be angling for a grapnel launcher and a drop rig to allow him to 'fly', and added in a couple champions with a double handed axe/hand flamer and a heavy stubber, respectively.

 

A trio of cultists with laspistols and axes, keeps them cheap and cheerful - Close combat is a little rough in Necromunda, so it's worthwhile to have a bunch of guys kitted out that way so hopefully at least one or two of 'em will make it into contact.

 

A couple guys with autopistols and one with a shotgun round out the initial nine members of the crew (as befitting a Tzeentch-themed cult). Overall these are mostly just simple weapon swaps as far as conversions go, though now that I understand how the Corvus Cabal models go together, I'm planning on doing some further conversions to create some guys with lasguns, autoguns and the like. Should be fun!

Really looking forward to getting some paint on these guys!

Necromunda - From the depths of the Underhive...

Between a mix of Real Life(tm), login issues with my webhosting company and general ineptitude I've once again let the blog lay fallow for far too long. That's not to say there hasn't been a ton of hobby progress, but I've not had much luck uploading pics to my web galleries of late. Luckily, that's now been resolved and a flood of new images are ready to be posted! Brace yourself for bandwidth!

 

First up, as a follow on from the last post (back in June? Really? Yeesh.) are the completed pics of the Goliath truck and some reinforcements for the muscle-bound galoots.

Really digging the FW weapon upgrade kits, most of the Newcromunda models don't lend themselves well to easy kitbashing as most of the arms have bespoke connection points meaning unless you're a fair hand with a sculpting tool you are gonna have a rough time. The FW kits go a long way to providing all the alternate options not available on the plastic sprues!

 

Along with the Goliath truck, I figured the insectile walkers would be ideal for the Van Saar gang and as such they got the same hazard yellow scheme as the associated gangers. Hard to go wrong with Caterpillar/JCB yellow on working vehicles!

 

These walkers were designed to carry the loot piles made a while back, and I'm really happy with how the green/blue/red of the cargo adds to the overall look of the vehilces!

 

If one is good, two is better, right? The intent is to do two or three vehicles for each gang to allow for some vehicle based scenarios in the upcoming campaign.

Speaking of, the Down and Out in Dust Falls campaign wrapped up this past weekend, and I realize I haven't uploaded the pics from the previous session either. Got a ton of game pics inbound for the next post!

Necromunda - When is a Goliath truck not a Goliath truck?

...When It only occurred to me after the fact that it would have been a better visual pun to have used a Goliath for my Goliaths! So, I went with one of the new Speed Freek models as a basis instead!

Fairly straightforward, a bit of a chop and greenstuffing on the driver to make one corpulent Goliath. It more or less works if only because most of the lower body is obscured and seated - The Goliath models are big, but not quiiiiite Ork sized, and the physiology difference meant I had to carve and sculpt a new neck. Added on a carved out chest plate and he more or less works! Will have to investigate some of the other Speed Freek kits to see if there's further opportunity for another Goliath vehicle!

Another pass of the water, pva glue and tissue paper to make a tarp to cover up the box o' squigs (that couldn't easily be otherwise removed), and a grenade launcher-toting heavy on the back to give it a little punch! After photographing it and looking over the pics, I figure I need to scrape down some of the more egregious orky iconography before priming it, but the spikes sort of fit the Goliath aesthetic. Overall I'm pretty happy with how it worked! The plan is to do a vehicle or two for each of the six house gangs (and a couple others) for use in the next Necromunda campaign...

Necromunda - The Caller and the Rise of the Kuloq

The Hive Spirits are restless! Planning out some of the narrative for the next Necromunda campaign and one of the main villains will be The Caller and his Ratskin Renegades! I actually never played or painted Ratskins in the old edition (it being the favored gang of a couple others in our group at the time), so it's been rather fun painting old models that I'd never owned nor painted before.

I'd picked up an assortment of Ratskins from ebay which ended up skewing pretty far into the Braves side of the spectrum, an issue that I'll need to remedy via a few more judicious purchases soon, but overall it's a decent start for the group. A leader, a shaman, 3 warriors (counting Eats Bad Fungus whom I forgot to detach from the guilder gang before photographing), 4 braves and good ol' Brakkar the Avenger, just for a little extra punch. I need three more warriors to field the half-and-half mix of basic Gangers and Juves/Champions/Leaders/etc. that the new system enforces (and to be honest I think is a good rule).

I figured I needed a proper villain for the campaign and The Caller will be leading a rag-tag mix of Ratskins and Scavvies! This was a model that never appeared in our 1st ed. days, so it was doubly exciting to get the change to build and paint it. As a sculpt it's a bit ropey comparatively speaking, but it certainly is evocative, and I really dig that they provide a mounted and dismounted model.

There's been some reference to Ratskins in the 2nd edition but no direct mention of them being a playable force as yet, however the rules are similar enough that I'll be working up some conversion rules for them that hopefully will prove reasonably balanced in the new system!

Necromunda - Ash Wastes Nomads

With the initial Necromunda campaign well underway, I've been giving some further thought to the next one. Where the Dust Falls campaign is set about halfway up the hive, not too far below The Wall, the upcoming one will be set all the way down at ground level, at the Sump and near one of the outer walls. As part of the setting I'm intending to include a bit of territory outside the hive representing a portion of the exterior ash wastes, and that gave me an excuse to build some Ash Waste Nomads!

I had picked up a number of tallarn-esque torsos from Reptilian Overlords ( https://www.reptilian-overlords.com/ ) and was super pleased with the quality of the bits. I knew that I wanted to mix them with the Genestealer Cult bits mostly because motorbikes, and was really pleased with how well they went together with just a little greenstuff here and there to fill some gaps and de-cult-ify the models a touch.

 

One of the things I loved about the old Necromunda tules were all of the add-ons folks had done in the various magazines, including rules for vehicles in the Ash Wastes. As I was using the Jackals to make bikes, it only made sense to carry on and put together a Ridgerunner. Bodged a harpoon from the Orlock gang set which I think helps sell the aesthetic!

 

Figured since I was doing a Ridgerunner it only made sense to include a Goliath as well. Just a basic crew swap on this one, the cannon and gunner are separate to facilitate painting, and to allow it to be used as a more generic vehicle in scenarios as well.

 

And then of course things got weird. Got a bit of a wild hair to do some further vehicles and looking over the rules got me thinking it would be fun to do examples from all the various motive types (bike, wheeled, walker, tracked, skimmer and crawler), so next up is what I'm dubbing a Formicidae Ashwalker, a six-legged flatbed hauler. Using bits from an old Robogear Spider, a Sentinel, and some other miscellaneous bits from the vehicle bitsboxes, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out!

I'm still debating what color scheme to go with for the Nomads, whether to do them up in drab greys, tans, and browns so they blend in with the dunes, or in bright hazard orange and yellow, to reflect them wanting to be high-viz for rescue in case of storms, ash-slides and whatnot. In the meantime I got stuck in painting the cargo piles - I tried my hand at making some tarps to partially cover the loot using some kleenex dipped in a mix of PVA glue and water, then sort of laid over and mooshed into place to dry. I have to say I'm quite happy with the result, and will definitely be doing more of them in the future!

All in all a fun start to a new project! As with most of the Necromunda stuff they're small self-contained groups, though this one is looking to be a little bigger than the usual 10-15 models a gang includes. In the future I'm going to build out further generic vehicles for various gangs to use in some of the scenarios bubbling away in the back of my mind...

Necromunda - House Cawdor Ambot

The Necromunda goodness continues! One of the House Cawdor players in the campaign had made a tidy pile of credits and was looking for something to spend it on. Enter the consecrated Ambot, guaranteed 99.9% holy!

  

Didn't want to just paint it up in the gang colors and call it good, so a bit of kitbashing was required! Added in a few candles, nooses, rats and whatnot as per the House Cawdor aesthetic, and swapped out the fist meltas with some of the polearm combi-weapons. For the purposes of gameplay they behave as normal meltas, though to keep things simple.

 

All in all I was pretty happy with how it turned out, it's hard to go wrong with a blue and yellow paint scheme which sets off nicely against the earlier two. It's also a decent brute to add to the force as the other Cawdor player is planning on building a Stig-Shambler - We'll have to do s beast-on-bot combat between the two gangs at some point!