Friday 13 September 2013

Down in the Sump

Every now and then a part of me keeps going back to my teens when we used to play a skirmish game on our dining room table fighting across buildings and spending the evenings reading through the background of this dirty world. The game was Necromunda and I absolutely loved it, unfortunately a number of years ago I was trapped for cash and had to sell my mint boxed set along with all the models I had collected along the way!
Cut to now and after my recent run in's with army painting I wanted to try something on a much smaller scale and so looked to the Necromunda rulebook and fell in love with the game again. It wasn't the gameplay itself per se which was fairly straight forward GW fare with a few extra's thrown in but it was the campaign rules and the fact you could guide a fledgling gang from a lowly start all the way through to being top of Spire with the latest weapons and grizzled veterans. There was a lot of John Blanche's art as well throughout the books that really helped to give the impression of a corrupt underhive feeding upon one another.

So I picked up a couple of Gangs (Cawdor and Delaque) that I had always wanted years ago and a copy of the original ruleset (prefer a hard rulebook to a PDF) along with a few buildings and got to work.


Along the way I came across the fantastic blog: The Tears of Isstvan, which has sadly now appeared to of ended but it's a great source of inspiration, although focused on Inquisitor it still fits in perfectly with the Necromunda universe and the idea of every model/character having a full back story and identity before taking to the board. A lot of the work involved in creating the models they used involved kit bashes from a large number of sources so this inspired me to pick through the bits box and make up..:


The Scavenger, a veteran of the sump and a quiet genius with robotics and cybernetics, his violent past is reflected in his arms being replaced and the addition of some wicked appendages. He always travels across the waste with his two scuttling robotic gun droids that help flush out anyone that takes on the Scavenger while he rummages through the sump looking for a useful find. They were made up using parts from Mantic, GW, Khurasan and GZG, he still needs more working filling in the gaps etc but I can't wait to get him painted up and brought to the table!


2 comments:

  1. Love it! Tears of Isstvan have been a great source of inspiration for me as well.

    I doubt we'll ever go back to Necromunda (although we often talk about it), but if we did this kind of stuff would be how to do it. Looking forwart to seeing the Scavenger painted! :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah it's a bit of a guilty pleasure for me! The story based skirmishing certainly adds a lot more depth to a tabletop game.

      Delete