We Print Miniatures - Wasteland Bounty Hunters & Competition...

The gang's all here - Wasteland Bounty Hunters pose for a rare group photo on the outskirts of the sprawl

3D printing is probably rightly hailed as the next big thing in the hobby (and it probably already is, for all I know!), and we've all by now seen the images of the kind of things that can be downloaded in the form of STL files and run off on a printer that uses UV-sensitive resin. It's a brave new world, with so much wonder and promise in it.

But what if you don't own a 3D printer for whatever reason? Is there a viable alternative for getting your hands on this kind of thing? Of course there are more than a few companies springing up that offer to print minis for you or sell the ranges that they print on demand.

Hobby Quickie - Ford Capri & Armed Bastards...

It's not an Audi Quatro, it's something a little better...

No time for a long blog entry this weekend, so I just took a moment to grab one of the cars and a couple of the minis that I've been painting over the dead period between Xmas and New Year to throw together a photo opportunity.

Most people seem to fall for the allure of the Audi Quatro from this period, but as I came to cars from the perspective of American muscle, rather than 80's police dramas in the UK, I'm  more into this kind of thing - plus, my old man drove one of these back in the day.

Far Corfe: Marines Penitent

A squad of Marines Penitent shows no qualms when it comes to using extreme force to suppress civil unrest and gang violence in Far Corfe...

Everyone in the hobby that's flirted with GW has gone through their Space Marine phase, and some people never come out of it. But I thought I'd well and truly gotten over mine a couple of years back when I started to be more interested in smaller and more grimy areas of the Grimdark. But the exception seems to be old-school Marines, as there's just something so wonky and charming about them when compared t something like a modern Primaris. So when the chance to get my hands on an entirely new sculpt came along, I was champing at the bit to put my name down. 

Ramshackle Games - The Pilgrimage of Rust (aka The Tetanus Tribe)

 

The Pilgrimage of Rust picks its way through a landscape of decaying metal...

We live in an age for the hobby where we're spoiled for choice when it comes to minis, there are a myriad companies, large and small, that are producing a stunningly diverse range of models that are more detailed than anything that I've seen in the past. But that's not to say that there aren't people out there making stuff that harks back to the more old-school feel of minis that I remember from back in the day.

eBay Rescue: £3 'Zerker/Chem Brute

A security patrol walks into the middle of a private discussion, and things suddenly take a turn for the worse...

I'm sure we all have things that we're constantly searching eBay for, and at the moment it seems to be the larger minis that are capturing my own interest. I also keep looking at the miniatures for the game Guildball, which I have no interest in playing for its own sake, but does have an interesting range of models available.

Far Corfe: "The Junkfood Dogs" - or a Bevvy of Beautiful Bikers

Copplestone's original Bikers

Whenever you're getting into collecting and painting minis with a near future, post apocalyptic or survival horror theme, there are some classics of those genres that you can't avoid wanting to get your hands on sooner or later. Alongside punks, mutants and the crazed followers of Elder Gods, the biker gang is one of those staples that always look good shooting it out with cops, zombies and crazies of every possible description.

Far Corfe: Underhive Nomads

The Nomads stalk through the alleyways and backstreets of the Underhive...

 

I've been picking up the random minis from GW's past on eBay that nobody else seems to want for a while now, and one of these was a ganger from House Cawdor that had been hacked about to an almost ridiculous degree by its previous owner.

I think the thing had lost both it's hands and perhaps even its legs too, but I was determined to make something out of it, and so I raided the bits box for replacement parts and ended up liking the results so much that I was soon back on eBay looking for more minis from the same range.

The Ungrateful Dead

An unsuspecting group of urban explorers are stalked by the Ungrateful Dead...

I'm a terrible one for buying stuff off of eBay or a magazine for the sake of a sprue that's stuck to the front cover, all because I think that the bits "might come in useful" one day. And having been doing this for around thirty years now, my collection is getting to be quite large and diverse, as you can well imagine.

Needless to say, when the Age of Sigmar: Mortal Realms piecework appeared on the shelves of newsagents everywhere, I was more than eager to get my hands on a copy. The 40K one had been an insane steal for the price of the first issue, with miniatures, paints and a brush for a fraction of the cost of the same stuff from a GW store.

Far Corfe: The Great Yuzzem Giveaway

The arrival of the Yuzzem in town attracts much interest from the natives...

I've been planning a series of skirmish games in anticipation of being able to do something fun once the dangers of the Covid Pandemic have lessened to the point where it's possible to get together with friends that I haven't seen for many months now.

The system that I settled is Fistful of Lead, by Wiley Games, a very reasonably-priced and adaptable set of rules that should allow me to make use of the miniatures and terrain that I've been stacking up for the past couple of years and have a good laugh at the same time.

Far Corfe: Confrontation Elite Gang

The Elite Gang fan out to protect their employer's assets...

I don't know about anyone else, but ever since I saw the page of them that survived into the Citadel blue catalogue in the early 90s, the miniatures from the Confrontation range (the predecessor of what we now know as Necromunda) always manage to make my palms sweat.

Far Corfe: Widdershins's Corpse Junkies - Gangers in the Mist

Havers, Eyeball and Dobbin try to look tough whilst ignoring the aggravating songs about summer floating around in the background...

It's been a while since I posted, and while I have a lot of stuff on the boil on the hobby side of things, the fact that I've had the flu (which now seems to have turned into full-blown Sinusitis) for the past two weeks has put a drag on what I've been able to get done. But as I'm practically bursting to get something out there, I decided to cobble a post together from whatever scrag-ends that I could scrape out of my camera's memory card.

And if you're after rejects, off-cuts and the scum that just couldn't make it in the bigger-time crews that strut around the ruins of Far Corfe, then you couldn't do better than looking up Widdershins's Corpse Junkies.

Far Corfe: Guy Ubiquitous a.k.a "The Fat Biker"

Guy Ubiquitous - for the record, has never been approached to host a cookery program of any kind...

While I love the gangs of Necromunda and the flavour of 40K in general, one of the things its always been lacking in is the ability to fill in the gaps between the massed armies of the 41st Millenium and the cut-throat clans of the Underhive.

The original Rogue Trader featured smaller and more ragtag forces, often little more than glorified entourages and barely organised rabbles, where the background and characters were as important as what they were actually fighting over.

Far Corfe: Rubber Ronny the Sewage Solutions Specialist

Rubber Ronny: Here to read your meter...

I was lucky enough to get into Games Workshops oeuvre right at the start of the 90's, a point where things like Hero Quest and Space Crusade were propelling its mainstream popularity to new heights and the resulting creative energy meant everything they came out with seemed to be gold.

But at the same time they were still selling off a lot of their older stuff, the things like Talisman, that were more traditional RPG-related fare, and so tended to get pushed to the periphery in their stores, so you could still pick up things like the Talisman Timescape minis for a reasonable price.

Necromunda 3.0: It's a Proxy Party! Part 4: Warmachine

I honestly thought that I'd come to the end of my little series on suggestions for proxies to be used in the new edition of Necromunda, but then I started to see one miniature after another in Privateer Press's Warmachine range that made me instantly want to track them down and paint them.

Khador Battle Mechaniks - can they put their massive tools in your box?

I'd bought some in the past and only recently got round to painting them, but the sight of the Khador Battle Mechaniks above made me instantly add them to the list and start thinking of the hangers-on that have just been introduced in the rules, such as Ammo Jacks.

Far Corfe: Abhuman Hired Gun - Part 1

"Hire this abhuman slab of muscle for your gang, entourage or block party; ask about our competitive rates - no bull!"

I think we've all looked at the really great stuff that's coming out for Necromunda 3.0 and then at all of the third party minis and scenery that's out there to augment it and longed to be able to make our gaming and hobby budgets stretch further.

Personally, I really popped for the Gor Half Horn mini, until I saw that he was around £18 from Forge World and realised that I could get something like ten metal miniatures for the same price from some independent online retailers.

Far Corfe: Underhive Scum Heavy - Part 1

"Here's a little flavour of how we do things down in the Sump Margins..."

I'd been waiting for my order of heads to arrive from Puppets War, the almost completed body of my Underhive Scum heavy sitting on the shelf for what felt like months (in reality more like a fortnight), when I found out that I'd won a competition that the company had been running and bagged myself ten exclusive Valhallan Shock Troopers, so I'll be painting and posting on them as soon as I have a chance to do so.

Rooting through my old Necromunda and Rogue Trader era stuff, I found that I had all of the original Underhive Scum, as well as a good number of adventurers and space pirates that lent themselves to a being a gang in their own right, so I decided that they'd become the "Soggy Bottom Boys", a nasty bunch of low-lives that had crawled up from the Sump Margin under the leadership of Boss Sass, and were working for their own gain, rather than just hiring themselves out to other gangs.

Obviously there was never a heavy made for the Scum, so one just had to be made.

Necromunda 3.0: "Billy" Orlock Juve by The Ewing Workshop

Billy and his ever-twitching trigger fingers...

A little while back I posted a feature on the rather nice Orlock Heavy created by James Ewing of The Ewing Workshop after seeing it and being very impressed, and so this morning, when he shared some shots of his latest work in the same vein, I felt compelled to do the same.

Billy here is a typically hot-headed Juve, overly eager to get out there in the Underhive and make a name for himself among the more experienced gangers that he longs to emulate. James was kind enough to provide the following blurb for his character background:

"Billy has always dreamed of being in a gang. 

His older brother Dredger has been in the Ash Rats for ages and has finally convinced Baby Jane (the gang leader and Dredger's lover) to give Billy a chance.

Far Corfe: Heapster Heavy - Part 1

"It's unreliable, bulky and prone to overload, but I had to choose the mining laser, just for the retro-chic..."

When I returned to painting as a serious use of my dwindling spare time in November of 2017 there was no clear plan as to just what I wanted to achieve, save for working on something vaguely inspired by the release of the third edition of Necromunda.

I pulled out a lot of Rogue Trader era miniatures that I'd hoarded and never gotten round to painting and some original Necromunda sclupts, and these started to get painted with a thought to putting together a gang of Underhive Scum.

Maelstrom's Edge: Broken Infantry Pack

The exact place that I first saw these and the person that recommended them escapes me, but as I'm modelling and painting the expanding range of gangs that I've dreamed up for the Inqisimunda games that I have planned for the God Emperor-forsaken port of Far Corfe, Maelstrom's Edge and their Broken range of plastic components came to my attention.

The Broken - a rousing rabble of rabble rousers

Costing around a tenner and in perfect scale to be mixed in with GW products, the basic order of four sprues comes with enough parts to make six complete miniatures with plenty of left-overs that can be stirred into a kitbash in order to produce something a little bit more exotic and unusual than the common recipe of Neophyte Hybrids + Chaos Cultists + Skitarii = Any Non-Goliath/Escher Necromunda Gang.

Necromunda 3.0: It's a Proxy Party! - Part 3: Get into the Juve...

It seems like one of the things that a lot of gamers have been left asking for in the release of the new edition of Necromunda is models that are suitable for representing Juves, the callow up-and-commers that tag along with the average Underhive gang in the hope of surviving the fight and gaining enough experience along the way to eventually blossom into full-grown gangers.

I expect that this is something GW will get onto in their own good time, but there are still people out there looking for an answer in the short term, so I've been scouting around for a solution - and I have to say, there really isn't one that's going to satisfy everyone!

The obvious answer would seem to be the Juve miniatures from the original release of the game, but the evident scale creep that can be seen in the new sculpts, scarcity and price, as well as the need to customise the weapons on a range of models that were all metal, could be a real issue when taking that option.

Unlike full gangers, the non-GW manufacturers out there are not replete with sci-fi or dystopian near-future miniatures of the youth, but there are some that could be used at a push.

Stefania by Hasslefree Miniatures