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.

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.

Magna: The Underhive in South Yorkshire?

I was wandering around the Magna Science and Adventure Centre during the school holidays, just one of the many things that we'd scheduled to keep our feral children entertained until the blissful arrival of the new academic year, when I was inspired to take out the digital camera and snap off some shots after thinking how much the interior of the massive place reminded me of what I reckon sections of the Necromundan Underhive might well look like.

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.

Necromunda 2.0: Wikipedia to the Rescue

After posting yesterday about the Fanatic range of miniatures that was released around 1999 and greatly expanded the range of gangs and hired guns available to players of second edition Necromunda, I did a little digging and found a very helpful Wikipedia page that details all of the sculpts in their unpainted (lack of) glory.

Click here to check it out.

I have to say that it pretty much confirmed my thoughts about this period in Necromunda's history, with none of the miniatures impressing me and the newer gangs just seeming to be fairly banal variations on existing themes.

I mean, if you have Redemptionists, are Choas Cultists really that big of a deal?

Scavies existing must make the addition of Plague Zombies and Ash Waste Nomads just a variation on a theme, right?

Maybe it's just me!

There were also some new characters, such as Cal Jericho, that I'd heard of and then forgotten over the intervening years, as well as a couple of new Bounty Hunters that I'm going to talk about below, as I think that they pretty much sum up the way in which the distinctive character had been bled out of the range by this point.

Fanatic Bounty Hunter #1 - Everybody loves head...

Necromunda 2.0: The Incarnation that passed me by...

I confess to having been cautious about the new version of Necromunda that's currently being chewed over by the gaming community (mostly it seems with positive reactions), probably because I've never been a Goliath fanboy and on account of some of the changes that they've made ("Boards?!? What madness is this???").

But then I saw the previews of the new Orlock models, and all was forgiven.

This new interest in gang-based skirmish games was also one of the reasons that I was inspired to return to painting miniatures after almost ten years away from the hobby, and after looking out my own odds and sods Rogue Trader/40K stuff, I inevitably took to Ebay to find more interesting things to paint as well.

I recognised most stuff, but then I came across a couple of miniatures being sold as Orlocks that I didn't - not unusual, as many sellers list proxies as Necromunda models. But these clearly had Necromunda stamped on their tabs, so they looked to be the genuine article.

I knew that the rules had been reworked and published long after the original boxed game.

Specialist Games Edition of the Necromunda rules