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.

Trash Terrain: Egg-Box Shipping Containers

Gangers ambush a Dalek patrol deep in the Underhive, obviously not knowing what the hell they're getting into...

As I may have mentioned before, I have literally zero money available to spend of terrain for gaming, and so my first recourse is always to dig around in the recycling bin for ideas, and recently I noticed that the large plastic boxes that hold around sixteen eggs or so are rather nicely futuristic in appearance.

Experimentally I stuck one together, primed it and then used some very basic techniques to paint up a sort of prototype, thinking of a sci-fi themed shipping container, and I was so pleased with the results that I pimped it around some FB groups, asking if people would be interested in a tutorial.

They were and so here it is.

Far Corfe: Muller's Lonely Comms Tower

Various weirdos and undesirables gather for a blurry photo in front of Muller's Tower

I don't have any experience with the making of wargaming terrain (as this blog post will no doubt demonstrate), and I also have almost zero money to allocate to the area as well, meaning that I can't just buy fancy buildings from GW or any of the other manufacturers out there.

But that wasn't going to stop me, and in the spirit of Rogue Trader, Blue Peter and the tutorial videos that I always end up watching on YouTube, I decided that the recycling bin was the best place to start my quest for terrain.

Far Corfe: Queef's Warband - Sgt Twitters, Dr Calamitous & The Goon Squad

Queef's Goon Squad - Bodyguards, enforcers and all-round shit-kickers

One thing that I love about Rogue Trader and miss in modern 40k is the amount of humour (most often daft and obscure to non-Brits) that ran through the setting, as though its creators never took anything too seriously and always tried to remember that it was actually all about the fun.

That's essentially why the setting for my skirmish games is called "Far Corfe", why I have gangs called "Heapsters" and "The Saggy Bottom Boys", and it's why the disreputable governor of the God-Emperor forsaken port is known as "Queef the Querulous".

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.

YouTube: Luke's Affordable Painting Service

I seem to have a habit of wandering away from painting and modelling every couple of years and then being spurred on to return by something that reminds me of how much I used to get out of the hobby (and how much stuff I hoarded in a cupboard back when I had no kids and money, as opposed to the opposite).

Every time I do so, it seems that I'm ready to learn something new and step it up a level, so when a friend bought the Descent board game and suggested that I paint the miniatures, I was back at it and soon happened upon the YouTube videos posted by amiable northern bloke Luke Fellows on the channel for his Luke's APS (Affordable Painting Service) business.

Aside from his commercial venture, Luke shares so many fundamentally sound tips for painting and modelling that it's impossible not to learn something useful, but it's his money-saving ideas and knowledge of the materials that go into products such as washes and paints that I really wanted to share.