Trash Terrain: The Mining Contraption

Flanked by his hastily hired bodyguards, Merrick Mass-Driver negotiates the sale of the mining contraption to a less than convinced local Forgemaster.

I kept on seeing one post after another online where someone had chanced upon something in a charity shop or pound store, then retreated with said discovery to their hobby lair and proceeded to transform it into something that was frankly amazing; and so I decided to keep my eyes open for a chance to do the same.

Far Corfe: Spellcrow Privvy

Lenny the Looter legs it with the last toilet roll, moments before the gangers charging for the use of the convenience realise the enormity of his crime...

Spellcrow are one of those pretty new companies that have sprung up on the continent recently and are already producing a range of minis with a character all of their own, both in terms of sci-fi and fantasy, well worth a look.

Recently they ran a Facebook competition to win one of a limited number of resin privys, asking those entering to post something amusing in relation to outhouses in order to win, and as always, I rose to the occasion, calling on a lifetime's experience of toilet humor.

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.

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.