Cult on Cult action in the Underhive.

We are starting a Necromunda campaign in Newport soon as we have actually managed to rope together 5-6 people who want to give the campaign system a try. Because I've played the most and actually read the rules I've been allocated to teach everyone, so for the first few weeks we are just playing one-off skirmish game to get everyone used to the rules.

I'd made some walls and bulkheads for Zone Mortalis games already, but to give us more depth I very quickly knocked out six simple EPVC terrain in homage to the old boxed set terrain last Saturday, it does the trick but isn't exactly detailed...

Last week I played a game against steve's Genestealer cult, who hadn't named them yet but as he's an Eton old boy I named them for him after some of the institutions famous alumni. I have Genestealers, Chaos cult, Escher, Goliath and Orlock painted, so I'm not sure what I'm using for the campaign- but this game I took my plague infested Skitarii gang the 3rd protocol as the Cults are fairly similar in power level (as in not much power) so it would give Steve a balanced first game. as usual my boys (and girl) let me down like only rust machinery can but you'll see more of that later.

Anyway, enjoy a battle report with some old school white dwarf style maps I knocked up in powerpoint, not just for boring presentations!


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The sewers of Necromunda are as dangerous as they are vital to the hives infrastructure. Specially trained squads of skitarii patrol the depths of this vast network driving out unwanted squatters and repairing the damage caused by the eternal gang wars. When protocol team 3 were sent into the system to investigate extreme corrosion they found an infestation of ‘Bilebeetles’, chaos tainted mutants that decayed and rusted the environment around them. After a prolonged purge only one of the creatures survived, but when protocol team 3 delivered it to the mechanicus they had changed. Judged themselves to have succumbed to nurgles rusting witchcraft, they fled back into the sewers with their captive. now on the mechanicus bounty list they have become engaged in a vicious turf war with the brotherhood of the sun father, a holy cult with their own agenda in the underhive.

Left to Right- Sepsis 6.3, Ventrot, Rotbringer (witch), Bilebeetle (Disciple), Bitterbolt,  Mouth of Rust and Bile (Demagogue) Sporeslinger, Compiler of Miseries (dsiciple- nurgle accountant who doesn't show up unless he has to, someone has to make money!), Tetanus 4.1. 

Steves gang wasn't entirely painted so no pretty pictures of them as yet. 

The board set up ready to go with a second board in the distance from another game. 

Deployment

Pict-scan of the area after deployment with both gangs in place. and Steve's arm. He literally built a wall of dice to hide a model behind. You just can't trust Eton boys. 

Both gangs spread out across most of the length of the board, with the Chaos Cultists clustering around the building in the centre and the walls to the south. Bilebeetle deploys as high as possible to gain a good field of fire.  The Genestealers take advantage of their infiltrate skill (on both Acolytes and the Adept) to grab one objective early, and place both Acolytes under the refinery, as close as possible to the enemy in order to cause carnage and delay them straight away. 

Turn 1

The Chaos cultists advance cautiously, with Rotbringer taking advantage of levitation to soar toward the centre building. Caamhrone drags the objective back to his deployment zone and Mhogg-Rise and his allies advance behind the bulkhead walls. The first bullets are exchanged in the south corner as Mouth and Bitterbolt open up into Whailes, though their combined fire inflicts only 2 flesh wounds, and Bitterbolt realises he forget to bring enough shells for his shotgun which does not bode well for next turn..  

The firefight beneath the refinery starts early thanks to the infiltrating acolytes.  

Turn 2

The firefight beneath the refinery continues, with Mouth inflicting a flesh wound on the second acolyte, Both Acolytes return fire but only manage to pin the Chaos cultists in place while Bitterbolt reloads. A few opportunistic shots are taken, including BileBeetle and Hidlysttorm exchanging heavy Stubber fire without any real effect, and Rotbringer swoops up to the top of the centre building, hiding behind the chimney stack. 

The Genestealer cultists advance to try and spot the Nurgle tainted tech-priests in the ruins. 

 Turn 3

Whailes starts the turn with a fearsome charge into Bitterbolt, the acolytes vicious rock saw carving 7 points of damage into the nurgle cultists and slaying him outright! The second acolyte gets to his feet but is pinned again by Bilebeetles stubber and Sporeslingers autogun fire as he pokes his misshapen head round the corner. Caamrhone runs into the refinery proper to back the acolytes up and the remaining Genestealer cultists advance to new firing positions. Rotbringer snatches the centre objective and brings it back behind the chimney. As Sepsis finally reaches objective number 3 he is blown off the building by a lucky shot from Wrathschild, the fall knocking Sepsis out cold and taking him out of play. 

Bitterboil is torn limb from limb by Whailes Saw as The Mouth of Rust and Bile looks on. 

Turn 4

The turn starts badly for The 3rd Protocol when they fail their bottle check, shortly followed by it getting worse when Rotbringer decides she’s had enough of the others incompetence and promptly flying off the field. Mhogg Rhise and Redmaihne take control of the northern building now the cult are flushed out, and the chaos leader is forced to send his support team of Ventrot and Sporeslinger north to deal with the Aberrant and claim the objectives. The two cultists take heavy fire from Hidlystorm as they run but survive unscathed. The same can’t be said for Tetanus who takes a 3 round burst from the newly arrived Caamrhone, shredding one of his legs and taking him out. The only ray of light for the Nurgle cult is Mouth’s charge into Whailes, smashing the already weakened acolyte to the ground and critically injuring him before retreating back behind cover. The hybrids will need to find a doctor with low morals pretty quick if the rock saw wielding lunatic is going to make it to another skirmish.  

Turn 5

The Chaos forces gain the initiative, but a failed charge from Mouth leaves him vulnerable to a 2 pronged attack from the genestealers- first Jorhnson drops him with a burst of auto fire, then Caamrhone charges in to deliver the coup-de-gras, though this only knocks the putrescent Skitarii out for now. The relative quiet in the north is shattered by a barrage of fire on both sides, with Mhogg-Rhise weathering a hail of fire from Sporeslinger at close range. Redmhaine takes careful aim through a window and manages to blow a chunk out of Ventrot, he’ll be recovering from that damage for a while. Redmhaine’s victory is short-lived however as a blaze of accurate stubber fire from Bilebeetle shreds him and sends him off to recover later too. 

Rotbringer flees the flight while Ventrot and Sporeslinger advance as Hidlystorm lurks in the distance. 

Turn 6

The remaining Chaos cultists decide it’s better to flee the field whilst they still can, and as Bilebeetle lumbers off into the sewers once more the Genestealer Cultists can claim the spoils of victory... Damned xenos scum, coming over here and taking our loot... 

Miners Guild

"The other guilds wouldn't last long without us, where would the blacksmiths be without coal, or the Engineers without our Iron? We ripped every blade, cleaver and fishhook from the bare rock since before the wars but where is the respect for our work? We've all heard the old joke about the Farmers and the Miners, 'The only thing lower than digging dirt is digging under it'. Well the Farmers didn't wait to earn that respect, they went out there and took it with hard work and discipline. And that's just what we're going to do, if they won't give us respect, we'll sink shaft and and dig the damn thing out of them.."

Vein, Miners and Colliers guild Captain.

So these started out when a good friend gave me a set of kick off Masons, I'd already painted an engineers team up straight out of the box but I tend not to paint many things straight, I enjoy putting my own stamp and theme on them. I'd been down an old mine a few weeks before so already had a lot of ideas about them, and the theme fitted the models pretty well so I did a few small conversions (okay Gob is pretty big, but Marbles is in there somewhere!) that kept them recognisable whilst giving them character.

I also experimented with the paint scheme, I'd done a little OSL here and there, but never so extreme as this, and is such a paintily/informal style. Some of it worked well, some of it didn't but it was definitely an interesting learning experience.

I've got lucky coming tomorrow, but for now it's time to make a pitch and pimp out some TT combat mine workings for terrain:)

Model Display Products Dropzone Bases

Last week I popped down Firestorm to play a few games of Age of Sigmar and Malifaux (need to get those Divergent Paths games in!) and while I was there innocently minding my own business getting whomped by Dom, Martyn (the owner of Model Display Products) chucked a bag of resin at me. This wasn't as violent as it sounds as the bag contained four sets of miscasts from his new joint venture with Hawk Wargames, sets of sculpted scenic bases for Dropzone commander Infantry.

Now when I say miscasts, these weren't mis-moulded in any way you could tell, Martyn prides himself on his high quality control, and all these bases had wrong with them were air bubbles in the bottom of the base, enough that Martyn wouldn't want to sell them, but realistically perfectly fine. As luck would have it I had a blister of Berserkers and a set of Free riders yet to be based at home, so I decided to do a quick review of the bases to show them off a bit as a thank you to Martyn, as well as talking through any issues/worries that I had with them.

To start with i'll describe what we have here- Martyn has sculpted 2 sets of bases for the 10mm infantry in Hawk Wargames Dropzone range, these are over the standard hawk bases so are the right size in every way, and he has two variants in each set- one with 5 spaces for infantry, and one with 3. I don't know what Martyn is going to call the variants, but for now I'm going to refer to them as Ruins and Rubble.

Ruins

The ruins bases have high sections of ruined wall, girders and brickwork standing between 3-12mm proud of the base itself, the detail is pretty high with ruined arches, door lintels and window frames mixed in amongst the brickwork and slabs. 

Rubble

The rubble bases have much lower sections of texture, with bricks, rocks etc and some of the same details as the ruins bases but an overall lower profile, probably 3mm raised max, there's more dirt/gravel type texture on these bases than the ruins though. (already built the freeriders before I had the review idea, oops..)

Assembly 

When Martyn first talked about his idea for custom bases I was interested, but had two initial misgivings- firstly that irregular infantry like bikes, razorworms etc wouldn't fit on bases with too much detail, and secondly that the detail could cover the holes themselves and make it difficult to fit the troops in. 

On looking at the bases I had, I think the first worry was definitely going to be an issue with the ruins bases- they are (to me) the best looking bases of the pair, but the raised detail was going to make it impossible for my freeriders to fit without carving a fair chunk of it off, which would defeat the point of using pre-made bases. The rubble bases however looked like they'd be much better, and so I decided to go with those for the freeriders.

They assembled very easily, none of the holes had been filled by the texture, and although the raised detail meant that I couldn't have them exactly parallel to each other this actually looks much more natural than my other freeriders (who look strangely regimented in comparison) I did have an issue where I accidentally used two of the rear mounted bikes on one base, so I then had to  do a bit of chopping and changing to get the last bike to fit, but this also added to a lack of uniformity so I'm happy with it. 

As I'd used the rubble for the bikers, it seemed sensible to use the ruins for the infantry. 

Now these were a little trickier to build than the first set, and one of the reasons was my second worry- one of the bases (in the bottom right of the picture) has two sockets that have been very slightly covered by texture, this meant I had to trim the stands on the berserkers to fit. This didn't take long as it literally meant just clipping off a sliver on one side, and the rest fit in very snug (even sliding under detail in a few places to fit very nicely). The other reason it was a bit tricky is two of the berserkers are waving their arms about a fair bit and there were a few slots on each base where they wouldn't stand facing forwards, not a huge issue but it did make it more important to plan ahead. 

Painting

Once the glue had dried I sprayed them black and gave them a few quick layers of grey and brown drybrushes to match the rest of my infantry, trying to keep the brown on the textured dirt areas and the grey on the detail. the raised detail is sharp enough that even a simple two-tone drybrush of each colour really picked it up, I then gave it a final very light drybrush of bone over the most raised areas to tie the two colours together and catch the eye a little more. 

Yep, that's a terrible photo, but you get the drift. I'm not great at painting infantry preferring vehicles where I can see the detail (my eyes aren't what they used to be) so I tend to base them first, then use the drybrushed areas as a basecoat to pick out details. I gave the bikes a quick red and yellow paintjob, with the riders keeping the green coveralls and grey plates my resistance fighters wear. The berserkers I decided to paint in a red and black scheme, with the skin in various tones then lightly painted over in white and black for a bit of a 'warboys' vibe. 

I picked out some detail on the bases first with bone, then pure white, I wanted it to look like ruined plaster- there are plenty of red-brick type detail pieces that I think would look amazing picked out in that colour, but it wouldn't have blended in well with my force so I stuck with plain grey for the most part. The details I did pick out were door lintels, interior walling, oversized blocks etc. I tried to spread it out across each base so it wasn't overwhelming the minis but there's enough detail on there to give a fair bit of choice on how you want to bring it out.

After this I inked the whole lot (base, bike, berserker) with Agrax Earthshade and left it to dry before adding some foliage tufts to show the overgrown nature of the core worlds. 

Freeriders on rubble bases- 

Berserkers on ruins bases-

Overall

I have a tendency to make my own bases for 28-32mm scale minis, but when I started dropzone I stuck to plain sand bases with clump foliage for the most part- only my veterans got some ruins and rubble to hide behind. When I think how long I spent trying to get the base texture looking good without getting in the minis way and compare it to how easy these bases are to build and paint then I'm definitely going to stick with these in the future (they look better too annoyingly). 

The detail is lovely and crisp, and pretty varied across the stands, especially when you think that you could spin them 180 degrees and they'd look very different. There are very few plain areas across all the bases, meaning there's very little work to do, and they needed hardly any cleaning up too. (although as these were miscast even the cleaning up I did have to do would probably not be needed on a finished product) 

They didn't manage to completely avoid the pitfalls I envisaged early on, larger infantry like ATV's and potentially even destroyers are going to need a little work on both sets (less on the rubble) although Martyn's done a great job of keeping the sockets almost entirely clear of texture. I'd definitely recommend covering the models little minibase with a textured paint of some sort once they are in place to blend them in (I went back and did this myself) but other than that they look really good and take very little effort to get that way. I'm not sure how much they are looking to retail at (or even when they hit general release with Hawk) but I'll definitely be picking more rubble bases up for my Scout ATV's and will use the remaining MDP bases I have for my Marine Force Recon and Sappers:)

I also now have spare sets of plain bases, allowing me a little freedom to sculpt some texture of my own for Martyn to potentially get cast up- so my question is what sort of bases would be nice outside the ruined urban environment, desert, jungle, space station or even something else? 

 

playing with filters

another gap after a post, getting bad at those, will have to keep an eye out! I haven't managed a tremendous amount of painting recently due to health crud, however I did focus on one project enough to get it near finished- My malifaux Mr Cooper's Carnival crew.

The idea here is to only take models that fit the theme, and if I need something that doesn't fit, i have to convert it. I'm taking it to a couple of tourneys this year (which is probably a bad thing as I have so far scored 7 points total in 5 games played with them) and this should give me such a limited pool of miniatures that I'll be a lot faster getting a crew on the table each game, it also means I can go to town on the painting as there's less to paint compared to the rest of my Arcanists

two models have jumped ship and ran away to join the circus- Johanna and my Gunsmith were colourful enough to fit the theme (and I wanted a relic hammer for the test your strength machine) so they've been rebased, everything else is purchased just for this crew. (or blagged from a good friend in the case of the firestarter)

I've not taken the best photos yet, BUT as I'm building a fate deck to match the crew, I've taken some quick phone photos and ran them through filters at Pixlr o-matic-

https://pixlr.com/o-matic/

to get them looking monochromatic, old and battered, and as this doesn't give too much away about the finished article, I thought I'd share:)

Steam Raptor (raptor body with bits box bits and etch-master wings)

Angry Monkeys

Mannequins

Effigy (memory man)

Harlequin Ice dancer (proxy made from december acolyte with TTB arms and head))

Gunsmith (famous sharpshooter Dirty Rosewood)

Big Jake (from Wild West Exodus range)

2 shots of Acolytes (Acrobats) not sure which I like best

Mercury, strongest man in the world!

Thin Lizzy- The Bearded Lady

Arielle- Mermaid of Malifaux (there's a howard langston (which it represents) a brass arachnid, a mannequin and a performer in there somewhere) 

The Killephant (killjoy with green stuff)

Luther, the Pascha hare

Johanna and the relic hammer game.

The Wolf Girl (proxy for myranda, TTB body legs and head, Hamelin's spunkcloud provided the arms and the face is green stuff) 

Mr Cooper, Carnival Master

Baritone Lola, sweetest thing in the carnival

The Funstarter, the party doesn't start till he does!

stay tuned for colour photographs when I get the time, lighting and equipment to do it properly!