Getting into Necromunda

Ever since I played in a Blood Bowl league as a teenager I was a fan of Games Workshop's campaign system. I just love the idea of a small group of people, slowly getting stronger and better equipped over time. I am also constantly blown away by content I see on social media what people do with miniatures and terrain, so I decided to take the plunge and finally get into Necromunda. And start a campaign while I'm at it.

Necromunda is a planet in the Warhammer 40k universe. Here cities turn into gigantic spires, reaching into the sky and as is the norm with enormous sci-fi city settings, the rich and powerful live on top while the poor and downtrodden live at the bottom. Necromunda even goes several steps beyond those tropes, as not only is each city build on so much debry from earlier times, the miners are basically just mining old trash leftovers to recycle, while deep down under a Hive whole oceans have formed from millenia of sewage flowing down into the depths. It's a pretty neat setting.

a fight breaks out at the market. 

The regular Necromunda gangs are just different flavors of human and while that seems like a step back compared to Orks, Necrons and Tyranids in regular 40k, Games-Workshop has done a wonderful job of making each of the 6 core gangs very distinct visually and in terms of playstyle. But there are also so many expansions and side material that even without homebrewing you could easily enough bring in different factions from all over the 40k universe if you do it right. For example, it'd be easy enough to squeeze Orks in a template of the Goliath or Ogryn gangs or just pretend your Esher gang has pointy ears. And the Venator bounty hunter gangs are a shoe-in for stuff like Imperial Guard or even Inquisition.

My Orlock Gang - the Junktown Bulldogs - are based on the simple question of "what would these neat Orlck vests look like, if I painted them in signal orange like they're garbage men?"

Like I said, I've always wanted to get back into campaign gaming, it just took me a while to do so. Over the course of a year I've been buying a few Necromunda books (I love the fluff in this game) and a few boxes, getting a better feel for the game and got together a small group for what I'm calling a "test campaign". There's just so much stuff you can do in a campaign if you plan it out right. There can be Chaos Cults rising to power, alliances with noble houses from the upper levels of the Spire, random monsters showing up and ruining everyone's day. It's all a bit daunting so I wanted to get a better feel for it in a smaller group first.

The Goliath gang has taken one of the Esher hostage and the girls are trying to get their sister back.

I'm the Arbitrator i.e. game master but also one of 4 players. We've each played 1-3 games by now and it's working very smooth so far. I've sort of been pressured into just getting it started to I haven't even figured our a name for the Hive we're playing in. But that's also kind of the beauty of the whole thing. Necromunda - as any other setting in the universe of Warhammer 40.000 - is so grandiose and ridiculous, our gangs fighting for a dome are few among billions on a planet littered with thousands of Spires but many of them are not important enough to even be on a map! Speaking of Maps, we got one of these too.

Can't wait for the first Sump Sea battles.

So far it's off to a slow start but I'm really enjoing it and the other players seem to as well. You can see more pictures and (German) text about our games over here in the blog of the campaign's Delaque player.