The Piper at the Gates of Down

They say that he comes out in the dead of night shift. When the forges are only just ticking over, when the Hive hums with the quiet lives of the darktimers, when the lights are low to conserve power. Then he can be heard, metal boots on metal floors. His sightless head swinging side to side, seeing without eyes. And if that blank face catches you, they say, his pipe will rise and a skirl of noise will reach out and wrap itself around you and they say you will follow him to the Gates that lead down, down below even the underhive and there.... there ehy do not say what will happen to you. But you will not come back. So they say. 

I've been waiting for inspiration to strike with the Delaque kit. The Dune Navigator is an obvious choice, but there seemed to be other possibilities in this rather Cliver Barker-esque style.

And so we have this guy.

A relatively simple conversion - a generstealer head fastened in the wrong way round and an arm from the escher kit for a slightyl spindly, out of proportion look and we were away.

The final result is pleasingly creepy, I think.

The Church of the Twice Born

Since the day you were born, your lives have not been your own. You have been used, and abused, and cast down amongst the filth by those above. You are not a person. You are a cog in the machine. You are production output. You are a target. You are nothing. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your lives. They are as dust.

But it does not have to be that way. You can rise up, on the wings of angels; rise up, born aloft by the love of the Allfather, the True Emperor. The God King who cares for you, who will cherish you and who will empower you. And when there are enough of us, we shall rise from the ashes and dirt and rust and bring vengance upon those who have despised us. Rise up, my brothers! Rise up, my sisters! Let your old lives end and be born anew into glory!

-Pater Dol, preaching in the Underhive

Since the old days I've always loved the idea of Genestealer cults. Necromunda is just the perfect excuse to make some. I've had the box of miniatures for ages as parts have been used for all my conversions over the last year, so the total cost of this little gang was £0.

In terms of painting, I wanted to capture the oily blue grey of the Harkonnen from Lynch's Dune as seen here modeled by Sting:

Creating this colour was a relatively complex process: a grey green base with a transparent blue wash; edge highlighting of sea grey and then a blue glaze over the whole before a black wash to filter everything back down to the darker end of the tonal scale.

I think the hassle was worth it, though, as the Sons of the Twice Born look pretty much exactly how I'd always imagined them.

Walkways

I've been wanting to improve my stock of 40k/Necromunda/Shadow Wars scenery and as much as I love the new GW stuff it's ruinously expensive. So I started to think about how I could build things up without breaking the bank.

The key thing for all the skirmish games I like is to have some height and different levels, so creating some sort of gantry or walkway looked like a good place to start.

A few people has talked about buying aquarium filters and using those for walkways. No-one had ever really said what they would use so I looked on ebay, found a cheap set and took a punt.

When they arrived, I was immediately impressed: they connected together in six different ways, allowing any set up to be completely modular. Even just slotted together, they were able to be lifted holding the weight of quite a few miniatures.

So, how to paint them? I needed something fast, simple and durable - the filters are made of quite soft plastic so I had some concerns about the paint adhering. 

I primed them with Halfords black and then hit them with a dusting of Halfords silver. This gave me a basecoat to work from. I give it a quick drybrush of a lighter silver and painted some black stripes here and there.

Why the black stripe? Well, the most iconic Necromunda colour is the hazard chevrons so I knew they wanted that on them. But how to get them done with the minimum possible? 

The stencils were made out of one of casefile folders. One about 1cm wide, one about 1 inch wide. 

I stippled the yellow rather painting it as this basically makes it 'pre-chipped' and worn. 

Next I started weathering. This was basically Vallejo rust weathering effect painted on then wiped off with my thumb to colour the metal and then stippled back on to create some texture. 

A drybrush of orange finished off. I painted a few sector marking with white and then toned them down with Vallejo smoky ink (if you don't have this, it's a bloody godsend for terrain features, like a liquid Typhus corrosion from the GW line).

I also added some drops of Nurgle's rot for chemical spills here and there. 

So here's all 16 pieces laid out on 36'' by 36'' table. That's a lot of coverage for £6. 

Obviously, I've ordered another set. 

And here's a couple of shots of it against the rest of my terrain. 

Next up - legs. 

The Downhive Reds

Deep in the underhive, there are whispers. The whispers speak of a gang owning fealty to House Escher. A gang that flit from shadow to shadow, every moving, never ceasing. A gang whose exposure to the chemicals and toxins that are their stock in trade has changed them. Changed them so they are barely human any more. Lithe, pale and stealthy, most believe the Downhive Reds took their name from the dyed scarlet of their hair. But the whispers say otherwise. The whispers hiss that the Reds get their name from the fact that they are so changed that they no longer subsist on Soylens Viridians like the rest of Necromunda but instead on some something darker, darker and hotter. All that remains of those who cross them are scarlet traces...

I thoroughly enjoyed putting the Escher models together ahead of the school club's Necromunda campaign. I feel in love with the aesthetic of them; the massive boots and hair look exactly like the Carlos Equezerra line work I remember from 2000AD when I was a lad. So that was naturally where I turned for inspiration.

I considered going down the Judge Anderson route but if they ever get around to releasing Arbites I want to go full Dredd on them, so I cast my net slightly wider and caught... well, Durham Red. When I knew her she was a supporting character in Strontium Dog. Apparently she ended up getting her own strip (and a stripperific costume to boot). In any case, I had the palette I wanted.

Given the amount of times I've done blue tinted skin you'd think I wouldn't have this much trouble with it, but there you go. Anyway, these dangerous lasses are done.

Next is the start of a fairly major project that I am certain I will live to regret.

The Pig Iron Wide Boyz

After a few digressions and a family emergency (my 3 year old son broke his leg and so spent a week in traction and then 5 weeks in a full lower-body cast over Christmas), I finally got my Necromunda Goliath gang finished.

As with the previous members, I kept the Mad Max aesthetic and worked on the assumption that these chaps have come from the dust and filth of foundries deep in the Underhive; so after painting there was a liberal application of ochre and oxide pigments. As well as the usual dusting I also experimented with a new pigment binder which allowed me to really cake it on like thick mud. I'm generally happy with the effect - the issue, of course, is that we don't know how it will react with varnish which is always the unknown quantity when dealing with pigments. As soon as they are coated, I'll report back.

In the meantime, here are close ups of Smak, Gripper, Twos and the rest of the ladz.

Stix and Twos guarding the doors. 

'Gripper' Jenkins

Blade