Necromunda Void War V2.2

A year ago I wrote a small ruleset for fighting in the vacuum of space. The aim was to portray Necromundan lunar colonies and space stations, as well as underwater and toxic environments where pressurised space-suits were necessary.

I’ve revisited those rules, expanded, improved format and generally made something better of them.

The new version strips away a lot of the turn-by-turn micro-management and less sensible stuff in favour of a quick and streamlined system.

The core of the rules is Suit Damage and Air-tokens.

Essentially each fighter is equipped with a personal air-supply and a sealed spacesuit of some description. Whenever that fighter takes an Injury roll, they additionally roll on a Suit Damage table. This uses an injury dice as well, but affects the suit independently of the fighter.
The three options are that the suit is punctured but able to immediately self-repair, it’s damaged and must be manually repaired with a repair-kit, or it’s been torn wide open and can’t be repaired at all.
These results can happen completely independently of the normal injuries. So for example a knife-slash that merely caused a flesh-wound on the fighter might tear the suit badly enough that it can’t be repaired. Requiring that fighter to sprint for safety.

Or perhaps the life-threatening Serious Injury caused minimal damage to the suit and the material has sealed over the hole..

The second part of this feature is the Air Tokens. Whenever the suit is damaged, the fighter loses precious air, normally recycled around and around, the suits only contain a very small volume of air and have little margin for loss. Typically a suit can take damage no more than 6 times before the suit runs out of air entirely.
These can be replenished at certain locations, you can buy expanded air-tanks and similar equipment and there are plenty of options to make the suits themselves more robust.

If a fighter finds themselves without any air and is in hard-vacuum, they go out of action at the end of the turn.
I’ve written full rules for handling airlocks and hull-breaches, unique territories and scatter-terrain for scenarios, new Trading Post items and equipment to suit the new setting and I’ve also written two new factions since using existing ones made very little sense.

The new factions are:

Clan Coronus, specialists in bio-technology and life-support equipment. They inhabit the agri-domes and live a techno-tribal lifestyle. I’ve been converting models to represent them using Escher and Idoneth Deepkin parts.

House Sirius – Mining and industrial faction, based on the Genestealer cult line of models. They are in fact intended to be infected by a Genestealer Cult, however the House at large is not, and the cult is meant as background flavour rather than providing any unique units or rules. (Really it’s just an excuse if I forget to remove a Cult sigil on any models I make for them)

Together the two houses form a duality of nature vs technology, a common theme but a strong one I think.

I’m planning to build some custom scenery specially for void-war, specifically an agri-dome (jungle scenery inside a circular building with part of a transparent dome over it) and a couple surface-outposts consisting of a few rooms and an airlock each.

Those plus some scatter terrain and I should be able to play some cool scenarios!

Necromunda_VoidWar_V2.2

Please play with them and tell me how you find them!

Necromunda Mechanicus Version 2

After two evenings of work, I’ve finished rewriting my Mechanicus ruleset for Necromunda!

I realised that when I first wrote it I formatted it more in the vein of 40k than Necromunda, writing specific profiles for unit-types rather than generic Leader, Champion, Juve and Gangers as is normal.

So this rewrite fixes that and ties in a lot of newer stuff like the Bionics rules, Brutes and Pets, Field Armour and so on.

Most of all, I’ve formatted the actual rules to match how they appear in the Gangs of the Underhive rulebook. It was always meant to be a serious attempt at a plugin for Necromunda, not just shoehorning in my beloved mechanicus.

Grab the PDF here!
Necromunda Mechanicus V2.0a

 

Necromunda Vehicles

Following on from my Admech ruleset, I’ve written a pretty comprehensive, though still very-much work in progress Vehicle Plugin for Necromunda

The concept is pretty simple:

It’s all about interaction.

In 40k, a vehicle is a unit in its own right, big, durable, packing powerful weapons and requiring a lot of force to destroy, but ultimately it’s a very shallow experience, you whittle down its hitpoints and destroy it.
It was a little more complex in 7th edition when you could inflict Immobilise and Weapon Destroyed results, but they happened at random and they were never something you relied on tactically.

In necromunda, it’s all about the gang. So a gang vehicle needs to keep that focus.

With that in mind, I wrote my rules around the idea of Crew and Components. When a vehicle activates, all its crew and passengers activate with it, meaning that there are a lot of different things going on. most importantly, the driver controls the movement of the vehicle, fires its hull-mounted weapons and generally acts to direct it.
Gunners operate specific weapons, and have to be seated on the appropriate weapon to use each. So an under-crewed vehicle may not be able to be used to its fullest extent.
Passengers are along for the ride, but since they’re not operating anything, they get to use any weapons and wargear they personally have to fight from the passenger seats.

The Component system is a bit more complex, the idea is that a vehicle is comprised of a Hull, and a number of subsystems.

Those subsystems may be targeted specifically and produce different effects as they are damaged and destroyed. For example:
* Wheels reduce the Movement stat of the vehicle for every wound they take.
* The Engine outright immobilises the vehicle if destroyed
* Weapons may be shot off to reduce its firepower
* Other more esoteric subsystems have their own effects like a Comm relay, which allows the Leader or champion who’s using the vehicle to activate gang members in a much wider than usual bubble.

So the Vehicles in this ruleset are quite direct in implementation, but have a lot of potential tactics and strategies to make them useful and manipulate the flow of the game. Both the controlling player and any foes have plenty to think about, and it should never devolve into a game of “whittle the hitpoints”

In my first test-game, a Sentinel Scout-walker belonging to House Escher was outright hijacked by the Goliath leader and turned against us!

For the purposes of testing, I’ve been building a variety of vehicles.

The two complete ones are the Sentinel mentioned already, and a Bounty hunter on a bike.

 

Necromunda Adeptus Mechanicus Gang

It’s been a long time! and a busy time at that.

I quit my job, got a new and better job, that job imploded as Indie studios are wont to do, so I got an even better job with a bigger and more stable company (one you’ve probably heard of!)

So now I’m on awesome money and getting my hobby on in a big way.

The biggest thing going on with me is that I got into Necromunda in a big way, I have a group of half a dozen friends who come around to my flat on a Wednesday night and play, each week, every week for the past two or three months.

I started with Escher, but quickly reverted to form and started writing my own rules. A complete ruleset for an Adeptus Mechanicus gang!

Necromunda Mechanicus Rules

The guys and gals report that it’s neither overpowered nor unpleasant to play against, and with the more recent updates to the base-game, the bigger, nastier weapons I’ve added are actually quite tame.

The main thing is that I’m not fielding a single model that isn’t customised specifically for the games we’re running, so it’s been a bit of an adventure!

 

The first model I built was this guy, going by the name of Aleph-0, he’s a Praetorian Gun Servitor, armed with a Servo Arm and Heavy Bolter.

I built him using a Slaughterpriest as the base model, it took me a couple hours to build and a couple more to paint. I then immediately bought another slaughterpriest and pumped out a second one!

Then after a few weeks where I fielded Horus Heresy models to stand in for an Adept and Tech-thrall/gun-servitors, I finally built a model for my Adept.

 

Adept Kovarian is made using a Primaris Psyker and parts from the standard plastic Tech Priest, plus a little brass-etch and a few spare parts I had lying around.

In ruleset, he’s a fairly capable combatant, so far he’s consistently beaten the snot out of anyone who dared enter melee with him (power axes in necromunda are horribly dangerous!)

On one notable occasion he blew himself up with the plasma pistol though. so there’s that 😛

I’m also using a couple custom models for my Servo-Skulls, though no pictures of those specifically (see the last picture where I show the whole gang together for those!)

I followed Kovarian with a bit of a boondoggle project, A Cataphract battle automata, based off the old Rogue Trader robots in concept.

It’s built using a Primaris Aggressor as a base model, with the body of a Horus Heresy Servo-Automata I had lying around, plus some parts of Kataphron Breachers for the backpack.

All the weapons are magnetised so I can swap between loadouts, In game it usually wields the melta gun and a bolt-pistol, the fists also count as power-fists, meaning it’s a brutally dangerous close-ranged opponent.

I dispensed with the idea of a carapace weapon after deciding the model was too small to mount a Lightning Gun without looking silly.

The final shift towards using entirely custom models was to make Tech-Thrall equivelants.

I wrestled with the idea a lot before settling on the solution.

Electro Priests with Kataphron parts made a surprisingly effective combination! The guns were an interesting part to figure out, they’re actually the Kataphron’s Arc rifles without the giant capacitor block on the top. I figure they resemble the original Tech Thrall Las-locks quite well!

Just in the past couple days, I’ve been expanding my gang further with a Tunnel Stalker (Rust-stalker variant for necromunda, armed with dual auto-pistols and a sword)

And a third Praetorian, this one based on Guilliman for reasons of ribbing the many many ultramarines players I hang out with! I take a perverse pleasure in reducing Roboute Guilliman: Primarch of the Ultramarines, Lord of Macragge etc etc down to a mere weapons servitor..

 

 

All in all, it’s been a very very fun project. The gang has been reasonably competitive without being overpowered and I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on the models!

The Big Wheel of Warhammer is spinning again, I’ve got plans for Seraphon and an Aquatic Ork army for 40k in the works.

 

Hopefully it won’t be two years before I post again!