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 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.