Last week I’d put together the last few pieces – a gang relic and a genestealer-flavoured stand-in for the Ogryn-Servitor Brute. Now, with both of them painted up, it was a great opportunity to get a whole family photo as well.
The two newest (and last?) additions
I’m unlikely to add any more to the gang in the near future – I’m very happy with how they’ve come out and I don’t have the time or resources to keep adding bits here and there. Perhaps if they release new Brutes, pets or vehicles I could be tempted to add some more, but the foot soldiers are finished and I can move on to other projects.
Kit Clawson
Quick and dirty! This fella was completed in two evenings with judicious use of washes and drybrushing. The colour scheme was no different from previous ‘stealers in the gang so I didn’t have to come up with a palette, so the hardest part for me was already done.
Which reminds me, I really should start writing down recipes for guys I paint…
Somebody’s watered the poison hole
Straightforward paint job with this piece – lots of browns, washes and drybrushing and liberal amounts of Typhus Corrosion. I obviously wanted to continue the running gag and replaced ‘spawning hole’ with ‘watering hole’ on the sign – despite the “well” being obviously unfit for human consumption.
It also gave me a chance to play around with another of my favourite paints – Tamiya Clear Green. It smells like death, but it it produces one of the most exciting radioactive green goop colours I’ve ever seen.
Final thoughts
I’ve had a smashing time building up this motley crew and getting them onto the table. Playing games with an outrageous cowboy accent and playing the moustache-twirling villain has made it even more fun. I’ve talked before about how Genestealer Cults in Necromunda are at their best when played campy and hammy, and I like to think I’ve camped and hammed these guys to their full potential.
I’m very much looking forward to my next campaign with them (fully painted models for every game, living the dream) as some of the later-wave lads didn’t even get an outing. I’ve even got some terrible plans for running a short campaign set on an arid western-themed penal world, the finale being an elaborate four-way vehicular heist.
Last time I’d pretty much rounded off the gang in terms of fighters – I’d used up all the bodies and legs on the sprues I had and was pretty satisfied I had enough variation in fighters to play the gang again in a new campaign. I just needed one or two bits to round off the gang…
Home is where the hole is
Every gang needs home turf, and Hive Noon are no different. I’ve had all sorts of mad and wonderful ideas about making some elaborate scenery and set pieces, but I think that’ll wait for another time (I can’t shake the idea of a train heist scenario called The Great Strain Robbery). I did need something a little more universal – a Gang Relic.
There’s a ripper in my boot!
Gang Relics are used in certain scenarios and when you have Home Turf Advantage – essentially they’re a little standard or icon that you plonk down on the table and they provide certain buffs to any nearby fighters, and in some cases can be used as objectives themselves.
I had a couple of ideas including a damsel tied to some train tracks for maximum moustache-twirling Machiavellianism, but settled on the idea of a spawning watering hole because, well.. I’d just watched Toy Story recently and I couldn’t shake the soundbite of Woody shouting “somebody’s poisoned the water hole”.
Jeweller’s chain was used for the bucket chain, secured with lashings of super glue.
I had the perfect signpost that had been rattling around in my bits box for a decade, extended with a little plasticard so I can paint on the necessary words to reassure people that it’s a real watering hole. The bucket was assembled from a nubbin from a Russian biochemical factory kit, now sadly quite difficult to get hold of, and a bent paper clip. I’m sure it’ll serve my gang well.
Mungo like candy
The final piece of the puzzle was a heavy. Genestealer Cults (at time of writing) don’t get access to house-specific Brutes so have to settle for one of the generic ones, either an Ogryn Servitor or the Am-Bot. I’d already built an Ogryn Servitor and I have an Am-Bot on the way, so I didn’t feel like using a generic one. I wanted something a little more… alien.
“Sometimes you just need to randomly blue-tack things together and see what sticks” -Abraham Lincoln
Out of the two, the Am-Bot had a neater set of rules for ‘big angry frenzy thing that tears stuff up’ which sat well in my head for some big Genestealer Brute, but I wasn’t excited about the special rule that allowed other gangs to capture it and ‘reprogram’ it for their use. Although unlikely, it would have been weird if it came up. Ogryn it is!
I pinch.
A classic Carnifex crushing claw fit perfectly into the socket of a Chaos Spawn body, and I knew whatever I made was going to use that as a base. I was still figuring things out at this point – a pair of claws looked unwieldy and I wanted it to be equipped with something that could reasonably be described as a melee weapon with the blaze trait to emulate the arc-welder rules. Luckily, I had just the random assortment of bits…
After much fiddling and sculpting, I was happy with the finished product. The left arm was eventually donated by a plastic Lord of the Rings Troll and the head came from a GSC aberrant. I wanted to maintain the semi-human look of the regular-sized aberrants and make him appear as an overgrown mutant rather than a big Genestealer, which was my first thought.
He’s also a pain in the ass to photograph, I can’t seem to work out where the golden angle is…
There’s an upgrade to give the Ogryn Servitor furnace plate, which increases their armour save from the front arc. I couldn’t quite figure out how to make that look natural, so I added a few bullet holes into the huge armour plates on his arm and reasoned that he would cover his body with is as he advanced. Handwavium!
Very chuffed with my arc welder solution – I used a monstrous creature adrenal gland and a couple of pipes from a barbed strangler (I think) to create a long tube to the claw. Add a few more adrenal glands and paint them in bright colours, and I figure it can be some kind of hyper-acid. Hellfire acid shotgun shells already use the Blaze trait to represent acid damage, so why not here?
The green stuff work was a little sloppy in places – I was making him during the penultimate week of the campaign and I was really ill – I wanted to get him finished and onto the tabletop before the campaign ended. I’d loved to have spent weeks lovingly crafting him into the perfect hybrid, but in the end I’m happy I didn’t. Finished, not perfect!
Last time we looked at the second wave of gangers added to Hive Noon and vaguely ruminated on the reasoning behind each assembly. This time, we’ve got them all gussied up ready for photo day, plus a couple of extras that didn’t make the cut last week. Let’s take a look!
JONAH FEX
This fella didn’t get a lot of action in the campaign – he was picked up in the last few weeks, by which time he was looked over in favour of heavy hitters or fighters with equipment more suited to the scenario. He’ll definitely be an early purchase for the next campaign!
Puny Owens anD Tiny Oakley
After the outrageous success of Baby Face Fanglayson (the familiar attached to Baron Clint Von Beastwood) I had to pick up more familiars. They’re 25 credits, available from the House list and give your extremely squishy Acolytes a fighting chance to get into combat. Anybody looking for one piece of wisdom to take away for their own GSC gangs: buy all three familiars.
These two were from the Deathwatch: Overkill set that I picked up crazy cheap from ebay. One had a broken hand, so I replaced it with one from the Acolytes kit with a wedge of metal as a makeshift club.
The Maw With No Name
Another star player in the campaign, despite being picked up about halfway through. Cheap to field and versatile on the game board, he kept plenty of people behind cover and away from my advancing hordes.
The only extra kit he picked up was an infrascope – good for popping people behind cover who think they’re safe from his Overwatch skill and useful when all the lights go out.
The Lone Render
Look at that shit-eating grin. He knows what he did. Absolute #Lad. If you’re playing GSC and you haven’t taken advantage of a) the Infiltrate skill b) cheap demolition charges or c) both at once, you’re missing a trick. Sure, he gets killed pretty quickly (and often) if you position him poorly, but the mayhem he causes is worth it.
He was usually accompanied by a familiar to keep him alive a little longer, and acquired smoke grenades and a chainsword for versatility and a fighting chance in close combat when he’s inevitably charged.
Stubber Ocelot
I’m overwhelmed by how well this guy fits in with everyone else. I know it seems like a minor thing, but I was very concerned the one model that inspired the gang wouldn’t actually fit into the gang once assembled and painted up.
As it happens, he was a great combatant too – I wrote about why last week – and the three pistols were also terrifyingly effective in close combat when you could bring all of them to bear.
Strong Wayne
I had a really tough time with this guy. I couldn’t get the blend between pale flesh and blue carapace right and I must have redone those arm/leg sections two or three times. Also, painting between all those chains I added proved to be far trickier than I’d anticipated, and I ended up filling in a lot of dead space with washes just to avoid having to try and paint them. Still, despite all those problems, it ended up coming out rather nicely, and adding the splashes of red to the weapons was good fun and rounded off the figure nicely.
Calamity Gene
Another ganger I’m likely to pick up earlier in the campaign when I play these guys next. The extra pistol combo with the hand flamer is particularly tricksy as you can shoot it at the same target as your hand flamer, so long as the flamer template is centred on the target. If you line your guy up correctly, you can still hit a few people with that teardrop template.
Yoswarmite Sam
This poor fella never even made it into the roster before the campaign was over. A simple loadout of shotgun and bombs (kept ambiguous so it could be either a frag grenade or blasting charges depending on the gang’s wallet) but late on in the campaign such a loadout was never called for – they were too busy saving up for the big guns! Shame really – the shotgun/dynamite combination was one I sketched together early on because of the obvious western aesthetic, but there was always something more important to spend the creds on. Another to pick up early next time perhaps?
Second wave
The second wave is now (obviously) completed, but as much as I’d have liked them to be done and dusted for the campaign, many of them had a few games half-painted or blue-tacked together before getting their final lick of paint. I like to think it added to their charm…
There’s certainly a few slight tweaks I’d do to them before sending them back out again – I’ll likely pop a chainsword on the Lone Render’s belt as it’s a strong addition to his lineup, and I think I’ll be swapping the power pick from Billy the Nid with a shock whip. It’s cheaper, more effective against most targets (power pick only really excels at high wound/armour targets) and gets him into combat faster.
Otherwise I’m very happy with this lot and I can’t wait to use them again in the future! I’d be lying to myself if I said I wouldn’t be adding more guys to the gang, but for now I’ve run out of bodies and legs, so unless they bring out some Necromunda rules for bikes or vehicles, I think all my foot soldiers are done for now. (That is, of course, until the next GSC update…)
