Back in the heady days of 2022 I was approached to do a guest post for Anvil Industry off the back of some Chaos hoodlums I had been showcasing on social media. I was generously offered some store credit to make basically anything I wanted in exchange for writing up a guest post for them (an offer I would take up again in a heatbeat if you’re reading this xoxo).
I had lots of ideas of what to spend my sweet sweet creds on but I settled on my one true love: Necromunda. I’d recently given myself the task of recreating all the Guilder delegation sub-gangs without spending a penny on them – just with odds and ends from the bits box. I’d already finished the Slavers’ Guild, and had the Water Guild and Corpse Guild semi-assembled, so why not round it off with the Promethium Guild?
Although the parts weren’t from my bits box, I wasn’t techically spending any of my own money. Necromunda is nothing if not a game with weird loopholes, so I checked with my Arbitrator (me) who said it was an acceptable interpretation of the rules, so I went ahead and put my order in.
Mercator Pyros Guild delegation here we come!
Fuelling the project
I encourage you to check out my full post on Anvil’s website for a full breakdown on how I assembled everything (including extra parts I used from my bits box), but the parts list I ordered is here:
- War engine organ
- Candles
- Robed cultist bodies advancing
- Gothic flame thower
- Hooded medieval heads
- Bearded axes
- Robed arms command
- Robed arms banner
It took a lot of wrangling, finagling, jiggering and pokering, but I’m very happy with my Power Guild eventually came out.
Remix to ignition
The bulk of the colour scheme had been decided for me: FIRE! This naturally terrified me as I hate painting flame effects, and have managed to avoid doing it for nearly all my life. In fact, I’ve only very recently adventured into painting flames with my Bedlam Feast firebreather. I just needed to step out my comfort zone and get ready to paint lots and lots of thin white and yellow layers over a black undercoat.
With the colour palette being mostly yellow/orange/red from all the flames, burning eye sockets and candles, I wanted some muted colours for the robes and metal. This was done with the now-popular slapchop method – drybrushing grey/white over black, then applying washes.
The candles were picked out with Ushabti Bone and any knots/cords were highlighted with Zandri Dust.
All members of the Promethium Guild have a weird extra special rule that allows them to detonate a photon flash grenade when they’re removed from the board, so I wanted to represent this instability with an internal glow to their armour.
I picked eye sockets (for rule of cool) and their backpack vents. I was (and still am) experimenting with OSL/glow effects, and for this project I did it the old fashioned way – starting with the light source and painting outwards (with lots of retouching of mistakes).
It started with pure white in the middle, with a few layers of yellow glazed over the top on the deepest recesses. Light orange was painted onto the inner recesses of the vents, then continuing outwards with darker reds. A final layer of Mephiston Red mixed with Lahmian Medium was added to nearby corners and edges to emphasize the glow effect. I think it came out pretty well!
Another challenge I’d given myself was constructing a guy with a banner. He’s a Pyromagir Champion with a cult icon, which could be represented by absolutely anything, but I chose something that required some freehand painting. Ah well.
I needed some heraldry to tie the guild to some distant masters, and I had just the ticket. An organisation kept poppin gup in my RPG sessions – the Collepan Fuel Network – a bunch of power-monopolising ultra-bastards headed by a rival of one of our player characters.
I enjoy designing flags and heraldry but I hate painting flags and heraldry, so I needed a compromise. I settled on this red/grey design, with a black strips covered in crowns crossing both fields. I figured the Collepan Fuel Network do their work on both hellishly hot worlds and frozen ice balls (the red and white fields), but ultimately they’re digging for promethium (the black band), which is where the family gets both their literal and social power from (the three crowns). A bit on the nose perhaps, but it’s not a statement piece if people don’t understand the statement.
The big boy was the most fun to paint. I didn’t realise at the time of ordering that the little guy in front would be so little – I thought he was a full-sized miniature, but he’s actually a little clockwork puppet! It makes for a fun composition, even if it does look a bit like the main chap is watching him play some sick tunes rather than staring moodily off into the middle distance.
The hardest part of painting all the fire was having the patience to see it through to the end. This was pre-airbrush, and I’d undercoated them black with the intention of having them in a dark colour scheme.
You have to go through so many stages of waiting for paint to dry while the model looks like utter crap before it starts to come together. Easily half a dozen layers of thinned-down white paint around the hottest areas, then layering on another half a dozen thin coats of bright yellow, then orange, light red, dark red, then black, then a touch of grey for the wisps of smoke. It was only when the red layers started to go on that I started to see the effect come together, which was a relief after several evenings of watching paint dry!
Painting fire is simple but time consuming – the hardest part is trusting the process. I’m a believer now!
In conclusion I’m overjoyed with how they came out. There were quite a few obstacles that could have been the diesel in the project’s petrol engine – trying to get all the bits to fit together, freehanding a banner, painting fire effects – but they all came together so well at the end!
I’m very happy with my Promethium Guild and I can’t wait to get them on the tabletop. Just the Corpse Guild and Water Guild left to do, but they’re not far away now…