Towards the end of last year, we were wrapping up a year long 40K campaign, and one of the players had enjoyed it so much that he wanted to do another campaign that he would run, in the Hive City of Necromunda!
This appealed to the group for many reasons. Partly it allowed us to change up our hobby and painting. When you paint larger armies for big game systems, it's very easy to get in a rut and then just churn your gears trying to get inspired to keep painting the same types of models. Playing the same game all the time can have the same problem. This was a great avenue for refreshing ourselves in terms of inspiration to model and paint, as well as to just have a bunch of smaller games with some small skirmish units. The added complexity of continuing campaign scenarios, experience, growing wealth, and skills to attract more members to our gangs just makes it that much more appealing.
I decided that I would take this campaign as an opportunity to dust off and paint up some older models that I haven't gotten around to before. In this case, my Redemption Crusade. I bought these models for an aborted campaign my friends and I were planning on playing in the heyday of Necromunda, when we were staff, but for many reasons (probably new shiny syndrome with a fresh new edition of 40K) it never happened. I kept the gang promising that one day I'll get to them. And that is now!Normally, when people devise a gang for Necromunda, they start by picking their gangers, selecting their gear, and then building the models to represent them. Instead, I chose to build a gang around the basic Redemptionist set. I had those specific models, so why not use them as is. It would reduce the conversions necessary to field them, and allow me to just get stuck in with painting...
However, I couldn't bring myself to not do something special with them, so I decided that I would dress up their bases a little bit with some scrap bits of sprue, wire, and plasticard to make it looke like the detritus of the underhive.
Here you can see with the simple addition of some plain plasticard, you can add texture to a plain base to make it look like it's made of metal plating, or scrap metal lying about. I also added debris texture using some Liquitex White Opaque Flakes, and Liquitex Resin Sand. When mixed, this gives the impression of piles of trash, rust, and accumulated dirt.
Another trick I used to make the preacher stand out was to raise him slightly on the base. To do this I took some odd sprue out of my old sprue bin, and chopped off a corner. I glued it down, then added some more sprue and a plasticard plate on top to make it look like a sidewalk and curb. By carving out chunks, and lines, you can give it the impression of old damaged concrete or metal.
On the back of the base, to give it more visual interest, I drilled some cross holes to make it look like a prefab type of concrete, with some conduit and rebar simulated by some solid copper wire. Elsewhere, I have used cut up sprue that has been drilled out to make it look like clay fired bricks, and used it as scatter to add more texture.
Another visual touch that gives these crusaders the appearance that they are missionaries in the underhive was to add a vertically standing sprue with some wire sticking out of the end to make it look like a broken concrete support column.
This rounded out the miniatures quite nicely as it places them within the underhive in a convincing manner, with some very inexpensive materials, and an hour or so of work.
Thats it for today's throwback. Next time you should see these with a bit of paint on them!
Links:
Games Workshop
