White Dwarf 130 wrote:
GLASGOW
Saturday 6th October - Hunt for Red Orctober
The Orcs have stolen the prototype Dwarven submarine and are heading out to sea. Can the Dwarf Gyrocopters sink it before it can get to the open sea and dive. (sic)
If you'd like to play in this Warhammer Fantasy Battle game with a difference contact the shop.

Saturday 13th October - Orkinator
The Orks have 'perfekted' their version of Terminator armour and are boarding a derelict starship to bring their own brand of mayhem to this participation game of Space Hulk.

Thursday 18th October - The Great Escape
An Advanced Heroquest participation game. All characters begin as prisoners of Zargoth the Chaos Lord. Starting without weapons or equipment they must arm themselves and fight their way out of a maze-like dungeon.

White Dwarf wrote: Necromunda's population has never been counted and the chances are that it never will be because the number of people involved is simply too large. There are probably more people on Necromunda than have ever lived in the entire history of Terra up until the end of the twentieth century.

An estimate on the "total number of people who have ever lived" as of 1995 was calculated by Haub (1995) at "about 105 billion births since the dawn of the human race" with a cut-off date at 50,000 BC (beginning of the Upper Paleolithic), and an inclusion of a high infant mortality rate throughout pre-modern history.[13]

White Dwarf wrote:His ancestors are known to have reigned for the past seven thousand years at least, records of government before that time having long since disappeared. Even the Archives of the Adeptus Administratum ... are remarkably silent on the history of Necromunda during the early days of the Imperium

White Dwarf wrote:The hives are grouped into clusters comprising up to a dozen or so individual hives ...

Each hive takes the form or many huge spires which rise from the base of the city. From a distance, a hive resembles a mass of stalagmites... Each hive covers an approximately circular area some fifty to a hundred miles in diameter. The tops of the spires can rise to a dozen or so miles above the ground surface...

There are approximately a thousand hive clusters on Necromunda...

White Dwarf wrote:No unpolluted air, food or water can be found in these dead lands, although there are fungi, algae and bacteria which live on the waste itself. These are believed to be resposnible for the limited free oxygen content of Necromunda's atmosphere.

The ash wastes are a striking and colourful if somewhat lurid environment. The nomads of the waste and even most hive-dwellers who see them would call them beautiful. The ash occurs in many different, often vivid hues such as sulphur yellow, citric green, cobalt blue, pink, mauve as well as various shades of grey, and it varies in texture from fine dust to crystalline clinker.

On a typical hive world air and water pass through, on average, 287.3 other people before reaching the lips of those who inhabit the undercity.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Even before then in the early 90s, there were plenty of articles that were basically previews of Realm of Chaos, 'Ere We Go and Freebooterz.

Lindsey Paton wrote:


You know what you must do, Borshak?" Inquisitor Kryptman asked sternly.
The psyker nodded shakily. "I-I must read this alien artifact and t-tell you what I find."
Kryptman nodded. He mistrusted Borshak - like all empaths, the psyker was highly strung but there was more to it than that. There was a weakness about the skinny youth that made Kryptman suspect that Borshak might be receptive to malign influence. He resolved to watch him closely.
They made their way down the cold corridor of the Talasa Prime base. The two black-robed security novices saluted Kryptman at the door. He answered their salute by punching his fist against his chest.
"Password?" asked one of the novices. Ordinarily Kryptman would have been unfazed by the need to give the code words. Even here in one of the most heavily-guarded citadels of the Inquisition he could understand the need for vigilance. However, he was nervous about the alien artifact and the circumstances it had been discovered in..
Coupled with the reports of sector wide unrest, it had set his nerves on edge. He wondered if the appearance of this strange creature was the harbinger of some new threat to the security of the Imperium.
"Opus Dei," he said testily. The cold-eyed novice stepped aside. Kryptman raised his ring and pointed at the door seal. "No barrier stands in the way of the truly faithful," he said. The red jewel set on his ring pulsed. The runes on the door flared to life and the door dissolved. Kryptman gestured for Borshak to proceed then followed him into the secured area. He knew they were safe in isolation. The secret of the dissolving door was one of the Inquisition's most carefully-guarded secrets and he was one of the few men privy to it.
The artifact sat on a plinth in the centre of the room, the eerie blue aura of the stasis field glowing about it. They moved across to the dais and looked down upon it. "I-it l-looks alive," muttered Borshak. He clawed at his shaven head with one dirty nail-bitten hand. "I-I d-don't like it."
"It doesn't matter whether you like it," said Kryptman.
He understood Borshak's unease. The fleshy, pulpy appearance of the thing set his stomach turning. During his own novitiate he had studied torture techniques. The appearance of the thing reminded far too much of an arm from which the flesh had been flayed to reveal muscle. "Just read it."
"Y-you say that this was taken from the wreckage of the freighter H-hammer of F-foes?" Borshak asked.
"Yes, it was stored in stasis."
This was more like it. The psyker had begun to collect information in order to facilitate his reading. "And that there w-was n-no crewmen on board."
"No living crewmen. Many of the escape pods were fired. They have yet to be found About three of the crew have still to be accounted for. We found the bodies of the others. They had been killed with something that appeared to be organic material. Eaten right through as if by a combination of acid and giant worms. The ship had been decompressed. We found the body of its Astropath floating near the stasis chamber. He had died of oxygen starvation. The artifact was in the chamber."
Borshak took a deep breath. His lined face looked even more worried and careworn than usual. He peeled off his gloves resignedly. "I-I'm ready," he said.
Kryptman intoned the litany. The stasis field de-activated. For a long tense moment they waited. At first nothing seemed to happen and they relaxed slightly. Kryptman checked the readings on the brass-rimmed screen of the wall monitor. The techpriests had been correct, no biological contamination. So far, so good.
He became aware that Borshak was looking at him. He nodded. The psyker proceeded; a grimace of distaste passed over his face as he touched the mucus-coated thing.
He pulled his hand back. A thin film of slime glistening on his skin. "Urgh," he said.
"Get on with it."
With a slight shudder he grasped the thing once more. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, settling down into the trance state needed for psychic receptivity. A faint nimbus of light played around the eye symbol tattooed on his forehead. When he spoke his voice seemed deeper and more confident.
"I-it is alive," he said calmly.
"Sentient?" asked Kryptman.
"B-barely. I'm receiving conflicting impressions of the thing. I've just barely made contact. I-it's so - alien. It's like trying to read the mind of a s-spider."
"Try for a deeper reading." Borshak nodded.
His breathing slowed. If Kryptman had not known better he would have said Borshak was asleep. He noticed a small tic had appeared far back in the psyker's jaw.
"I-it's alive and part of it h-hates. I-it's so fierce. N-no. One of them is so fierce. It lives to bite and claw and spit, it chews up the other part, the little part and makes it into sh-shrapnel. Th-there's three of them. One bites, one guides and o-one - and one dies."
"One dies?"
"Y-yes, one lives to die. I-it's odd. The small one is many. It lives to die. It is chewed up and turned into projectiles and it i-infects the target."
"Speak sense, man."
Borshak had started to sweat. The strain of contact with the alien thing was starting to tell. "I-it's a weapon a-and i-it's alive. The bullets are alive. The firing mechanism is a-alive and the gun's alive. It's a kind of symbiotic organism l-like the martian tree-crab. I-it's alive and we - it hates you - us."
Kryptman's mind reeled. A living weapon? A living rifle? He tried to think of how such a creature might evolve? It was madness - weapons were designed not born. "Try psychometry - find out what happened on the Hammer."
"We are picked up by the sensitive one, the one who speaks at distance. He senses our hate and he responds. At first he is curious then he grows to know and love us. He is united with us. He senses our bloodlove and we hunt - we hunt the meat-things, the enemies of our makers. He knows our need to plant our seed within them. He knows we hunger to spurt forth the little hungry ones who eat the meat. He carries us and we seek our prey through the red dark of the long-long corridors."
Kryptman noticed how agitated Borshak had become. The gun had started to throb in his hand. The fleshy muscular sacs pulsing like the valves of a great exposed heart. He senses that something was wrong.
"Put the thing down, man. It's doing something to your mind."
"We h-hunted the meat-things, to lay the young-eggs within their flesh. Again and again we send them forth, pleasure bursting through us mixed with the pain as we send the little eaters out their way. Fire them out to bore through the meat."
Borshak swivelled the huge gun to bear on him. Kryptman threw himself to one side. The thing in Borshak's hands spasmed. There was a terrible tearing grinding sound..
Kryptman remembered that Borshak had said about the grubs being chewed up and spat out. There was a sound like a man vomiting. A burst of mucus sprayed out. Something hard cracked on the wall behind him. A stink, as of excrement mixed with bile, filled the air.
"Yes-yes, we hunt the meat-things - but they flee into the great dark and they trap the ship - soon it is hard to breathe but the meat-thing, our carrier, our partner, places us in stasis so we might live. Now we have new partner. Groupmind complete."
Kryptman rolled behind the dais, drawing his pistol. The grinding sound continued. A burst of shrapnel tore into the dais. Steam rose from the stone where the acidic mucus eroded rock.
Kryptman leapt up and blasted. The bolt flew straight and true in Borshak's chest. His rib cage exploded. What was revealed within reminded Kryptman oddly of the weapon falling from the psyker's dead hands. He fought to control the urge to pump bolter-shells into it.
It lay there dormant. Borshak's mouth continued to open like a fish's would when out of water. The Inquisitor understood now what had happened on the Hammer. The ship's astropath had melded with the weapon and hunted the unarmed crew. They had fled in the escape pods, after decompressing the ship. Rather than let the weapon die, the astropath had put it in stasis and suffocated himself. That question answered, Kryptman could hand the artifact over to the techpriests for dissection.
There were still other questions that needed answers though: who had made the gun, there had it come from, were there any more?
Kryptman had a premonition that he and the whole Imperium would soon need to know the answers.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Love that story, the early Nids were really scary and alien, more than just Space Bugs.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
I've got the three that saw general release - the ones designed to take separate plastic arms. None of the single-piece ones, though; I've never seen them until I joined the Oldhammer FB group.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Sorry, I meant Brat gangers. The only armless Arbites I have are the ones where I sawed the arms off to make conversions.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
Like I said, the "sergeant" one with the power maul and bolt pistol has his arms out to the sides making them easy to remove, and has no high collar so you can easily reposition the head. Get a few of that guy, some plastic Marine arms and guns and have at it.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The current (non-Primaris) Marine arms fit too. They’re roughly the same bulk as the original sprue that came with the Strike Force box set.