H.B.M.C. wrote:

Zenithfleet wrote:
In Necro, the battles could be a little lacklustre due to the clunky 2nd ed mechanics (IMO), but the campaign play was deep and involving.

I disagree. I think that the 2nd Ed 40k rules came into their own with Necromunda. Finally they were applied to a skirmish game of individual fighters, rather than a wargame with squads. The scale of 2nd Ed's level of granularity just fit with Necromunda better than it did 40k Proper.

It was't perfect, obviously, but it seemed like the 2nd Ed rules (which were basically adapted Fantasy rules anyway!) really started to sing when applied to a smaller game type.

Wiz Warrior wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Book of Boba Fett miniatures game?

Funny how I keep seeing Boba fett attributed to a setting far older than even star wars itself. Im not talking about necromunda, but the concept of a desert wasteland. it's not an indictment against those who havent been exposed to more varied media than what is literally shoved in front of their faces to consume, but it is definitely indicative of it.

For an over 100 year old example, should you motivate yourself enough to look, is the John Carter of Mars series, (which was also produced by the House of Mouse in your preferred media form) though the words that Edgar Rice Burroughs chooses to use may seem archaic by todays standards, making it for a medium weight read that may require a dictionary on hand for younger readers.

But that's merely one example I urge you, kind reader, to explore. It's a big universe out there, and its a lot bigger than the House of Mouse would have you believe.

alphaecho wrote:

I enjoyed the John Carter movie but I am, relatively, easily pleased.

What I did enjoy more were some of the reviews that accused the John Csrter storyline of being derivative!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

RazorEdge wrote:
Also there isn't enough Terrain which let the set look awfull.

Not enough terrain in a game mostly based around mounted combat in giant ash waste deserts?

Plus dunes and scrap piles are a doddle to make.

 Overread wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Maybe some of the gangs from Necromunda Proper just don't show up in Ash Wastes because it wouldn't make much sense for them to venture out. Cawdor and Delaque are the two that strike me as groups that have no business in the wastes, the former because how are they going to cobble together vehicles and the latter because what would they want in a desert?

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:
I wondere how they're gonna handle Vehicles vs rideable mounts rules-wise.

Poorly?

The problem with being lore selective when making something like this is that it leaves some armies "out" and that means leaving some players, fans and customers out. If this is the new direction for a lot of the games content coming forward then leaving out some groups would leave those customers with nothing to buy and less reason to stick around. It's not that every army has to have every thing, but if you make a subgame and invite only a few armies that is leaving players totally out of the loop.

So I don't see GW doing that; yes some factions will take longer and some might get more models than others. Indeed that might be how they do it; factions that feature heavily in the wastes might have a more varied roster; whlist those who feature less might have fewer units that they use more often or that come with more optional parts.



As for vehicles vs mounts I suspect they'll handle it the same way they handle such things in 40K and AoS.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
The bit about Flash Gordon, I'm sure Flash started as a comic strip not a serial.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I'd expect this to be in the main summer "new edition" slot.

Zenithfleet wrote:
For a long time my forlorn dream was a version of Necromunda using the LotR SBG core rules. No, really! They're also by Rick Priestley and intended for small-model-count games, and they play like a streamlined and modernised 2nd edition (opposed combat rolls and so on). GW Historical actually did a Wild West game (Legends of the Old West) that came pretty close to what I wanted, although it used Mordheim's campaign system rather than Necro's. I even tried writing it myself, although I had a snowball's chance in the Sump of convincing anyone else to try it.

(Also wouldn't mind a version of Mordheim using that ruleset, a la Legends of the High Seas.)

zamerion wrote:
and some wheeled reveals for Necromunda: Ash Wastes.

Some reveals next week

 Wha-Mu-077 wrote:

zamerion wrote:
and some wheeled reveals for Necromunda: Ash Wastes.

Some reveals next week

The train?

 Geifer wrote:

The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla laughs at GW's idea of "realistic" wasteland dwellers.

Modern pseudo-scientific rubbish.

 Zywus wrote:

 Geifer wrote:

The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla laughs at GW's idea of "realistic" wasteland dwellers.

Modern pseudo-scientific rubbish.

When did Chris Jericho comment on ash wastes gangers?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Interesting bit of background, I never read Gorkamorka and didn't know it was meant as a Necromunda supplement. Ah what could have been...

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Dunno if it "nearly bankrupted them" but I think they seriously overestimated people's love of Orks, Mad Max and vehicle games.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I'd expect this to be in the main summer "new edition" slot.

 PetitionersCity wrote:

Spoiler:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On GorkaMorka, it was also meant to be the first in Xenos equivalents of Necromunda.

There’s also the claim that due to foreign language overproduction it nearly bankrupted GW.

I do know that when they axed it, you could walk into a GW and pick up Spanish (maybe German?) copies for very little money. Like, a few quid.

Whether that is the source of the claim, or proof of the claim I don’t know - but I suspect it’s just the GW equivalent of a Conspiracy Theory.

It's worth checking out interviews with Rick Priestley:

Rick Priestley: Warmaster was a slightly odd project for me. During its development the situation within the business shifted from a position where the creative staff within the studio were coming up with the plan for product to one where the sales staff were beginning to dictate what product should be made and when it was released. It was a political shift within the business, which had always been led by its creative ambitions up to that point. In many ways it was a factor of growth and the issues that growth would bring. In very broad terms, I would say that Games Workshop would go on to be led by its sales divisions and then for a time by its manufacturing division and broader supply chain management.

These different factions within the business became key to success at different stages of growth. That inevitably meant other aspects of the business were obliged to conform to one faction’s capacities and evolving competencies. By the mid ’90’s the sales companies were fuelling our rapid growth, and the policy from the top was to give them their head. That meant the ‘sales’ view on new and proposed products was suddenly thrust to the fore. This shift in the focus of decision making would throw up inevitable problems. In the early ’90’s I would set the initial print quantities for products after talking requirements through with the rest of the exec. Once the sales companies gained control of their own print quantities they over-ordered like crazy because the last thing a salesman wants is to be out of stock of anything. On at least two occasions, this resulted in overstocks that would have bankrupted most similar-sized companies and which we weathered only with the greatest difficulty.

Against that background we had attempted to relaunch our ‘Epic’ scale range with a Titan combat game called Titan Legions. We had done quite well with the previous iteration of the ‘Epic system’ Space Marine (’91), so the plan fitted in with the general idea of relaunching our core systems every few years with new models, as we had for Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. The game was designed by Andy Chambers and new plastic Titans were created as centre-pieces. Sales were poor compared to previous years’ main releases. The sales companies were very quick to blame the product. Of course, sales numbers were targeted against previous years, so you were always comparing sales against Warhammer 40K re-launches, which would always outsell anything. It didn’t matter what you chose as your main annual release: sales numbers would always look poor compared to Warhammer 40K. There was also an issue with the French, Spanish, Italian and German markets being relatively ‘immature’, which meant the customer base for anything other than Warhammer wasn’t there in the same way it was for the English language product. Of course, we didn’t have to take account of such things in the ’80’s or until GW started to expand its sales arm beyond the English language market.

After the poorly received Titan Legions release the sales companies became very antagonistic towards any ‘Epic’ based game. Insisting that all future products had to be 28mm. This diktat posed something of a problem. The studio had already started work towards the fantasy ‘Epic’ system that would become Warmaster. This was scheduled to come out in 1997 in the main release slot in the autumn. The sales companies insisted that we drop the Warmaster proposal and do a 28mm game instead. By that time it was very late in the day to come up with a new game. Way too late by the terms of our normal operational deadlines. So we looked to cobble together a game that used whatever other work we had in progress at the time.

As it happened the studio had already started work on a series of Ork releases that included a bike and buggy. That gave us a starting point to work from. The result was Gorkamorka, an Orkish re-skin of the Necromunda game system. Using an existing game system and work-in-progress as the basis allowed us to hit the autumn launch slot. We could never have done it had we started from scratch. Gorkamorka was one of those games that the sales companies massively over-ordered and which would cause us great pain as a result. It was a good effort from the studio working against the tightest of deadlines, and had it been ordered in reasonable quantities and promoted in an appropriate manner I’m sure it would have been considered a success. It just wasn’t Warhammer 40K. But then what was?

Meantime, I had the design work for the ‘fantasy epic’ game Warmaster, originally planned to take that ’97 slot. It was imagined to use 8mm models (like Epic 40K) arranged in ranked strips. The game would be a ‘big box set’ of the standard size, complete with plastic armies, siege equipment and fortifications. I’d already come up with the concept model for the plastic fortifications, and we’d designed some armies in metal to trial out the system. The game itself was partly inspired by the turn-over mechanic in Blood Bowl, and was based on the idea that you’d dice for movement whilst combat resolution would be relatively breezy. The core of the game was in the command element, the manoeuvre of armies rather than individual combat, as suggested by the scale. Although by this time I had moved away from a design role, the fact that I’d already designed the game meant that I was keen to see it published. It was eventually published in 2000, but very much in the teeth of opposition from the sales companies. All the plastic was dropped and the game was released as a book in a secondary release slot at Easter. The models were no longer ‘Epic’ scale but larger at 10mm to distance them from the taint of the 40K Epic range.

Something of a last gasp from that phase of creativity in the late ’80’s to early ’90’s, Warmaster is still occasionally cited as the best game I’ve ever written. It was certainly the only game I played regularly at that time, and which I continued to play to some extent even when I left GW, although I must admit it’s now been a few years since I did so. Black Powder (published by Warlord Games) was derived from Warmaster and, like WAB, was another project initiated by Jervis Johnson that I developed and completed. I did a version for ancients, published as a stablemate to WAB, which was well-received by ancient players and helped to establish the ’10mm’ size of figure in historical gaming.

In the fourth part of the interview, the development of Confrontation and Necromunda is discussed:

Rick Priestley: Confrontation was a project of Bryan Ansell’s that never really gelled into anything tangible. I wasn’t involved in it creatively but I wrote-up Bryan’s old Laserburn rules for publication in WD as the ‘Confrontation’ engine. It was just a rules editing job really. I remember going over Laserburn and trying to rationalise some of the stickier elements. Laserburn has turns divided into fractions of time that allowed for detailed actions. It was quite complicated and I thought it was hard to keep track of. The fractions included both ‘thirds’ and ‘quarters’ of a turn, for example. I never played Laserburn (never played the Confrontation version either). The rules were just mechanics that needed sorting out as far as I remember. I did a lot of that kind of thing with rules put together by various folk. Usually when something needed turning round fast. I rewrote the Talisman game rules at one point for example.

Confrontation didn’t really have a games designer at the heart of it and I think that was the problem. It was the sort of project I would have instinctively avoided to be honest! I know it was abandoned at some point leaving quite a lot of artwork, including some crazy psychotic looking clown costumed gang concepts and other weirdness drawn by John Blanche. Tony Ackland produced a lot of very atmospheric artwork that explored the environment. Fantastic stuff really. But all quite mad. I suspect Bryan would have been trying to give the project some impetus through the artwork, but these things need a writer and games designer behind them if they are to work in my experience. I think the idea was that Confrontation would be set within the 40K universe to piggy-back on the success of 40K; however, it had nothing to do with 40K as far as I could tell. It was a capsular universe: very much its own thing. The 40K narrative was set up to allow for individual world backgrounds, and we’d exploit this potential later, but at the time I did feel it was like trying to shoehorn something into the 40K setting.

I don’t recall when Confrontation was abandoned, but it wasn’t on the studio agenda by the time that Bryan was actively selling the company. Once GW sold there was no champion for the game and we had bigger issues to deal with in terms of the future of the company and product development. We were left with some names – Necromunda and Lord Helmawr – and a little background information in respect of 40K that included a reference to an Imperial Guard unit. We had this general concept of a hiveworld with city spires sticking out of a polluted wasteland. And we had some artwork relating to those things. I rather liked the names Necromunda and Helmawr – I’ve no idea who came up with those – I guess they were coined by Bryan. Good names anyway. The central image of the city spires sticking out of the wastes had become ingrained and was powerful. I liked that too. Those were the elements I took from Confrontation when I wrote Necromunda.

Necromunda fitted into the new scheme I’d come up with for the product line. That must have been the back end of 1991. We had moved into a new studio building on Castle Boulevard in Nottingham. The move was part of readying the company for sale. The new shiny offices were much more impressive than the old shabby warren on Middle Pavement the studio had occupied since the mid 80’s. Anyway, I remember touring round these be-suited venture capitalists and the whole thing looked surprisingly clean and well-organised. Must have worked because soon after that the company changed hands in the shape of a management buy-out led by Tom Kirby. From that point we had to re-make the business in order to build turnover and rationalise production. We had a huge debt to pay off and we couldn’t just carry on as we were.

I came up with a plan for the product lines, and in particular Warhammer and 40K, that would re-define the ranges in terms of boxed starter sets with plastic models, dedicated army books and associated plastic and metal models to go with them. I know it sounds obvious… but that wasn’t necessarily how it had worked in the past. Looking to the future, I had this ambition to produce a series of games set within the 40K background that would explore either a particular world or a particular theme. A spaceship combat game would be one example of the latter. We – which is to say the creative team – had ideas for a number of 28mm miniatures based skirmish style games that would be interesting to do without creating a huge demand for new figures. The plan was that we’d have the core 40K game as our constant and then these other games, which we anticipated would come and go from the catalogue, much as games always had in the past. I also wanted to build the 40K story with a series of campaign supplements for which folks would use their existing 40K forces perhaps with the addition of personality figures and the odd special. These last would be easiest to do because they were mostly writing and artwork. Figure design was the pinch-point at the time – hard to imagine these days when there are so many talented sculptors – but back then it was a very rare skill indeed. Building up the figure design department was a real priority but would be a hard slog and never quite achieved until long after my tenure. The point is than we had to design games around smaller numbers of models or – more strictly – fewer designs.

After the relaunch of Warhammer and 40K we needed to produce a box game to go into the main release slot for 1995 and I thought the Necromunda setting would make a good basis for a ‘Wild West’ style game… in space…as it were. So, I pushed the setting down into the underhive, leaving the spires as functioning cities whose populations could play whatever role in the Imperium such worlds had always played. The underhive became a dystopic ‘Wild West’ and the game itself would be inspired by tales of the American frontier in the mid-nineteenth century. The underhive setting with its chemical wastes and mutants would become the land inhabited by a native population who lived ‘at one with nature’ and had a strong spiritual relationship with the environment. Into that environment we planted frontier settlements and a landscape of interconnected domes, ancient and overbuilt, but often treasure houses of abandoned waste accumulated over the millennia.

The game itself would use the 40K mechanics – which I imagined would remain constant across all these games – something that would enable people to switch from one game to another fairly easily. The gangs were envisaged as all human because it was a human world – but each has characteristics I’d normally associate with a fantasy race. So the Goliaths are big, brutal and I some respects ‘Orkish’, for example. Six is a good number for variation of game play and I came up with the six ‘Houses’ which give you your basic culture types for the gangs. It was actually Tom – our boss – who was insistent about having a three-dimensional element to the games and he had this notion it would be played on a 3-D plastic construct with levels and ladders joining walkways together. This wasn’t really very practical for a number of reason, not least being the sheer cost, but in the end I took the idea and we produced a plastic frame into which card walkways and walls could be slotted. I remember making the concept piece for that myself out of mounting card, just to get the engineering as I wanted it.

The whole design team and quite a few of the staff started playing the game at lunchtime and we organised a campaign in the studio which anyone who wanted to join could do so. I think that’s where Andy and Jervis would have finessed the gang development and character progression design. Jervis had created something like that for BloodBowl, and that was the model I used to build the initial system, but when it came to getting the balance right and turning it into something workable I suspect Andy and Jervis would have taken a lead. Chris was actually our production manager – in charge of the guys putting together the products – so it just goes to show that these things are very much a collaborative effort. Of course, we didn’t have the actual models at that point, and we had to convert gangs from ordinary 40K models. I built my gang using the Catachan Imperial Guard models and everyone did something similar.

Necromunda was very successful. At the time there was so much demand for ‘new product’ that the studio was expected to churn out supplements for it, which we did, but I always felt this was over-egging the concept. There was a lot of, ‘When are we going to have Space Marines in Necromunda’ type of pressure that I thought was entirely missing the point. I always felt it would have been better to have gone on to explore Space Marine chapters with their own Necromunda style supplements rather than cramming Space Marines into Necromunda. And so on for other races and worlds. An Eldar Craftworld turned feral and fought over by rival Eldar gangs amidst ruins dominated by alien parasites was one we wanted to do. It was not to be though, and soon the opportunity fell away once the driving force behind product development shifted as I’ve already described elsewhere.

Andy Chambers' interview on the same site is also interesting:

Andy Chambers: My only real contact with Confrontation was helping Jervis Johnson to run a participation game of it at my first Games Day at Derby Assembly Rooms in 1990. It might even have been a Golden Demon day but I’m not sure we’d started doing them then. Confrontation was… not easy to run, Jervis had come up with a nifty slide-rule like device for calculating the percentiles more easily – but the fact we needed one should tell you all you need to know. I recall asking him in the van on the way back whether he thought it might make a decent 40K skirmish and he opined that it would be too complex and just result in a set of dice rolls against armour. That was the last of that for several years. When Necromunda kicked off there was really no connection at all to Confrontation in my mind except that we played initial games on some enormous urban/tunnel terrain boards Nigel Stillman had originally made for Confrontation. Rick drew some inspiration from the old art and background I think but Necromunda was very much its own thing. Necromunda itself was great and a real treat to work on, 40K 2nd ed worked well with a small number of figures and a few tweaks like pinning and bottle tests rounded it off nicely. It was extremely popular around the Studio, so we ran a series of campaigns that gave us solid feedback for the campaign rules too. Great fun.


Holding with the original version of Necromunda, I asked Andy about Outlanders, the supplement that brought forward new gangs such as Scavvies, Ratskins and Redemptionists, amongst others. I wondered what the inspirations behind the new gangs and characters was, also if there were any favourites he had.

Andy Chambers: While Necromunda had been run with Rick and Jervis as leads I was more or less turned loose to do what I wanted with Outlanders. Many of the new gangs were ideas that had been suggested in the campaign like Ratskins and Scavvies so we had some great advocates for them when doing Outlanders. The whole idea was to take things more to the extremes than the House-based main gangs in Necromunda (hence ‘Outlanders’), Spyrers for the top end predator-like Nobility, Scavvies and Ratskins for the absolute bottom, plus Redemptionists for some insane, fiery zealotry with a nod back to the old Lazerburn game (which had bled into Confronation) and the Lone Sloane graphic novels by Druillet they were inspired by in the first place. The Redemptionists were always a personal favourite of mine and the comic version of The Redeemer is one of my favourite characters ever.

As I mention above Redemptionists brought me joy, although I’d run Goliaths forever in the campaigns prior to Outlanders – the infamous Dog Soldiers being the Goliath gang, who were mostly infamous because I called them infamous, although they did get pretty numerous by the end.

Moving from Necroumda to Gorkamorka, another game that still attracts a sizeable cult following, I was interested in gaining some background information on the game system and its subsequent add-on, Digganob.

Andy Chambers: Gorkamorka came as something of a surprise if I’m honest, it was clear Necromunda was popular and we’d half expected to do an Ash Wastes Mad Max type game to build off it. The decision came down as Orks instead and it came down pretty late as I recall so it represented a frantic eight-week period of building a campaign, gang lists, armouries and scenarios around the background and core vehicle rules Rick wrote. I don’t remember it too fondly as it was a strong contrast to Necromunda where we had plenty of time to finesse. I’m glad people like it, and it does have a fun premise but like I say it was a tough bite of a publishing reality sandwich for me. When it came to Digganob I was happy to pass the reigns along to Gav Thorpe so he could take the lead much as I had with Outlanders, I think it was his first big box supplement and they were a good learning experience.

 ImAGeek wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:
I'd expect this to be in the main summer "new edition" slot.

That’ll be the big new edition of Horus Heresy, surely.

 Flinty wrote:

 Blackie wrote:
Book of Boba Fett miniatures game?

I really hope not because those stupid hover Vespas made me so angry I stopped watching the show.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Feels like that video escaped early.

pgmason wrote:
"Battle Ready" are beginner level, and "Parade Ready" have more detail.