The Piper at the Gates of Down

They say that he comes out in the dead of night shift. When the forges are only just ticking over, when the Hive hums with the quiet lives of the darktimers, when the lights are low to conserve power. Then he can be heard, metal boots on metal floors. His sightless head swinging side to side, seeing without eyes. And if that blank face catches you, they say, his pipe will rise and a skirl of noise will reach out and wrap itself around you and they say you will follow him to the Gates that lead down, down below even the underhive and there.... there ehy do not say what will happen to you. But you will not come back. So they say. 

I've been waiting for inspiration to strike with the Delaque kit. The Dune Navigator is an obvious choice, but there seemed to be other possibilities in this rather Cliver Barker-esque style.

And so we have this guy.

A relatively simple conversion - a generstealer head fastened in the wrong way round and an arm from the escher kit for a slightyl spindly, out of proportion look and we were away.

The final result is pleasingly creepy, I think.

The Church of the Devoured

Since the day you were born, your lives have not been your own. You have been used, and abused, and cast down amongst the filth by those above. You are not a person. You are a cog in the machine. You are production output. You are a target. You are nothing. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your lives. They are as dust. Worse: you are food. Meat to be consumed by the machinery of this Empire of Man.  Our lives are eaten by the factories. Our sons and daughters are eaten by the conscription tithes. Even our dead are fed back to us. 

But it does not have to be that way. You can rise up, on the teeth of angels; rise up, born aloft by the love of the Allfather, the True Emperor, the Devourer of Mankind. The God King who cares for you, who will cherish you and who will empower you. And when there are enough of us, we shall rise from the ashes and dirt and rust and bring hungry vengeance upon those who have despised us. The devoured shall become the devourers! Rise up, my brothers! Rise up, my sisters! Let your old lives end and be born anew into glory!

-Pater Dol, preaching in the Underhive

Several of these you will recognise as the core of my Necromunda gang, built as stock Genestealer Cultists. For Kill Team I added a couple of Space Hulk Genestealers and some more cultists built from the Cawdor gang and cultist bits:

To get the best of the Cawdor kit - which has some great bits in it - you have to be willing to be brutal and start using the saw and knife quite forcefully. 

If I knock together a couple of infiltrators that now means I have two complete Kill Team Rosters. 

Myself and the eldest spent the afternoon building - me some Hobbit Goblins and he a cheap little Revel Star Wars kit I had kicking around for him.

The Church of the Twice Born

Since the day you were born, your lives have not been your own. You have been used, and abused, and cast down amongst the filth by those above. You are not a person. You are a cog in the machine. You are production output. You are a target. You are nothing. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your lives. They are as dust.

But it does not have to be that way. You can rise up, on the wings of angels; rise up, born aloft by the love of the Allfather, the True Emperor. The God King who cares for you, who will cherish you and who will empower you. And when there are enough of us, we shall rise from the ashes and dirt and rust and bring vengance upon those who have despised us. Rise up, my brothers! Rise up, my sisters! Let your old lives end and be born anew into glory!

-Pater Dol, preaching in the Underhive

Since the old days I've always loved the idea of Genestealer cults. Necromunda is just the perfect excuse to make some. I've had the box of miniatures for ages as parts have been used for all my conversions over the last year, so the total cost of this little gang was £0.

In terms of painting, I wanted to capture the oily blue grey of the Harkonnen from Lynch's Dune as seen here modeled by Sting:

Creating this colour was a relatively complex process: a grey green base with a transparent blue wash; edge highlighting of sea grey and then a blue glaze over the whole before a black wash to filter everything back down to the darker end of the tonal scale.

I think the hassle was worth it, though, as the Sons of the Twice Born look pretty much exactly how I'd always imagined them.

Space Hulk

The big victory over the summer was the completion of the new Space Hulk Set. A really lovely set of miniatures to construct and paint and the whole shebang looks lovely when it's together. Expect this to hit the table soon.

I even painted the door bases...

Space Hulk

It's the best game ever. We all know this to be true. There are few games that can get the adrenaline surging like being the Marine player on a 3-minute clock as what feels like thousands of stealers pour down the corridor towards you...

Anyway, as you know I've replaced the terminators with metal ones. Today I dug out the boxes and started figuring out what was there and what wasn't.

First up, the Stealers. All present and correct although they have been painted in my Blue Crab Tyranid colour scheme. This doesn't bother me. The pale colour fits with the lightless confines of space hulk for me. And I have plenty more Stealers if I decide to go old school with them.

There were also the Genestealer hybrids from the expansion. I have no intention of using these but they should be fun to paint up.

There were also the Librarians, continuing the pattern of awful Marine plastic sculpts for this game.

I seem to have a full set of all counters except the doors. Annoyingly I know I've seen them somewhere before we moved house; so the question is do I buy a replacement set from ebay for a tenner or do I design and laser cut my own from MDF?

Lastly, and most annoyingly I have all the rule books and even the hardback campaign book - but not the original Mission book. Does anyone know where I can find a pdf copy of that?

Lastly, and most annoyingly I have all the rule books and even the hardback campaign book - but not the original Mission book. Does anyone know where I can find a pdf copy of that?

Overall I'm very happy - as soon as I can score the missions, I'm ready to play.

And some leftovers in the original paint scheme