Hey scummers! If you weren’t sick of Primaris Kevin already with Hammer of Math, he’s also showcasing his Murder Hornets Van Saar gang!
I’ve been in and out of the hobby since 2nd Edition (with a hobby backlog to match) and while I love 40k, there’s just something special about the combination of tactical gameplay, roleplaying game, and unadulterated insanity that comes from fighting in the underhive. I still fondly remember throwing dice back in the 90s while moving models over cardboard terrain, with my Redemptionists turning my poor opponents heretics into ambulatory bonfires before cutting them down with Eviscerators. Things have been great with the new edition and I am excited to share my Van Saar gang, the Murder Hornets.
I’ve always enjoyed the idea of Van Saar, and while playing with a scheme for Marines Malevolent I came up with a really fun method for painting yellow. Goobertown Hobbies has a really good video on it, but you basically start with an undercoat of pink and then add a zenithal spray of white overhead. Yellow is my favorite color and between looking like bugs and Murder Hornets being just one more thing about 2020 it seemed like a logical choice.
To paint the gang I adapted the method a bit using the following method:
- Undercoat GW Wraithbone.
- Coat with Liquitex Ink! Magenta.
- Zenithal spray with Wraithbone.
- Drybrush white.
- Coat with Liquitex Ink! Yellow Orange Azo.
- Line recesses with Army Painter Soft Tone.
The guns start with Wraithbone and are followed with GW Blood Angel Contrast, Army Painter red tone, and where needed some panel lining with Soft Tone. The blue bits start white, are ringed with thinned GW Talassar Blue, and then blended to white with thinned GW Aethermatic Blue. The metal is Vallejo Air Gunmetal highlighted with Vallejo Air Silver and then washed with Army Painter Dark Tone.
I really enjoy making things my own, so I played around with a few things. Instead of bare heads I trimmed away the hair and made every model covered in a black full body glove. I omitted the tails (I hate them) and put a bunch under a Skitarii head to make a squid like pet to represent a grapplehawk. All of the shields are magnetized as well, and several of the guns are kitbashed.
The biggest changes happened to Crabro (all of the gangers are named after wasps and hornets), the Archeotek. I really don’t understand what GW was thinking with the Archeotek, but it’s really oddly built. I think the best way to run it is to build a heavy weapons platform, using Gamma Torsonic and Alpha Ocular Cyberteknika and grabbing a heavy weapon off the Trading Post. Magnetizing the model allowed me to have flexibility for a Lost Zone campaign where you aren’t guaranteed a particular gun.
I changed a lot about the model, adding a backpack from a Hellblaster and cutting down the obnoxiously phallic dangly bit to something that looked more like armor instead of a cry for help. Instead of yet another protrusion in the front I used Green Stuff to sculpt a full chest plate. The multi-melta is a set of barrels from a few Armiger sprues while the heavy bolter is a mix of random bits and plasticard.
In terms of composition I tend to go fairly simple, with Subteks and Neoteks equipped with lasguns and a variety of special weapons for the specialist and leaders. I’m a big fan of the grav gun, and even the meltagun is suitably terrifying in close quarters. I could easily have just slapped a bunch of plasma guns in the gang but I don’t think that’s particularly fun. In both Lost Zone campaigns I played Crabro ended up with a heavy bolter and he quickly became the personification of death. Archeoteks aren’t allowed energy shields (WHY?) so he tends to lug around a ceramite shield if I find one.
I have a lot of things on my plate, but my Necromunda expansion plans include painting up a bunch of Sector Mechanicus terrain I assembled, adding some more Neoteks in preparation for Ash Wastes, and painting an Escher Gang for my daughter. I also assembled a Tech Merchant that I want to paint and a few other hangers on. Of course there’s also Tyranids to paint and plenty of things in the real world as well, but hope springs eternal.
One of the best things about Necromunda is how many opportunities you have to do random things. A good example is the driller bot I built for the Archaeo-Hunters mission. It has no use outside of that one game (and possibly a Rogue Ambot…), but it was fun to paint and I think it looks cool.
Thanks for reading! I hope this article provided you with some inspiration or ideas. If you have questions, I am always on the Patreon Discord and am @PrimarisKevin on Twitter and Instagram.
(Editor’s note: I liked fellow Kevin’s Murder Hornets so much that I painted up a Spyrer proxy like one!)
And that’s it! We love Kevin’s Van Saar scheme and look forward to seeing more of them in the future. If you are into stats, check out his regular column Hammer of Math. He even did an article about Ammo Checks in Necromuda! As always, if you have hot takes or hot tips drop us a line at Necromunday@Goonhammer.com.
