What a thrill…
A few weeks ago, I won a local Necromunda campaign run by Greg “Klobasnek” Narro and made a post about it in celebration on the Goonhammer Patron discord. Like any good shadowy Necromunday overlord, Fowler messaged me within the hour that he would be very interested in my thoughts on the experience. Fortunately, I’m happy to talk about Necromunda, so I’ll leave my fugue state of painting Chaos Marines for a little while to talk about my Delaque Gang, The Snake Eaters.
Why Necromunda? Why Delaque?
It’s really hard to play multiple game systems consistently, especially with how much time and brain space Warhammer 40,000 can take up. I’ve got some beautiful Daughters of Khaine and some Titanicus stuff I’ve been working on, but they often get sidelined for my 40k projects or events. To keep my interest, I want a game that gets an itch that 40k doesn’t really reach: something smaller, shorter, and wackier. After listening to the 40k Badcast House of Blades review, I was sold that the experience I was looking for was Necromunda and bought a box of Eschers the next day. Turns out, Necromunda was the exact gem of a game I was looking for, only having to worry about painting a few models filled to the gills with personality made it an easy hobby commitment. And playing the game almost always came with really memorable moments, like when I was playing against Rocco’s Delaque with my Escher (The Clashettes) in my first ever Necromunda campaign and laughed my ass off at truly the worst game luck I’ve ever had in my life. That’s the kind of game Necromunda is: a game so weird and wild that even losing badly is often a great time.
As far as why I picked Delaque, I wanted a different gang to start off with in Klobasnek’s Necromunda campaign than my Eschers. I love my Escher, but when starting a new league or campaign I think there’s alot of fun and charm in starting off with something new and growing through the campaign with it. So I picked Delaque, which I had seen already in all of their tricksy glory in that aforementioned game against Rocco. They are a finesse gang just like Escher, but that finesse is still different enough to provide a totally different experience. So, I got to work painting Necromunda’s biggest Matrix fanboys.
The name The Snake Eaters? It’s not because I’m a huge Metal Gear fan. I’ve actually never played even a single game in the series. But the games have a legendary reputation, and being as terminally online as I am I decided to make my gang’s theme all about having knockoff Metal Gear names. So we get gems like “Solid Serpent”, “Rain Revolver”, “Otacon Gear”, and “Jetstream Boss”.
My Paint Scheme
My paint scheme for the Delaque is about how quickly can I paint theme models and still make them look great, and what shortcuts can I take to get there. The answer to what those shortcuts are is the same as almost all of my painting shortcuts tend to be nowadays: contrast paint and drybrushing.
Take the coat, for example. Its a dark brown that almost is black at a few points and looks great on Delaque models. To do this, I just put down a coat of Thondia Brown and hit it with some thinned down layers of Black Legion contrast. Then , Drybrush back up the Thondia brown and add a light drybrush on Thondia brown on the highest edges. I find a method like this is the easiest way to paint capes and cloth in general, and it turned out perfectly on the delaque here.
I do have a little bit of OSL here too, with the mechanical eyes on the Delaque models and the Nacht Ghul Ninja Blade. Again, the power of contrast and technical paints shines through here. The Ninja Blade is just some Aethromatic Blue glazes, and the green glow is Tesseract Glow technical paint, which is my secret best trick for any sort of easy green OSL.
The Snake Eaters in the Underhive
For a quick campaign background, the Snake Eaters were playing in a campaign system Greg had created that was a modified Lost Zone campaign, called Greywater Reach. It was very similar to the Lost zone in how may of its changes, like the Trading Post and Skill Advancement, were toned down to try and curb late-campaign snowballing. A few changes were made for some new player accessibility, like having some items be purchasable off the House gear list at any time as long as the item was under 40 Credits after gang creation. I was a big fan of this change, as it meant buying things like basic weapons or mesh armor for my gangers during the campaign wasn’t ever too difficult but the big guns to push campaigns into arms races were hard to come by still.
The campaign featured Greg’s Orlocks, Andrew’s Enforcers, and Luke’s Chaos Van Saar. In any straight up fight, I didn’t really stand a chance against any of these gangs with Delaque. My basic gangers have a very unimpressive gear list at gang creation with middling stats, and because of this my gang was mostly juves to fill out my roster with only a handful of gangers to get access to an autogun and grav pistol later on. This meant most my bozos were running around with cheap Autopistols and couldn’t hit the broad side of a bard with them most the time, so there was no way I could win a fair fight in a shootout with the firepower these gangs brought to bear.
Lucky me then, that delaque are very good at not fighting fair.
One of Delaques best strengths is its champions – who can become very dangerous right out the gate – and the Snake Eaters were no different. My leader had a plasma pistol and web gauntlet. He mostly made sure that my juves could group activate and keep cool. My bruisers were my champions and nacht ghul. Both of these guys could infiltrate, and each was equipped with some very dangerous stuff. The Champion had a meltagun and web gauntlet, which was eye-wateringly expensive at gang creation but meant that with infiltrate and after a levelup the excellent faceless skill, he had little trouble sneaking around and dispatching anything that got in his way. The Nacht Ghul’s ninja blade was a great way to decisively put down any rogue threats as well, and he was stupid fast to boot. I did later give him Wyrd powers from the delaque list as well as picking up a Psy-Gheist for the power Spatial Psychosis, which let me pin enemies as a simple action. Now, as it turns out the Psy-Gheist is terrible at actually casting powers with willpower 8, but as long as he could focus he usually did okay.
Altogether, this meant my play style for this campaign was to trust my juves and leader to play the mission or help pin/web the occasional stray ganger (one juve did have the honor of a web pistol that was much more valuable then they actually were), while my champions did the heavy lifting of dispatching the enemy gang. So missions with custom crew selections were my bread and butter, but The Snake Eaters struggled with missions that were random selection. If it was random selection, it was very possible I would have a gang of almost all juves with my best damage dealers left at home. It also meant if someone actually could take out my champions, my gameplan fell apart real quick. It was a fun playstyle, I felt like an apex predator of the underhive in some games but I was never very far from things flying off the rails if I wasn’t careful.
A weapon to surpass Ambots
When I started the campaign, I decided my campaign goal was to recruit the Delaque Brute, the Piscean Spektor. I had read the Necromunday House of Shadows review and looked at my own book and wanted very badly to give this murder machine a whirl for myself. About midway through, I had enough rep and creds to accomplish this goal and recruited the ultimate weapon of the Underhive: Metal Gear Calamari.
I expected him to be good, but damn was he good.
He flew, which made him great for popping up at unexpected angles to murk any unsuspecting ganger with eight attacks that ignored armor saves and had versatile. He was tough too, with carapace armor, good toughness, and multiple wounds. Any game I got to play with Metal Gear Calamari I felt like I was the monster in a horror movie, lurking in the dark until I struck like a bolt from the black. I even gave him Nerves of Steel once he leveled up for the first time, meaning that now the plan most had for dealing with Calamari by pinning him wasn’t very viable anymore.
He was a terror, scored me the campaign winning kill in the last mission, and absolutely lived up to the name of Metal Gear.
I had a blast in the campaign, and a special shoutout goes out to Greg Narro for all the hard work he put together to host this campaign and hosting us to play at his home. All the missions he selected and work he put into them were full of attention and love for Necromunda, I never had a bad game day while I was there. Hopefully we can do another campaign in the new year, maybe even using the new Ash Waste vehicle rules and some more new faces from our local scene, and I can’t wait for more wild Necromunda times.
Fowler: And that’s it! Dear readers… this could be you! If you have done a cool thing, or painted a rad gang, or maybe just have a nice story about Necro – it could be here. We enjoy writing manifestos about starting campaigns / always overcharging, but we also love being a platform for people who are passionate about the game and the hobby in general. Also, never stop sending ideas or asking for us to write about specific stuff! Lots of folks have asked about updates to Mini Munda as well as some of the gang focuses that have a bit more dust on them. I also owe you a third batch of MANWOLFS!
As always, drop us a line at Contact@Goonhammer.com if you want to get in touch. Cheers!
