Recently my gaming group has been playing a few games of Necromunda which we’ve all been enjoying. After borrowing a Cawdor gang I scavenged some figures from Daniel for a Scavvie gang, which seems appropriate. I believe he picked these figures up as a bulk lot from TradeMe, which turned out to include at least a couple of gangs worth of old Necromunda figures. Most of them were half painted by what looked like a 12-14 year old hand I suspect. However a bit of methylated spirits and some scrubbing got rid of most of that. I still owe you something for these figures too by the way Daniel!
The Scavvies Daniel was kind enough to part with are original Necromunda scavvie figures – evidently Games Workshop have re-sculpted the gang, judging from what they’re selling now. I have to say I think I prefer the older figures, however while these are out-of-production classic high-lead GW Scavvie figures I felt no compulsion not to butcher them!
Since there were a couple of repeated of figures the first thing I did was a few head swaps using my 28mm Pig Iron Rebel heads. The head swaps are pretty obvious in the photos because Pig Iron uses a lighter, low lead pewter and the older GW figures have defining experienced some oxidation. At the moment the heads have simply been pinned onto the bodies and I need to do some basic sculpting to build up some rags around their necks.
I’ve also filed down all of the round Scavvie ‘angry face’ badges these figures seem to be adorned with. I’ll be blanking those off to flat medals with some green stuff and probably painting them up as simple metal tokens, or maybe some kind of crude rad-dosage badge?
Next I de-tagged all the figures – which is surprisingly easy to do when they’re high-lead – and put together a bunch of simple bases. These bases are textured with a selection of resin scraps from my bits box – including some 28mm scale resin corrugated iron, barrel halves and some cast skid-plates. The idea is to paint the bases up so that the bare base you see will become lurid green toxic sludge of some sort, when and if I get around to painting these figures. At any rate now I have a bunch of based Scavvie figures I can game with, in conjunction with the handful of Warhammer Fantasy zombies I have actually painted.
I’ve played a couple of games with this throw together Scavvie gang and haven’t found them completely worthless. I was wondering if they were overly penalised because of the Outlander rules they have to play which seems like it would severely limit your gang’s income during a campaign. However the flip side of that seems to be that Scavvie gang members are pretty cheap to hire, and even armed with homemade weapons, their numbers can add up during a game. Everybody also seems fairly terrified of the rather erratic Plague Zombies which does add a certain element of fun to playing this gang.