Tri-Sun Mining Corporation and Timey-Wimey in Vela Mine(y)

 

So first real post, and I thought I would focus in on the Genestealer gang I have built to serve as the main NPC baddies for the Necromunda campaign I am currently arbitrating, as well as that campaign itself. I present to you the Tri-Sun Mining Corporation (TSMC on the Hive Primus stock exchange).

Like I said, this is my main arbitrator NPC gang, and so I use these guys either in one-on-one games with players in the campaign, or they might show up in multi-players games, but either way, they’re not really “competing” so much as serving as a foil to advance the narrative. And narrative is what its all about when it comes to Necromunda, or at least it should be!

 

This campaign is the Dome Rush variant of the Dominion campaign, as described in the N23 rulebook. The setting is a giant open pit mine called the Vela Mine, but here’s the twist. The Vela Mine does not exist within the time-space continuum, not completely. Rather, it phases or shifts in and out of existence, appearing and disappearing seemingly at random. Each instance of the mine that occurs is unique in some way, the supposed “founding” date of the mine is always different whenever it appears. For example, in the campaign, the players are fighting over a manifestation of the Vela Mine that says it was established in 999 M41, which is a bit of a conundrum for the gangers fighting over its riches, as that is 221 years into the future from their perspective. 

 

The TSMC are extremely interested in the Vela Mine for its mineral riches (as is everybody else) but also because of the wealth of chrono-crystals that occur within the mine. Now, chrono-crystals are one of those pieces of Necromunda equipment that I love not because they’re useful, they’re not. Rules as written, they literally only have one purpose in one specific scenario from N17, so functionally useless in all other situations. But I like to think they were thrown in to give players and/or arbitrators something to take and modify to suit their own needs. So I have.

The chrono-crystals can be harvested as post-battle actions, and I’ve also included them in some scenarios as rewards/loot. They can be sold for 50 creds at the trading post, should a gang ant some quick cash, or they can be activated. To activate one, a ganger has to pass an intelligence check. If they’re successful, they gain both the Blink power, and another random power from the Chronomancy discipline. Should they fail however, the crystal is destroyed, and should they roll a double 1 or 6, just like the Perils of the Warp, it’s bad times. They will automatically gain the enfeebled lasting injury, representing the flow of time speeding up and rapidly aging the ganger. These will stack over the course of the campaign too. I also plan on introducing some vehicles/automata/monsters that have weapons that manipulate time, and any ganger unlucky enough to get hit suffers the same enfeebling effects. 

 

So really, the themes of this campaign are genestealers, mining, and time. I wanted to keep the TSMC aesthetic as functional and simple as I could, while still looking intimidating. I had painted a test mini more than a year ago in the scheme, and really liked it, but I just didn’t have the opportunity to actually make a whole gang. Then we finished our last Necromunda campaign, and I was brainstorming what the next would be, and I also discovered @pastor_llevac on IG and they’re amazing interpretation of a genestealer cult. It all sort of just clicked.  

I of course will take credit for being the inspiration for GW to make GSC one of the focus factions on the upcoming Hive Secundus box set! I kid I kid, but it is a rather interesting coincidence. When the box releases, I may have to split it with a friend, as while most of the stuff I have no interest in, those malstrain genestealers look super cool, and I’d love to add them in. 

Next post I'll probably include some shots from the first round of the campaign. Thanks for reading!

Introduction

 

Hello! Welcome to my blog! I am Sanguinekane (Hugh in meatspace), and I guess I’ll just launch in to it by saying a bit about who I am, and my approach to the hobby as a whole. Hopefully that doesn’t scare you away, but if it does, c’est la vie.

Like a lot of folks, I got my start with Warhammer Fantasy Battle as a kid with little to no real comprehension of the rules, and even less money to spend on minis. Specifically, I came in towards the end of WHFB 4^th in the mid-late 90’s and the aesthetic of that period will always be a formative influence for me. My friends and I spent way more time reading the books, building lists, and having arguments over which hero was the best, and very little time actually building or painting minis. I think I may have “played” one full game in the time. Eventually we moved on to 40k 2^nd edition, and the pattern continued.

As I got into high school my friend groups did actually get more serious about the hobby, and we really did build and (sort of) paint armies and play games, and we branched into other games and systems. WarGods of Aegyptus was a favorite for a bit, then RPGs like Vampire: The Masquerade. But overall it was really the entire worlds that GW had created that stuck with me. I could spend hours in class daydreaming about epic battles of space marines  and orks, though Chaos, no matter the flavor or incarnation, was always the ultimate draw personally.

Of course then college came along, and I dropped the hobby pretty much entirely for almost 15 years. I came back in my early 30’s, primarily through historical wargaming. I work in public history professionally, and have had an abiding interest in military history ever since I was a little kid, so when I found myself with a bit more disposable income than I had had previously in my life, I began to gravitate to games like Bolt Action. After a few years of the historical scene, I found myself being drawn back to WHFB and 40k, and to my shock and horror learned about how my cherished fantasy had been literally blown up, replaced by Age of Sigmar.

Now here’s why I might get a little controversial, but I just am not a fan of AoS as a setting. More power to you if you do like it, it takes al kinds of folks to make the world go ‘round after all. However, I just can’t do it. I find a lot of the minis very cool, and do buy them for kitbashes and conversions occasionally, but with WHFB dead (and The Old World not even a rumor) I “resigned” myself to just playing 40k.

But even then, something was different. None of the current 40k (this would have been 8^th ed) felt the same as what I had remembered. It all felt too clean, too serious, and too…commercialized. Now, I know how many pairs of eyes just rolled at that statement, and I totally get it. GW has ALWAYS been a company that is driven by a profit motive, these games have always been products. I get it, capitalism in all it’s……lovely finery. But nevertheless, I felt no motivation to dive into mainline 40k.

What did grab me though? Inquisitor! I had bought the book back when the game was released, and we had played some games. It was exceedingly complicated (or seemed so at the time) and so I ended up just appreciating it more for the lore and the whole concept of the a parallel “war in the shadows” that went along behind the scenes of the larger battles depicted in mainline 40k.

I devoured the Eisenhorn and Ravenor series, and began to seek out other folks who also appreciated the smaller, more intimate scale of narrative games, which naturally led me to 28 Mag and the 28 community/movement as a whole. From there, it was a short hop to Necromunda, then to games outside of GW’s IP, like Forbidden Psalm or One Page Rules. I am active in several different discords for various aspects of the hobby, including the In Rust We Trust, 28 Mag, Mordheim, Grimdark Film Club, and other communities, and it was actually within those amazing and supportive places that I found encouragement to even start this blog.

So that brings us to now. I’m thinking this space will primarily be a place for me to post my work, with more exposition/lore/worldbuilding than Instagram will allow. Other topics will probably cover things like my approach to playing & arbitrating Necromunda, as that is what my current gaming group plays the most, or musings about the state of the hobby as a whole. I’ll try to keep my personal politics to a relative minimum, but I’ll just let you know right now, I’m an unabashed lefty, and I’ll probably end up with at least one political rant on here, especially given the political climate in the US this election year. So you know, nazi punks fuck off and all that.

Anyway, this is probably more than long enough for an initial post, so I’ll wrap it up here. If you wanna drop me a line my Instagram handle is @Sanguinekane, and I am also under that name on all sorts of Discords, including In Rust We Trust.