The new edition of Necromunda, the Warhammer 40k spin-off game of gang warfare in the grimy underbelly of a colossal hive city, goes up for pre-order this Saturday. While the bloated rules definitely need to be trimmed and rationalized, existing fans may not be thrilled to face a stack of rulebooks becoming obsolete. To sugar the pill somewhat, Games Workshop has announced plans to make the rules for 74 special characters, alliances, delegations, and hangers-on available via a free download called ‘Necromunda’s Most Wanted’.
Players will still need a copy of either the new ‘Gangs of the Underhive’ or ‘Gangs of the Outlands’ books to build a gang in the new edition. But there are so many additional bounty hunters, odd-jobbers, and Dramatis Personae, that Games Workshop could easily have filled a third book if it had wanted to – thank the Emperor it decided not to.
You can find the full list of models that will appear in Necromunda’s Most Wanted on the Warhammer Community website. A few models aren’t going to be in the PDF, mostly the ones with plastic model kits – those will appear in the two Gang books in a short section on ‘supplementary fighters’.
The 2017 edition of Necromunda had one of the most tortuous release processes of any GW game – if you think repurchasing a Warhammer 40k codex every three years is irritating, that’s nothing on Necromunda. The game’s initial development was done in just three months to hit a Christmas release slot, a last-minute decision made after Adeptus Titanicus was pushed back for a year so its minis could be redesigned as plastic sculpts. Necromunda was essentially unfinished when it launched.
The game was completed through a series of small pamphlet supplements which added in gangs and gameplay systems, which were eventually recapped into a revised rulebook and gang list book. That didn’t stop it expanding further, with hardback supplements each with a mixture of content: a new gang, a new campaign mode, new special characters or hangers-on. Even the ‘House Of’ books, nominally dedicated to a single gang, often contained rules for allied delegations that could be taken by several other gangs.
There were even more characters which had rules but never got official models. GW says that “the studio will be looking at giving some of them updated rules in the future so you’ll still be able to use any awesome conversions you’ve made”.
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Source: Wargamer
