The Necromunda box that went up for pre-order in August has the word “Skirmish” printed across the front of it, and that’s been nagging at me ever since. Necromunda doesn’t need a qualifier. It’s Necromunda. Eight people with stub guns and a grudge, fighting over a water still. Sticking a subtitle on it looked like the setup to something, and on the 18th, at the Big Autumn Preview, GW said what: there’s a second Necromunda now, Warhammer Necromunda Roleplay, and the other box says Skirmish so you can tell them apart on a shelf.
The bit I didn’t see coming was which faction they gave the players.
You don’t play a house gang. You play a Venator band, which on Necromunda is the crew you join after you’ve walked away from your house, and that’s a much stranger choice than it sounds if you know what the word has meant since 2018.
What’s actually in the Necromunda Roleplay Core Set
Eighteen new plastic miniatures and a 224-page Core Rulebook. Four of the models are Iconic Characters, meaning the pre-made player party: an Escher Assassin, an Orlock Gunslinger, a Squat Fixer and a Goliath Champion, each with alternate builds if you’d rather roll your own. Five more are Adversaries, and the list of those is a Scabber, a Saboteur, a Hive Preacher, a Cadaver Merchant and a Heretek with a servo-skull. The last eight are Hive Scum, which is GW’s term for nameless blokes you shoot.
You also get two double-sided card playmats, eleven player handouts, an Arbitrator’s screen, fifty blank character sheets, and a D10 and D100 alongside the usual D6 and Firepower and Injury dice. Resolution is roll-under: your skill value, modified by difficulty, and you try to get beneath it. The box ships with two adventures, “An Abominable Intelligence” and “The Pilgrimage of Bones,” and launches next to a 48-page expansion called Journal Apocrypha: Denizens of the Hive, which stats up 51 more Adversaries using models you probably already own.
The Arbitrator is the GM. You can build characters from any of the six Clan Houses, or from a seventh origin called the Underhiver, or you can play a Squat.
Venators put their names down before the job
White Dwarf #430, back in May 2018, ran a piece called The Rites of the Hunt that is still the best thing written about these people. It describes Necromundan bounty hunters as a spread running from desperadoes who hunt because it’s the only way they know to fund the next bottle of Wildsnake, all the way to witch hunters doing it out of religious fervour. Some of them, the magazine says, “border on being classified as death cults and are only allowed to exist so long as their murderous instincts serve the Imperial House.”
Then it gets to the initiation, and this is the bit I think about.
Coming together into a Venator band is described as a nigh-religious experience, heavy with ritual, and the oldest surviving tradition in the hives requires the hunters to set aside their individual identities for the length of the hunt. They put on hoods. Snarling masks. Sometimes an executioner’s noose, which on Necromunda is worn as a symbol of faith. WD #430 finishes the thought by noting that when Venators show up in a settlement, death isn’t far behind.
Everyone else on that planet is their house. A Goliath is a Goliath before he’s anything, and the new Goliath book spends its length arguing about what that even means. An Escher belongs to a matriarchy. Your surname decides your job, your dialect, your clothes and which tunnels you’re allowed to walk down. WD #430 puts the hood and the mask at the centre of the Venator ceremony, worn for the length of the hunt and taken off at the end of it.
The kit stays, though, which is the part GW got right in plastic. Former gangers keep the symbols of their old house, keep using the weapons and armour they were trained on, and keep quiet channels open to their old gang mates for gear and information, all while working shoulder to shoulder with people they used to shoot at. Look at the four Iconic Characters again. The Escher is dressed Escher, down to the mask and the crest, and the Goliath has the same slab shoulders and spiked plate he’d be wearing in a house gang.
Necromundans aren’t the whole of it either. Venator bands take off-worlders, mutants, abhumans and occasionally xenos, and the background names a few outfits that have made a profession of it. The Wu-Kang and the Jarlgar Headhunters are Executioner Families, hereditary killers who hire out as crews, the Wu-Kang known for close work and their tattoos and the Jarlgar for never staying anywhere. Then there are the dedicated witch-hunter bands, the Red Brothers and the Hammer of Psykers, who only chase rogue psykers and who the background reckons are sometimes quietly led by Ministorum priests.
Necromunda Roleplay leans on this directly: the expansion book stats up Kal Jerico and Scabs, who GW notes have been known to hire Venators for their own jobs.
The Escher’s character sheet makes it explicit, actually. Her name is Ophelia Skar, her Origin is Escher, her Archetype is Assassin, and her Background is Matriarch. So she came out of the house that runs on chem-craft and matriarchs and she’s now freelance with a laspistol, a stiletto sword and two choke gas grenades. WS 61, BS 49. Better with the blade than the gun, which tracks.
I went down a hole on this about three years ago and it cost me an evening I’d promised to spend stripping Drukhari. Started on the Necromunda hired guns page because Kiran wanted to know if you could run a psyker in a gang, ended up two and a half hours later reading about the Wyrd Brethren, who are entire psyker gangs operating under a special Imperial House dispensation on condition they wear obedience implants. Then the Janus Clan, who are a clone collective that House Escher makes. Then a sanctioned psy-hunter called Ortruum 8-8. I went to bed annoyed because none of it had anything to do with the question and I still hadn’t answered Kiran, and the Drukhari are still in the sump of a pot of Biostrip to this day. Eight years I’ve had my horrible little Kill Team force, which is longer than I’ve had the flat. Two of them have ever been finished.
The guilds are the ones writing the cheques
Venator sanction runs on oath-tokens traded out by the Merchants Guilds. The guilds also keep their own in-house Venator cadres for work they’d rather not subcontract: the Adjurators, who hunt down oathbreakers, and the Shacklemen, whose job is recapturing escaped slaves. There’s a man called Eyros Slagmyst who runs a standing crew of Water Harvesters, whose entire remit is enforcing guild law against water thieves.
The Merchants Guild itself, going by Necromunda: The Book of Peril, isn’t one organisation. It’s dozens of guilds, thousands of merchant families, each holding a charter from Lord Helmawr giving them exclusive handling rights over one vital resource. The Book of Peril puts them structurally between the noble Great Houses above and the vassal Clan Houses below, and reckons they got rich in the first place by brokering ceasefires between warring clans so that trade kept moving during gang wars.
Read the roster of them and the planet comes into focus. Mercator Gelt is the Guild of Coin. Mercator Nautica handles water. Mercator Temperium sells air. Mercator Lux is light, Mercator Pyros is promethium, Mercator Sanguis is the Slave Guild, and Mercator Pallidus is the Corpse Guild. There is also a Mercator Viritas, the Guild of Oaths, which I only clocked while writing this. A Venator’s licence is an oath-token, and there’s a chartered guild whose commodity is oaths.
The second adventure in the box, “The Pilgrimage of Bones,” has you killing a Cawdor preacher on behalf of the Corpse Harvesters Guild. That’s the Mercator Pallidus, the outfit whose Pale Consorts and Bone Scriveners walk onto a battlefield after a gang fight with surgical tools and rebreathers to grade the bodies before they go to the corpse grinder plants. The nutrient paste everybody eats comes out of the far end of that. So the Corpse Guild is your employer and a Cawdor preacher is the job.
I should say I’m not certain the lore is doing as much work here as I want it to. Venators started life as a rules convenience. The bounty hunter list exists so you can field any models you like without worrying about house lists, and “band of outcasts” is the cheapest possible in-fiction justification for a mixed party. Every RPG needs a reason the dwarf and the elf are in the same tavern, and GW had one sitting on the shelf already. So maybe I’m reverse-engineering a design philosophy out of a convenient bucket, which is a thing I do. Then I go back to the noose and the masks and the guild that sells oaths, and I’m less sure. Somebody wrote all of that down in 2018 and nobody’s contradicted it since. I’ve talked myself round twice already writing this paragraph and I don’t much fancy a third go…
The Arbitrator’s screen
Unrelated, mostly, but the screen art in the contents shot is the best thing in the box and nobody’s mentioned it. It’s papered edge to edge in wanted posters. One of them offers a bounty “for unsanctioned psycanery.” Another wants somebody “dead and unmasked,” which given what you now know about the hoods is a nasty little joke. There’s one for “acts of terracide.” Dead centre, over the top of the lot, is a red respirator mask and the words HELMAWR IS WATCHING.
That’s a games master screen. It’s a piece of cardboard whose entire job is to stop players seeing your notes, and GW put a propaganda poster on the outward face of it. My mate at my local store has a D&D screen with a forest on it.
I’d probably have bought this anyway, and Kiran will make sure of it, but the thing that shifted it from “maybe” to “yes” is a footnote. GW says you won’t need anything from the Necromunda Skirmish books to play. The box is the whole game on its own, and the fifty blank character sheets suggest they expect you to burn through people.
Ophelia Skar’s sheet lists her starting credits at ten.
