"Bleak Industrial Hellscape" - Necromunda Terrain I

Each of these man-made mountains of plasteel,

ceramite and rockcrete has accreted over

centuries to protect their inhabitants

from a nightmarishly hostile environment

~ Necromunda Gang War I

Hey all, welcome to another beautiful Friday on The Art of Caesura!

We're shifting gears again today after finishing out Silver Tower a couple weeks ago and then my first review on the blog last week. Today we're setting the scene for Necromunda!

I teased the fact that I would be working on Necromunda back in the New Year's post. My parents got the me the starter set for my birthday back in November, and I actually secretly started working on it over Christmas but then paused for Silver Tower and have only got back into it now. 

To get us into the setting, we'll start with a bunch of the larger pieces of scenery this week, and next week we'll look at some of the smaller, more detailed pieces. 

For those of you new to Necromunda (welcome!) it's a setting I love, that takes a lot of great tropes and design cues (and likely acted as an influence itself) for many post apocalyptic worlds that we're familiar with like: Mad Max, Judge Dredd, Rage, Escape from LA, The Expanse...

You can get an idea of the strong industrial overtones from the scenery here. Big heavy bulkheads and rivets feature prominently. 

I wanted to capitalize on this unapologetically industrial quality by painting the terrain in mostly bare metal. Obviously a big table of steel terrain wouldn't be too interesting to look at, so I tried to bring colour back in via copper elements, verdigris, rust, dirt and details. 

Above you can see some of these details: I painted the hydraulic pressure gauges white with a red "warning" section towards the right-hand side. 

I like how the lights turned out. I did them all the same, you can imagine them pulsing, bathing the hall in red warning when a rival gang is near. They are Mephiston Red to Evil Sunz Scarlet with Yriel Yellow added as I layered toward the centre of the lights. I inked the surrounding metal with Carroburg Crimson for a bit of object source lighting. I finished the light bulb with gloss varnish and then painted the metal grille.

I actually painted these before I had my revelation about the paint Leadbelcher being the old "Boltgun Metal" so I painted these with intentionally messy layers of Runfang Steel with several layers of Nuln Oil. 

I had a little too much fun with the weathering! I used Typhus Corrosion (my first time using this great paint) and dry-brushed Ryza Rust. I tried to focus the Typhus Corrosion to areas where this would naturally build up: in the nooks and crannies of the bulkheads, clogging the grates and dripping from the rivets. 

The copper was simply Hashut Copper washed with Agrax Earthshade, highlighted sparingly with Stormhost Silver in places and then given a lick of Nihilek Oxide (which I mostly rubbed off with my thumb to accentuate the messiness). 

Something I really love about this terrain is it's verisimilitude. I love how the elements of scatter terrain are clearly ripped from the larger doors and bulkheads. I played this up by painting corresponding elements the same, for example I painted the square panels of the backsides of the doors copper on both the large bulkheads and smaller scatter terrain. Same goes for the large copper rivets in the corners of the pieces. 

I'm pretty impressed with the amount of terrain that's included in the starter box and I think it looks good when it's altogether!

I hope you enjoyed my first forays into the Underhive, tune in next week for the rest of the terrain on The Art of Caesura!


Listening: Rusalka, Rusalka / Wild Rushes - The Decemberists
Reading: Saga Book II - Brian K. Vaughn
Watching: Ready Player One - Speilberg


Next Week:

Explosive elements of The Underhive...