Since the start of Feb I have been Arbitrating a Necromunda campaign at my local gaming club in Norwich. Aftermath Gaming Club is a superb ecliptic collection of gamers who’s membership is somewhere between 35-60. Between us, we can cover pretty much every genre, wargames, tabletop games, boardgames and more.
Obviously there are the big mainstays like Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, Bolt Action, Fire and Fury and many, many others.
After coming out of lockdown last year, Daemonforge and myself both decided we wanted to partake in a campaign and figured we’d get some games going of Necromunda. We hoped that this would be good practice and would also pull some interested players out of the woodwork.
We quickly set about offering demo’s to players loaning gangs and models and use of my terrain. Even though we had done this and got a lot of positive response, we were a bit shocked when the response for people wanting to join the campaign numbered 11 and then grew to 13.
“Right” I thought, “How on earth do I deal with that many players in one campaign?!!”
After a few chats with a couple of folks including Daemonforge it seemed like the best approach was to split into two groups that feed into the same narrative campaign. That way one story is being built whilst everyone is kept gaming. From the off, the first group would be made up of more experienced Necromunda players or players familiar with the setting and GW games. The 2nd group would be complete newcomers or those who have had little experience of the game and anyone else that joined in last minute.
The Mad Hatters were created as a gang central to the sectors story. The sector was named after the building we hold our club nights in. They would be outcasts and would be the “house” gang. So anyone could have a go at playing them and they could be used as a last minute opponent to pull/drop outs. With an odd number, they’d help balance up. With the special added bonus of being able to play against gangs in both groups if needed.
We then factored in that as a club people liked to play other games as much as Necromunda, so the cycles would have to be super slow and perhaps more prescribed in terms of games. A cycle was therefore defined as four weeks, with the expectation one game was played in that time.
Downtime would be after four cycles. Which would allow for everyone to play each other at least once and rotate the attackers and defenders. Downtime would also give me a chance to look at the groups with the idea of switching the bottom 3 of Uptown and top 3 of Downtown meaning the second half of the campaign would give fresh opponents to players.
With that all said and done, the initial groups were drawn up as following…
Uptown
| Will | The Betrayed (Outcast) |
| Matt | Shade Serpents (Delaque) |
| Garry | Bad Batch (Venators) |
| Ian | Ponytail Express (Van Saar) |
| Mike P | The Forge masters (Goliaths) |
| Jack | Steel City Sicarios |
Downtown
| Charles | Sump Town Stim Slingers (Goliath) |
| Mark S | The Sump City Cat Herders (Escher) |
| Sean | Savages of Slaanesh (Cawdor) |
| Austen | Unheard (Delaque) |
| Nigel R | TBC (Van Saar) |
| Paul S | TBC (Venators) |
| Mark W | Blaque Ops |
| ‘House Gang’ | The Mad Hatters (Outcast – Cawdor) |
With the basics covered, I’ll start porting posts over from the blogger I was using for the campaign as wordpress has an obvious edge over that in terms of some tools etc. See you all shortly…
Poison Spurs 