When it comes to founding a gang in Necromunda it can be a little daunting at first. There are a lot of moving parts in this system as mentioned before, that’s the main purpose of this article. To get you familiar enough with building a list to get to playing a match.

Campaign or Skirmish?

This should be the very first question you should answer before you are deciding anything else. Since the points values are baked into the campaign, they start you at 1000 credits. If you are doing a skirmish then you have to pick your starting credit amount. So if I challenge you to a skirmish, I would say we are going to play with 1000 credits.

Leading by example

Now that we know we have up to 1000 credits to equip our guys, we need to get some guys on our roster. The first unit we need to pick is a (Leader). These guys are the glue that holds everyone together, they usually have good support rules for the rest of the gang. They come stock with a skill selection, which will be the first step in how your gang will function in the game. Lastly, you have to go in and buy their equipment that they will take with them in the scenarios ahead. If you skip this step, have no fear, you can utilize the unarmed profile in melee to deal some serious damage output. That is if you can get there! So don’t forget to equip them, and remember they can only have 3 weapons and unruly weapons count as two weapons.

We are the Champions

Champions provide another chance to “personalize” a character more with a free skill choice from the start and a wider variety of weapons. Compared to the Leader units, these guys will have access to some of the strongest weapons there are to offer. Their cost is normally closer to the leader units, so while you are building just keep in mind not to put all your credits in one basket. This is where you have to get some reps in with your faction and figure out if you want to play a more elite style, or do you want to have as many models as possible? I have been playing Cawdor, so I keep my leader light, make a champion that can secure kills when I need to, then the rest is little dudes with guns and flails.

Gangers

Gangers are the “supporting” role to the cast that is the rest of your selections. These guys level up a little bit differently than the other member of your gang. At the post-battle sequence, if a Ganger has 6 xp, then they will roll 2D6 and consult the chart. This will increase the cost of the unit, but also increase the stat that was modified. If you roll a 2, or a 12 your Ganger will be promoted to a specialist, to which they will level up as a specialist from now on.

The randomness of the leveling is going to make these guys hard to map out for your gangs, therefore these guys are the best suited for the front line. You should equip them to be able to zone out your enemies, and bait opponent into over extending. Then letting the models that have the highest probability of eliminating an opponent get where they need to be.

Juves

Juves are where you can brew up some crazy combinations, you just have to get them to that point in mostly one piece. After they have advanced an attribute, you can increase that one on the next level up without the additional two experience points required! This could let you get a really high strength brute that will be able to knock the toughest foes down!

Not having access to a wider variety of options as everyone else, I initially thought these guys were the meatshields for everyone else. However with a campaign under my belt, I believe these guys are the seeds you plant to grow your gang into a reflection of how you play the game. It’s all about balance, but going into my next campaign, I plan on taking four juves, because of cawdors ability. I don’t see much use for more than 4, if you bring one, you get d3 additional juves to your roster.

Hanger-Ons

These guys are the spice to bring your gang soup all together! Each faction will have a handful of hanger-ons that will help your gang. The Cawdor can take a Preacher that lets you start with d6 faith tokens! There are also a few useful ones to go through like the Rouge-Docs, Ammo Jacks, my favorite the Slopper. There are restrictions to these when you play campaign, so make sure you check those before you add them to your list. Your reputation is a limiter here, and I realized that too late, but I really didn’t gain anything from it, other than not having around 100 points to put in my roster. So I would say leave them out for the first campaign, they won’t help you out as much as you think.

Wrapping it all up

Hopefully this gave good idea of what the basic building blocks are for making a gang. There are still weapons, skills and equipment to put on them, and that is something you are going to have to experiment with! We will start working on a breakdown of all the inner workings of Necromunda. From here I would suggest go over to Munda Manager and start throwing together some models into a gang. When you need to know what something is, flip over to NecroRAW and use that to fill the gaps in. After your first couple of gangs you’ll get the hang of it, but realistically you don’t spend days going over all the different skills. Play a game with only weapons, then add equipment, then add skills, work slowly. Skirmish games are marathons, enjoy the ride because the mistakes we make along the way are what we will cherish years from now. Thank you for reading, Stay Classy Wargamers!