Necromunda is a narrative miniature skirmish game published by Games Workshop, and it’s one of the oldest games in their portfolio in terms of when it last got a new edition.
With the recent release of the Necromunda: Ash Wastes starter set, the Book of the Outlands rulebook and the new series of Aranthian Succession campaign books, Necromunda has gotten so many new rules, gangs and model releases that it’s pretty close to having gotten a new edition after all.
In this article, we guide you through all the changes and additions made to the game in the Ash Wastes/Aranthian Succession “season” of Necromunda, as well as the lore behind them. It is our Necromunda Ash Wastes Guide.
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A Short Primer for Beginners: What is Necromunda, and what’s changed?
Necromunda as a tabletop game first saw the light of day in 1995, but the current edition of the game was released in 2017 as Necromunda: Underhive.
The game takes place on Necromunda, an Imperial Hive World in the Warhammer 40,000 galaxy. Being a Hive World means being a planet dotted by huge cities whose spires reach towards the sky, housing billions and billions of humans under absolutely terrible conditions.
In Necromunda: Underhive, you enter this grimdark world of the future as the leader of a gang that tries to survive in one of the Hive cities on Necromunda.
To play the game, you select, build and customize a gang of fighters from a specific gang. Each gang has its own special rules, fighter types and access to specific skills, weapons and wargear. Usually, you play the game as part of a campaign with other players, in which the outcome of each battle changes what territories your gang controls, which of your fighters are killed or injured, and how much money you get to purchase better equipment for your fighters.
The actual playing of the game takes place on a relatively small game board, which most often depicts the corridors and walkways of the industrial underbelly of a hive city, with ladders, pipes and scattered crates for your fighters to take cover behind. The players take turns to activate one of their fighters, which can then take two actions, such as moving, attacking, operating hatches and so on, until none of them have any fighters left to activate – much like many other miniature skirmish games. Movement is measured in inches, and attacks are simulated by rolling six-sided dice.
It sounds simple enough, but in the case of Necromunda, it really isn’t: A large part of the charm of the game, apart from its fantastic setting, is the level of detail with which it simulates the desparate life of an Underhive danger.
All fighters grow in experience as the game progresses, gaining access to new skills and weapons, and the weapons themselves have all manner of special rules and conditions. The injuries your fighters sustain in combat can impair them for several consecutive games (losing a leg will do that to you, after all), but can also be fixes by giving them prostheses or cybernetic implants that make them even stronger than before! You can hire cooks, medics and merchants for your home base, steal equipment from your enemies, employ magic-wielding psykers – or even decide that your gang is secretly infiltrated by aliens planning an uprising on Necromunda, or that they’ve taken to worshipping the powers of Chaos! It’s so wonderfully granular that the game often comes close to feeling more like a tabletop role-playing game than a miniature skirmish game – it’s become that immersive and full of customization over the years. If you want a comprehensive guide to the basic rules of the game, you can check out our guide for Necromunda: Underhive here.
So what’s changed in the new “season” of Ash Wastes and the Aranthian Succession? We’ll go into more detail with everything in the rest of the article, but here’s a quick bullet list of the biggest changes:
- The Ash Wastes are a new setting for the game, taking place in the open (and highly hazardous) environments between the Hives called the Ash Wastes. In the game, this environment is represented by the game board and scenery available in the Ash Wastes starter set.
- Vehicles are now part of the game. There’s a bunch of generic ones that most gangs can take, and gang-specific vehicles are being rolled out for most of the major gangs as the season progresses.
- Outland Gangs are a new way to build your gangs and play campaigns in the Ash Wastes. Outland Gangs get extra credits for the purpose of buying vehicles and getting crews for them, and Ash Wastes scenarios have all sorts of new weather rules that spice up how you play the game.
- The Aranthian Succession is a new storyline for the game that moves the plot of the setting onwards a lot more intensely than previous expansions to the game – it’s told through a series of campaign books, making it ideal for playing through the whole thing with your gaming group.
- Lots and lots of general content! The Ash Wastes season is full of new stuff in general: New gangs (Nomads! Squats!), new Vehicles, new characters and options for existing gangs, new scenarios, campaign rules and so on. The cadence of releases for the game has really ramped up, and now is the best time ever to get started playing Necromunda, so let’s have a look at what the Ash Wastes is all about.
Necromunda Ash Wastes Guide: Lore
The Ash Wastes is the new setting that kicked of the current “season” of Necromunda in the summer of 2022. In this section, we go through the lore of that setting and all the new rules that were added to the game to enable playing Necromunda outside of the Hive Cities: Outland Gang Campaigns and Vehicle Rules. We also walk you through what was added to the game in the Book of the Outlands expansion to the game, since that’s the main sourcebook for non-Aranthian Succession Ash Wastes play.
The Ash Wastes setting all takes place on the plains of the Great Equatorial Wastes of Necromunda, a toxic wasteland situated between all the major hive cities. If life in the Hives is reminiscent of cyberpunk stories like Blade Runner or even something more grotesque such as Judge Dredd, the Great Equatorial Wastes are a mix of the Wild West, Dune and Mad Max: It’s a vast, mostly uninhabitable desert full of toxic storms and a poisonous atmosphere, where the long arm of the law of Lord Helmawr has even less reach than in the Underhive of the Hive Cities.
As desolate as it may be, the desert of the Equatorial Wastes is still essential to life and civilization on Necromunda. It is a source of natural resources such as minerals from its mines, and, situated between the great Hives as it is, crossed through by important trade routes. On top of that, the Cinderak Crater central to the Equatorial Wastes is home to the ruins of the ancient megacity Hive Meridian, and as such full of salvageable tech and materials.
Cinderak City, the only major city in the Wastes, is where most of the political power in the area is concentrated: all the major gangs and Clan Houses have a presence here, from the mine-operating House Orlock down to secretive Xenos worshippers and the cannibals of the Corpsegrinder Cults. There’s even a large contingent of Squats here, the dwarf-like nonhuman prospectors whose industriousness and terraforming tech keeps the atmosphere of Necromunda somewhat breathable.
While the threats of life in Cinderak City are a lot like what gangers experience in other Hives, the dangers facing them when they venture out into the Wastes on their motorbikes, buggies and other vehicles are much more alien and unsettling. First and foremost, the Wastes are already called home by a people whose life has nothing to do with the Hives: The Ash Wastes Nomads, or the People of the Ash as they call themselves, have lived here for ages, hostile and mysterious in their cloaks and rebreather masks, raiding and pillaging any cilivized settlement they can get to, and the gangs wage a neverending war against them to secure the trade routes and mines from attacks. Further into the Deep Wastes, all manner of irradiated monsters and inhuman horrors dwell.
The Ash Wastes Starter Set – everything you need to play Necromunda in the Great Equatorial Wastes
The inhospitable and horrifying lands of the Equatorial Wastes and the Cinderak Crater is the setting of both the Book of the Outlands gaming content and the ongoing storyline of the Aranthian Succession, which we’ll explore further below.
But how do your get started playing Ash Wastes Necromunda games if all your scenery for the game is corridors and hallways? We recommend starting with the Necromunda: Ash Wastes Starter Set.
The Ash Wastes Starter Set functions both as a starter set for Necromunda in general and as a jumping-on point for the Ash Wastes season.
The starter set contains:
- the Necromunda Ash Wastes rulebook, which is a full rulebook for playing Necromunda (with a few errata and updates to the core rules, even!) as well as containing some additional Ash Wastes-specific rules such as Vehicle rules. As per the release of this set, it is the default Necromunda rulebook to buy.
- Ash Wastes scenery and game board, consisting of some very modular hab-block scenery that lets you build tall huts with elevated walkways between them, perfect for zooming around beneath with vehicles.
- The Ash Wastes Nomad gang, including 4 giant insect walkers that work as the vehicles of the gang.
- The Orlock gang, originally the third-oldest gang in this edition, but in this version, it also comes with two Orlock-specific armed buggies.
- basic gang rules for the two gangs (expanded in Book of the Outland and in House of Iron, respectively).
- All the dice, tokens and measuring tools needed to play the game.
New Rules for Vehicles in Ash Wastes
While the rules for playing Necromunda are mostly unchanged in the Ash Wastes “season”, and you’re mostly just dealing with more content for the old ruleset, a couple of additions have been made to the rules. The most notable is the addition of Vehicles, which is what this section is all about.
Vehicles are models for Necromunda that behave slightly differently from models on foot. The rules for using Vehicles in the game, which we’ll explain here, are printed in the Ash Wastes version of the Necromunda Core Rulebook, but for some reason, they’re sort of scattered across the book (the absolute chaos of how rules are rolled out is a big part of the charm of Necromunda), so if you’re interested in using Vehicles in your gang, we deeply recommend that you use the Vehicle Rules section of the Book of the Outlands instead. It’s the same set of rules, just much more coherently presented!
Vehicle Profiles
The first thing you need to know about Vehicles is that they use a different set of Characteristics in their profile than what you’re used to for your gangers. If you play Warhammer: Horus Heresy (another fantastic GW game of the complex “it’s almost and RPG” variety), a lot of this will be familiar to you, as Vehicles in that game share many rules with Necromunda Vehicles. A Vehicle Profile in Necromunda consists of (from left to right):
- Vehicle Characteristics:
- Move: This works just like on fighters, telling you how many inches the Vehicle can move in a standard Move action.
- Toughness: Your Vehicles have Toughness just like gangers do, determining how difficult it is to Wound them, but a Vehicle has 3 characteristics for this – one for Front, one for Side, and one for Rear, simulating how it can be harder to wound from a direction in which it has more armour. Often, Vehicles have their highest Toughness in their Front characteristic, and the higher your number here, the better.
- HP: HP isn’t hit points, (sorry DnD’ers!) but Hull Points. This is the characteristic that decreases when a Vehicle takes damage, and when it reaches zero, the Vehicle is Wrecked (more on that below).
- HND: This is Handling, and is sort of a Dexterity characteristic used to mitigate the effects of terrain, ramming enemies and so on.
- Sv: This is a Save characteristic just like what a fighter has.
- Crew Characteristics:
- BS: This is Ballistics Skill, showing what you have to roll to hit with ranged weapons with your crew.
- Ld: This is Leadership, which is used to simulate how the efficiency of your crew is impacted by various conditions during the game.
- Cl: This is Cool, the “morale” statistic of Necromunda, which can determine whether your crew is Broken or flees.
- WIL: This is Willpower, which is used to simulate reactions to terror and psychic powers in the game.
- INT: This is Intelligence, used to simulate the ability to use advanced gadgets and tools in the game.
Vehicle Profiles are noted on Vehicle Cards, which are just like Fighter Cards, but with the appropriate slots for Vehicle Characteristics.
Mounted or Crew
The second important thing to know about Vehicles is that not everything that looks like a Vehicle on a model for the game actually behaves like one! Vehicles are actually split into two categories: Vehicles, which are what we’re mostly talking about when mentioning specific rules in this section, are defined by being suited for more than one passenger, and they have Vehicle Cards and all the special Vehicle Characteristics in their profile. Fighters manning this Vehicle are treated as Crew. However, Vehicles or animals suited for riding, fit for just one “passenger”, are instead treated as Wargear, meaning they’re a piece of equipment for a fighter. The fighter riding that motorbike, giant beetle or whatever you’re fielding, then gains the Mounted condition.
When Mounted, fighters can carry fewer weapons, and no weapons with the Unwieldy trait, unless those weapons are Lances. They also gain the ability to Ride By, which means that if they move within an inch of an enemy (which they’re allowed to), they can interrupt their movement to make a close combat attack, but the target can then also make a Reaction attack. If the Mounted fighter is hit by this attack, the Strength of that attack is determined on a table in the Mounted rules based on how far they moved before attacking. This system is also used when a Mounted fighter is hit by a ranged attack. Instead of getting Pinned as a fighter hit by a ranged attack usually does, they’re instead Knocked Down if they fail an Initiative check. When Knocked Down, they also take a hit based on the same table as when making Ride By attacks, but this time, the Strength of that attack is determined by how far they moved in their last activation, representing the momentum with which they were moving. Then they become Pinned, and have to pass another check to make the Stand Up action, simulating the difficulty of getting your bike back on the road or calming your giant beetle.
In addition to these specific rules, Mounted fighters also get some bonuses from their specific Mount Wargear, such as a much better Move characteristic, they get better at Retreating, and they can’t climb stuff for obvious reasons. Otherwise, Mounted fighters behave a lot like regular fighters.
Moving, attacking and Taking Damage for Vehicles
While Vehicles in many ways function as bigger, faster versions of fighters, it wouldn’t be Necromunda if they didn’t have all sorts of special conditions and exceptions to the general rules that govern how they interact with the rest of the game. Here’s a list of the most important ones.
- Movement: Your options when moving a Vehicle are greatly expanded compared to moving a regular fighter. A Vehicle can Move its Move characteristic like everyone else, but it can also:
- Maneuver, which is moving up to half that of a normal Move, but backwards or with any 90 degree pivots you might want to make
- Move & Shoot, which is moving up to half that of a normal Move and then shooting with one of your weapons
- Drift, which is moving sideways
- Ram, which is moving its basic Move value plus D6 inches straight into another vehicle or piece of terrain, with a smaller chance than usual to suffering a hit from that collision itself.
- Spin, which is a Move but with up to a 180 degree turn at the end.
- Full Throttle which is a Move of up to three times its Move value, but if you make a turn during the move you have to make a Loss of Control test (you also have to make this test after Drift and Spin). A Loss of Control test is a roll made with a regular dice against the Vehicle’s Handling characteristic. If you pass the test, nothing happens, but if you fail, you have to roll the special Control dice that came with the Ash Wastes starter set. This can cause the Vehicle to pivot uncontrollably, or even be flipped over. While pivoting isn’t always that important for fighters, remember that it’s extremely crucial to Vehicles because different sides of them have different Toughness values, so an unwanted pivot can really leave you vulnerable and force you to make some of the pivot-specific move actions to get back on track.
There’s much more to how Vehicles move: They can be flipped over, become Stationary so you have to make different checks to get the Vehicle up and running again, and Vehicles can destroy some scenery just by driving through it. All in all, movement with Vehicles has some really great rules that allow for very cinematic moments, especially in Vehicle vs. Vehicle combat!
- Attacking: While Mounted fighters can attack mostly as normal, but Vehicles can Move & Shoot as described above, Aim just like fighters to improve their chance to hit, and Fire All, which means they can make an attack with each of their ranged weapons in one action, which can be quite a bunch of shooting if your Vehicle has several Hardpoints for mounting guns on. otherwise, attacking works just like it does for fighters.
- Taking Damage: Taking damage from a hit to your Vehicle involves two special dice. First, you must roll the Location dice, which determines where your Vehicle was hit – note that this doesn’t determine what side of the Vehicle was hit; that’s determined by the direction of the attack – and it can either show a hit to the Body, Engine, Crew or Drive of the Vehicle. Then, you roll the Damage Dice once for each point in the Damage characteristic of the weapon that hit you, and this can roll either a Glancing, Penetrating or Catastrophic Hit. Based on the result of your Location dice and Damage Dice, you consult a table in the Vehicle Rules, which tells you what then happens. For example, a Catastrophic Hit to the Body of the Vehicle removes one of your Vehicle’s weapons, gives you 1 Hull Point of damage, and makes you take a Loss of Control Test, while a Glancing Hit to the Engine makes the Vehicle Stationary and Stalled. It’s a pretty deep damage system that really takes all aspects of how the Vehicle works into account.
When a Vehicle goes down to 0 Hull Points, it is Wrecked, taking it out of the battle and forcing its crew to roll on a special Crew table for Lasting Injuries.
This isn’t everything there is to be said about Vehicle rules: Fighters can also move around on them (great for train robbery scenarios and such!), Vehicles can catch fire, and they interact with terrain differently than regular fighters, but the bottom line is that Vehicles have come to Necromunda with some very detailed rules that make them behave as anything but oversized fighters – they’re their own thing, and they add a lot of both tactical complexity and cinematic, chaotic fun to the game. You can consult our Necromunda Gang Overview to see what Vehicles are available to your gang.
Book of the Outlands and the content in it
Book of the Outlands came out shortly after the release of the Ash Wastes starter set, and its the book where gaming in the Equatorial Wastes really started taking off.
If you want to play in this “season” of Necromunda, it’s the book to get. It has all the rules for forming Wasteland Gangs (see below), the Vehicle rules, rules for making your own vehicles, rules for the new gangs, and even more.
Wasteland Gang Rules
The Wasteland Gang rules are a modified version of the regular rules for creating a gang, and they’re printed in full in Book of the Outlands. The most important change is that the Wasteland Gang rules give your gang an extra allowance of 400 credits that can only be spent on Vehicles, mounts (bikes or riding animals for your fighters) and upgrades for these. You can also spend your regular credits limit on these things, but you can’t spend any of your 400 extra points on non-Vehicle stuff.
New Gangs and Additions to Older in Book of Outlands
Book of the Outlands has the full rules for two gangs: The Ash Wastes Nomads and the Ironhead Squats Prospectors.
The Ash Wastes Nomads gang is the most Ash Wastes-specific gang in Necromunda, made up of indigenous warriors from the Great Equatorial Wastes, designed as something between the Tusken Raiders of Star Wars and the Fremen of Dune, with plenty of ways of hiding and using the conditions of the Wastes to their advantage (through their special Wasteland skillset, among other things).
Book of the Outlands has rules for their basic kit and Dustback Helamite riders from the Ash Wastes starter set, as well as a couple of special fighters such as the Wy’tari Stormcaller pictured above. You can read more about them and their releases in our Necromunda Gang Overview.
The Ironhead Squat Prospectors is the first entirely nonhuman Necromunda gang outside of Genestealer Cults gangs (unless you believe the slanderous propaganda about House Delaque!) – they’re a gang of Squats, the dwarf-like abhumans who have been part of Necromunda for centuries and who have appeared as single models for the game before, but now they’re here in full force.
They’re a stout gang, armed to the teeth with great ranged weapons and few, but really tough, melee weapons, and they have the special Wisdom of the Ancients skillset which gives them an assortment of bonuses from being better at looting (of course) to rerolling all ammo checks or fighting once before being taken out of action. For some reason, the Squats don’t have any unique mounts or Vehicles, even though they’re an Ash Wastes gang, but they do have a special model in the Vartijan Exo-Driller pictured above. You can read more about the gang in our Gang Overview.
In addition to the two gangs, Book of the Outlands also contains rules for the Outland Beastmaster, an assortment of Exotic Beasts, the huge Ridgehauler vehicle available to all non-Nomad gangs, The Outrider Quad for the Orlocks available in the Starter Set, as well as three Genestealer Cults models that are now Vehicles available to all gangs who can take Vehicles: The Ridgerunner, Wolfquad and Rockgrinder. All three models are made for standard human-sized models to fit with them, so they’re great for conversions to fit your gang’s style.
Wasteland Workshop
If you’re a hobbyist who likes making models your own with kitbashes and conversions (and if you’re reading Necromunda articles, you probably are), you’re going to love the Wasteland Workshop.
The Wasteland Workshop is 23 pages of rules for designing your own custom Vehicles for Necromunda from the ground up. It has profiles for various sizes of Vehicles, even bipedal walkers, and tons of different additions and upgrades for them that you can choose. It’s completely amazing, both from a gaming and hobbyist’s perspective, and it really lets you use all sorts of 40k vehicles in new ways, as well as clearly also being a template for using various toy cars in the right modeling scale for Necromunda as well.
Campaign Content in Book of the Outlands
Apart from having some really cool lore bits for Ash Wastes games, Book of the Outlands also contains some really cool rules for simulating the battlefield conditions of the Wastes, most notably the Rolling Roads rules, where all the models and terrain are moved towards the “back end” of the battlefield every turn to simulate how the battle is progressing as a vehicle-based high-speed chase. It’s worth noting, however, that the rules for fighting in the Ash Wastes are actually more expansive in the Ash Wastes Core Rulebook than in Book of the Outlands (confusingly enough), as opposed to what was the case for Vehicle Rules, so you definitely need both if you’re hitting the Ash Wastes roads with a Vehicle-heavy gang.
The Aranthian Succession
The Aranthian Succession is a big campaign event for Necromunda, a bit like what you might see for Warhammer 40,000 or Age of Sigmar leading up to a new edition. Release-wise, it is a series of rulebooks for the game, each of which advances the storyline as well as adding new rules to the game, such as new scenarios or the faction-specific Vehicles for each of the great House gangs.
Lore of the Aranthian Succession
The event that sets the Aranthian Succession in motion is basically the Fall of Cadia and the opening of the Great Rift in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, when the forces of Chaos poured out onto the Galaxy, splitting it in two. Being relatively cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, except for the trade ships and transports that pick up its resources, Necromundan society was more or less unaware of the coming catastrophe until it turned the planet completely on its head.
The first part of the Aranthian Succession storyline, told in the Cinderak Burning book, tells the story of how, all at once, the power in the Hive Cities stopped working all at once, disabling life support systems, lights, heating and the industrial areas that were the beating heart of the planet’s economy. This led to all kinds of riots and conflicts, which has turned most of the major hives into either complete warzones or heavily controlled de facto prisons after crackdowns from the Palanite Enforcers.
Gang riots and urban warfare weren’t the only consequences of the catastrophe, however. As a great, toxic storm of supernatural proportions drew in over Necromunda, Chaos cults started rising up, spurred on by the explosion of Chaos energy throughout the galaxy, and paleskinned horrors crawled up from the depths of the underbellies of the Hive Cities. The minds of Wyrd psykers across the planet erupted, killing off or mutating their surroundings, and the uncorrupted now had another war on their hands against the forces of Chaos in their midst, and the planet was now the site of a Chaos Incursion, meaning that the forces of the Imperium were surely on their way to clean it up no matter the cost – a prospect potentially more apocalyptic than the Incursion itself.
Out in the Ash Wastes, things were just as bad – the storm flayed the landscape with poison and destruction, monsters charged out of the Deep Wastes, and the Nomad gangs raised an army to take down their hated city-dwelling enemies once and for all. In the end, the gangs and houses of Necromunda joined together to put down all the rebellions just in time to prevent the Imperial fleets doing it for them, but Necromunda emerged from the Great Darkness a very different society than what it had been before the calamity.
The ruler of Necromunda, Lord Helmawr, was mortally wounded in an assassination attempt during the Great Darkness, and while he lay suspended in a stasis chamber, the fight to become his successor began. In the beginning, all sorts of hopeful nobles vied for power, but at the end of the Cinderak Burning book (we’re summarizing here – the actual account of the succession wars in the book takes up dozens of pages of really well-written lore), two main factions have emerged: On one side is Lady Haera Helmawr, the only daughter of Helmawr to emerge from the succession struggles with her head where it should be (she murdered most of her other siblings), and on the other is Lady Credo, a leader of a smaller house who has risen to power by building an alliance of renegades and outcasts that continues the rebellion against the Imperial rule that Lord Helmawr stands for. At the end of the first part of the Aranthian Succession, Necromunda still stands, but war has broken out on several fronts and both sides are struggling to gain enough supporters to topple the other.
In the second part of the Aranthian Succession, Cinderak finally falls to Lady Credo and House Escher takes control of the city. Then, a mysterious Prophet appears, who leads throngs of Redemptionists and other desperate Necromundans on a Pilgrimage to recover a Lost Saint in Hive Temenos, a great undertaking that threatens to completely destabilize the power base Lady Haera has managed to establish after the rumoured death of her father. The Palanite Enforcers do everything they can to stop him and his disciples, but it turns out Lady Credo is on his side, further strengthening her claim to the throne of Necromunda.
Cinderak Burning
Cinderak Burning is the first book in the Aranthian Succession series. It contains the basic rules for playing Succession Campaigns, lots and lots of lore and a bunch of new fighters, characters and Vehicles.
New Campaign Rules in Cinderak Burning
The first part of the Aranthian Succession can be played through as a special campaign called a Succession Campaign, and the rules for this campaign system is included in Cinderak Burning.
A Succession Campaign is different from a regular campaign in a couple of ways. First of all, it’s divided into two parts with a downtime inbetween. The first part is called The Great Darkness, and this is where you create your gang. It’s a pretty chaotic place to start, as you can see from the lore overview above, and in order to be able to survive during the open warfare in the hives, you have 2000 credits +400 for Vehicles to build your starting gang, rather than the regular 1000. However, during the Great Darkness part of the game, you can’t recruit any new fighters, so you have to survive with what you got!
Instead of fighting over territories, gangs challenge each other for Sympathisers, since they’re trying to rally whoever they can to their cause. Sympathisers can come from all sorts of different gangs, houses and organisations, and like territories in regular campaigns, they give you various bonuses when you occupy them.
The really awesome thing about these Sympathisers from a narrative perspective is that they come from groups in Necromundan lore that you either have already heard of or you can look them up, and as such, they can add much more to the story of your gang than the relatively flavourless territories. In the second part of the game, The Spark of Rebellion, the restrictions on recruitment are lifted, and you have to declare who you want to support in the Aranthian Succession. You can either declare allegiance to Lady Haera Helmawr, sort of representing the status quo, join the rebellion of Lady Credo, or remain unaligned. Whatever you choose, it grants your gang some additional bonuses and options.
Through the number of Sympathisers and a selection of Triumphs the Arbitrator (Necromunda gamesmaster) can hand out, a winner can be declared after your group has played through both parts of the Succession Campaign, but keep your notes and models close, because the campaign continues in the next Aranthian Succession book, which we’ll cover here when it is released.
Cinderak Burning also contains 12 new narrative scenarios for you to use in the Succession Campaign, which make use of the full scope of rules available in Necromunda in this “season”, so that you’ll play scenarios both inside the Hives and on the plains of the Ash Wastes.
New Models and Vehicles in Cinderak Burning
Cinderak Burning contains the rules for 4 major characters in the Aranthian Succession: Lady Haera herself, Gorshiv Hammerfist of House Goliath, Athera of House Escher (and her Caryatid companion), and the Outrider-mounted Vespa “Minx” Merdena of House Orlock.
In addition to these, Cinderak Burning upgrades House Goliath and House Escher to Ash Wastes standards with a new vehicle and a set of Vehicle Tactics for each gang:
Goliath get Mauler bikes, heavily armed choppers with blades in the front.
Escher get Cutters, swift jetbikes that function as Wargear with the Mounted condition as explained above.
Vaults of Temenos
Vaults of Temenos is the second instalment of The Aranthian Succession, with rules for the next part of the Succession Campaign, as well as tons of lore and new rules for Cawdor and Enforcers, among others.
New Campaign Rules in Vaults of Temenos
The second part of the Succession Campaign is all about the Great Pilgrimage, and each gang must side with either the Imperial House or Lady Credo’s Rebellion, as they chase Relics and take up missions surrounding the Pilgrimage.
New to Vaults of Temenos is the option to play a Crusading Gang, which turns a regular gang into followers of the Pilgrimage, giving them access to divine powers as well as a set of Tenets they have to follow to keep gaining blessings and avoid divine punishment. For example, crusaders of Cognus, the Saint of Quotas has to earn at least 50 credits from its Territories when revenue is calculated, and followers of Vermin, the Saint of Rats have to avoid their Exotic Beasts dying or getting Critical Injuries.
New Models and Vehicles in Vaults of Temenos
Vaults of Temenos contains the rules for 4 major characters: Axon Hammer (pictured above), Durgan Kill-Fist, Scrutinator-Primus Servalen and The Prophet of the Redemption, whose miniature hasn’t been revealed yet.
In addition to these, Vaults of Temenos upgrades Cawdor and Enforcer gangs to Ash Wastes standards with new Vehicles/Brutes: Cawdor gets Ridge Walkers, which can be crewed with either Cawdor or Redemptionist Crew, and Enforcer gangs get “Sanctioner” Pattern Automata, Hard-Case Cyber-Mastiffs and Enforcer Bodyguards.
Finally, Vaults of Temenos also contains rules for the Guild of Coin Chronos Pattern Ironcrawler.
Final Thoughts in Necromunda Ash Wastes
Necromunda is a vast, sprawling game with a huge amount of gangs, books and special characters that’s been added over the years. What the game has been lacking, somewhat, is a big, high-stakes story that really shakes up the status quo and introduces the more hectic pace of storytelling in the wider Warhammer 40,000 franchise to the game.
With the Ash Wastes rules and the multi-book Aranthian Succession campaign storyline, Necromunda has gotten all that in spades, in a way that’s relevant to all Necromunda players regardless of what gangs they want to play.
The rules that have been added in this new season are generally of really high quality, and they bring meaningful changes to the game: Vehicles are wonderfully implemented, the Succession Campaign uses just a few new rules to really nail the feel of the new storyline, and the promise of Vehicle upgrades to all major gangs is a nice addition on top of the expansion sets and weapon sprues that came out along the gang “codexes” the couple of years before this new “season”.
It shows that Necromunda is still in a great place six years after its release, and we can’t wait to see what the rest of the Aranthian Succession brings to the game – and we’ll update this guide as soon as we know more.