Hey everybody,
It’s Necromunda Week! I’ve been meaning to get round to talking about the Necromunda campaign that I’m playing in for a while now, and after game 3 at the weekend, I think the time is now!
I’m playing my Goliath gang in a Law & Misrule campaign with my buddy James, who started with his Orlocks but after game one switched to Enforcers. I’ll get to that shortly, though! Necromunda is a game that has been talked about so often here on the blog, though while I’ve talked about the Dominion campaign previously, I don’t think I’ve talked about the Law & Misrule campaign before. Law & Misrule was featured in the Book of Judgement, and was almost purpose-built to include the new Palanite Enforcers gang list. The campaign takes place, as all Necromunda campaigns seem to, over seven “weeks”, broken down into three weeks of fighting, then a week of downtime, then three more weeks of fighting. Whereas Dominion focuses on control of Territories, Law & Misrule features Rackets that we are fighting for control over. At the start of the campaign, each gang gets two of these Rackets which will give boons for having them, either in terms of bonuses or income. You then nominate an unclaimed Racket to fight over during the first phase, and the winner of the battle will claim it, in addition to any scenario bonuses. The second campaign phase then sees gangs fight to take over each other’s Rackets, as they try to gain more prestige and so on. Each Racket is linked to two others, and you gain enhanced boons for controlling either one or both of the linked Rackets; it should make for some interesting times in the second week, or even the first week as we seek to deny each other linked Rackets.
Interestingly, the rules for the campaign do allow for a mixture with the Dominion Territories, and it is suggested that they can be used side by side, as there are some Rackets that sit nicely alongside a thematic Territory.
Each gang also has an alignment, either law-abiding or outlaw, and this alignment will affect a lot of the campaign. Some Rackets give certain bonuses depending on your alignment, for example, and as you gain Reputation you have access to boons depending on your alignment. The main focus on this, however, is Intrigues, which I suppose is the other half of what makes this campaign. At the start of each battle, players each draw three Intrigues and keep them face-down. These will have a certain action that must be completed a set number of times; as soon as you have completed these actions, you can claim the Intrigue for a reward. However, Intrigues are tied to an alignment, so for example you may draw an outlaw Intrigue but you are law-abiding. Well, you can still complete it, but you must then perform an Alignment Check, rolling a number of dice as detailed on the card; any 1s will fail and you are “caught out”, forced to switch alignment and suffer a loss of 3 reputation. Some gangs cannot change their alignment, however, which means they suffer a loss of 5 reputation.
As I said before, James started by playing his Orlocks but after the first game decided he wanted to change to the Enforcers gang. I suppose I’m acting a bit like the arbitrator for the campaign as well as playing in it, as I have all the books and stuff, but it made thematic sense for his choice so we’ve just gone with it. The Orlock gang are all ex-cons, and the first scenario we played was Prison Break from Gang War III. However, the escape of the Orlocks has been noticed by the authorities, and so the Enforcers are chasing down my Goliath gang as they believe the House of Chains to have been behind the breakout. So we’re going along with that!
Necromunda is a game that is so much about the narrative, after all, so why wouldn’t we go along with it?
As the Palanite Enforcers are always a law-abiding gang and cannot switch alignment, I’ve decided that my Goliaths are an outlaw gang, which means we all have a bounty on our heads, which can potentially be claimed in the post-battle sequence.
It’s this sequence that I find to be almost as interesting as the game itself – it’s where much more of the RPG elements come into play, as we wrap-up from the body of the game and work out where we stand.
Following the first game, we decided that I could keep the bonuses almost like some kind of penalty for James switching gangs, however I’m a bit worried that this has put me too far forward already. After the first game, where the objective was for me to stop the Orlocks escaping, I managed to gain 1 experience for everybody, with a bonus two for my leader as he proved to be a monster taking a few enemy fighters out of action. We also gained four reputation, which is a very good start!
There are three currencies in the game, if you like: credits, XP and reputation. The first is obviously a literal currency, with which you buy stuff, including hiring bodies for your gang, whereas the others come into play in quite different ways. XP is earned most often by simply taking part in a battle, and gangers can gain additional XP by taking enemy fighters out of action. Sometimes there will be additional things that a fighter can do to gain XP as well. You then spend XP on advancements for your fighter – for leaders, champions, juves, prospects and specialists (basically, everybody not a ganger), you can use XP to purchase upgrades to your stats such as improving your weapon skill or ballistic skill, gaining skills, and so on. For a ganger, when you gain at least 6XP, you roll on a 2D6 table and gain the appropriate benefit which is similar to the above.
Finally, reputation has a couple of applications, most common being a level that allows you to hire hangers-on and brutes. So when you have between 1 and 4 reputation, you can hire one; between 5 and 9, you can hire two, and so on. Hiring the body will still cost credits, of course, but they can almost act like a bonus for your whole gang, depending on who you hire. Certainly, brutes are basically an additional fighter that will have very real in-game benefits.
In a Law & Misrule campaign, however, reputation has another use, determined by whether you are law-abiding or an outlaw. For my outlaw Goliaths, this is for stuff like discounts at the black market, or recruiting certain types of hangers-on for free, while law-abiding gangs can claim bounties on outlaw fighters, and recruit other types of hangers-on for free.
It’s a very intricate system, but it’s all pretty fascinating and I think we’re both really into it, so that always helps!
Anyway, now that we’ve had a few games in the campaign, I’ll be back later in the week to go through what has happened so far, and have a proper catch up moving forward. I think the fact we’ve been able to play so often recently is quite unprecedented, but hopefully we can keep the momentum going!
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