Necromunda Table – Ash Wastes Shanty Town

Welcome back! Today I’m going to go through the Ash Wastes table I put together from late Spring into Summer 2022.

I think I had always had the idea that I wanted to do some kind of shanty town table, using a lot of GW containers and other things to build housing out of for a somewhat District 9 vibe. I always thought this would be great for Necromunda one day, and when the Ash Wastes was announced I felt this would be the perfect chance to finally do this. I had been stockpiling GW cargo containers and other terrain kits for awhile, so I was pretty much ready to go off the bat. Also, while we had a lot of terrain in the community for Necromunda to play in the underhive, I knew we would need some more Ash Wastes terrain to get going.

Below you can see the starting point of building, taking up the entire room basically, and where I decided I had enough to start painting. I can’t say exactly how long this took but I certainly spent many a day plugging away on this to get it ready for paint. A lot of cutting, gluing, abusing foam terrain, and trying to create fresh buildings from plasticard! I ended up with a number of storefronts from cargo boxes, a classic Pringles tower, and a 2nd life on a bunch of old green hills I received years back in a big box donation. For the hills I pulled off the various larger plant life and shoved the stilts into it from the Ash Wastes terrain so I could mount plat forms on them if I wanted to.

Below is a some shots of the various buildings. I had a lot of fun cutting them up and building shutters and everything, trying to picture what each one would be when I got to painting. I got a gunshop, some general stores, of course a few closed up ones too. I also did up various scatter terrain as cover is everything in Necro!

The classic Pringles container for terrain was something I always wanted to do. I don’t wanna say how long that was in my closet either (I did clean it..). This also gave me some use for the various Sector Mechanicus platforms. The Ash Wastes platforms have also given me some ability to have modular options since I can swap them around for things like the tower or even on those hills.

While I was at it I also got a bunch of the factory terrain done up too (and uh still have to finish off…) – and then enlisted the help from my buddy Marty to get the whole shebang sprayed up. Always wonder what the neighbours must think..

And then it was on. Paint..paint…paint. I used the airbrush as much as possible to get colours down on these, which left only doing some detail work and then the weathering by hand. I wanted a big mix of colours and not just rusty metal hulks, which I think worked out pretty well. You can see some of the bright colours on display before I got to making it dirty.

This was a lot to do in one fell swoop. The whole time I also had the table setup in my room to store the terrain on and jump back and forth on. The rusting and weathering is when things finally started to feel done for sure. I also added paper ads and posters scattered around, which are just printed out on regular paper, white glued on and then washed with sepia.

Finally, on July 8th I was done. All in all it took 2 months roughly from piles of sprues to 6×4 table. You might say, well where is the table? The final piece to this was the game mat! I would LOVE to have a fully molded or carved out table… but storage is consideration that won’t allow that. So I would have to settle for a nice game mat from: https://www.gamemat.eu/

And of course, the 1 mat I wanted was sold out until OCTOBER. I don’t think it arrived after shipping until December… But, it did eventually come. Thankfully our Necro campaign wasn’t gunna hit the wastes until 2023 so no biggie. The quality is lovely and I’ve bought their stuff before so I’d highly recommend it (just keep in mind slow shipping). They also have really nice prepainted terrain that frankly I was highly tempted to just get for this project.

And there it is! Somewhat. The first time getting it out on a table was for a game of 30k with Marty, which needed more space to move around on so I left off all the scatter terrain and some other bits. But it still felt very good to see it all on a table after all that time. One thing I like is that I can easily add to this table for some variety by just picking up some more containers and converting away! Now that I have the table playable I can just grab some here and there and enjoy working on them without any pressure too.

I hope you enjoyed this, I really (most of the time) enjoyed working on this. Terrain is the 3rd army, and it so often gets left behind. But in the end nothing makes a game more than a fully painted table to play on with your fully painted armies. This also puts me at 2 full 6×4 tables that I can use for any setting, and 1 Titanicus 6×4 table as well. I still have a ZM board to make as well.. which I will get to at some point when I start printing out terrain again (3d Printing.. a whole other freaking hobby).

Until next time!