Necromunda is a hellish world. Both on the surface of the planet, and deep within the hives life is cheap and gangs fight bloody battles for cash, resources or for the shadowy influence of the powerful individuals and guilds who hire them. From tight battles in close confines in the depths of a city, or high speed vehicular combat across the ash wastes, the planet offers multiple ways for an up and coming ganger to make their mark. Most gangers, however will amount to nothing but corpse starch.

In the new revised Core Rulebook (2023) for Necromunda, up for pre order today, players can discover this world and take part in their own campaigns to tell the story of their gang surviving in this hellish environment. In this review we’ll be taking a look at what the game is, what has been consolidated together from other books and see what has been changed in order to bring the game up to date.

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So gather your gang together as we get ready to head back into the Underhive.

Necromunda New Core Rulebook 2023 Review

So before we dig into what this book is, let’s take a little time to talk about Necromunda itself! Originally released in 1995, Necromunda is a skirmish game set within the close confines of the Underhive – the labyrinthine passages and structures below the hives of the world of Necromunda, an industrial hiveworld that creates many resources for the Imperium, and yet is mired in its own web of corruption and crime. In 2017 the game was re-released by the Specialist Games Studio and has gone from strength to strength since then with a whole host of books and supplements, most recently in a new campaign series that follows the assassination attempt of Lord Helmawr, the ruler of the planet.

Now, with this being a popular game with around 15 books released for the new edition of Necromunda there are currently lots of rules spread across multiple different volumes, and it seems that Games Workshop have taken this opportunity to put out a new and revised copy of the core rulebook. So what does this mean if you are a new or existing player? Well for existing players this book does a couple of things we will be looking at in closer detail further down – but the big ones are that it takes the rules content from the original core book, the Ash Wastes book and the trading post all crammed into a single book. That’s ace, but that’s not it – there are also lots of small tweaks to a lot of rules in the game to either make options more viable, or make things in combat a little more lethal, or just generally clarify things for players. For brand new players to Necromunda this is great, as this gives you a nice new book that has everything you need to play (except for your gang rules)

So let’s take a look at what has changed

The Lore

So we have a fairly chunky section going into the lore of Necromunda and the various gangs, cults and factions – With a lot to cover over 50 pages, I’d say this is really more a flavour and overview piece for people who are new to the game who want to learn about the setting – there’s a lot more to dig into in the various “House Of” books (for those newcomers this is along the lines of a “codex” for your factions with background and rules) and a lot of this will be familiar to existing players, but again its nice to have a flick through with some great artwork and maps that really capture the feeling of the universe. One thing that did surprise me here is that the timeline ends just before the Aranthian Succession storyline starts. So if you are new to the game and want the full “story so far” you’ll probably want to also pick up those two books if you are interested in the developing lore. This also means that games can easily be played before this major event happens, meaning that players are not “locked” into the new storyline.

The Rules

The big selling point of this book is that it takes rules content from both the last core rulebook and the Ash Wastes rulebook into a single 330+ page book – this is a massive boon for players who have sometimes felt like they need to flick back and forth through multiple books to have all of the information that they need in order to play games. This is also supplemented by something that I was very happy to see in the form of a full index – this is comprehensive and even lists Trait, Skill or Condition in brackets after key entries to make it really easy to look up what weapons, skills and abilities too without having to use multiple bookmarks to keep track of everything during a game. This is a small change but for me one of the most important ones in a game that can at times be a little complex due to the number of different moving parts and rules elements.

The back of the book also still contains a full round summary that details how each phase runs with clear page references to the full rules for that phase, along with any key charts or tables that are needed. – this summery and the index will mean that newcomers to Necromunda will have a much easier time looking these things up without having to create a full cheat sheet in order to do so, and even existing players will be glad of having not to flip wildly through the book as much!

As for rules changes, there are no massive game altering things such as changing the core mechanics of the game, but instead lots of little tweaks and improvements that keep the game flowing a lot better than the previous edition. in a lot of cases working has been re-written to make things a little easier to follow, and in other cases some amendments that do have larger impacts.

One example of this is that all serious injury roles now cause a flesh wound – this means that fighters tend to go out of action a lot quicker than they did in the previous edition. But we also see some decent updates to the Lasting Injury table with it being expanded to now have 19 possible outcomes. A biggie is that if a fighter rolls a double one they only have to miss the post game sequence and do not go into recovery, making this an ace result now with minimal downsides. Equally there are also a couple more beneficial results on the chart, 12 giving them impressive scars that improve their cool, 13 giving them horrid scars that give them the fearsome skill, and 14 giving them berserker against the gang that caused the injury. Gangers not missing the next game covers around half of the injury chart with results up to 43 just having them miss the post game sequence – they still get some negative modifiers to reflect their injuries, but they can get back in the fight the following turn. There’s also some more deadly results on the chart too such as Multiple Injuries making them roll D3 times on the chart. I like these changes – firstly it makes it more likely that downed fighters will go out of action rather than spend the entire game bleeding out on the floor. But with the reduced chance of missing the next game it limits the massive disadvantage this can be for early campaign while also maximising the cool narrative aspects of injuries and grudges, something that can be used to great effect within a campaign and giving Arbitrators something fun to use as incentive to make and break alliances.

Another thing that sees quite a few tweaks are Skills – Games Workshop have again taken the opportunity to improve some skills that didn’t tend to get picked and bring them up to speed against some of the other more popular ones. For example Hurl now allows you to throw someone as a free action after a charge – which is really cool! I can see someone charging across a bridge towards their target before throwing their poor victim to their doom. And speaking of free actions, Headbutt is now free making it a lot more viable to pick up! It’s great that GW have taken the chance to update these – and now that you can pick a secondary skill for 12 xp there’s more options available to players to tailor the kind of fighters they want to play.

From an experience point of view there are more ways of gaining XP during a game – you now gain a point for causing a serious injury, 2 points for taking someone out of action or wrecking a vehicle (with an extra point if you take out a leader or champion). You also get xp for assisting a fighter with a recovery check and you now always get 1 xp for surviving the battle! This is great as should mean that fighters now have a more consistent stream of experience and more opportunity to gain more advancements. It also means that the losing gang should also still get a decent amount on their fighters even if things quickly go sideways during the battle.

We also get the Dominion Campaign included in the book which is a really nice way of chaining together games into a campaign with various different territories for your gangs to fight over. Campaign play is probably the best way to play Necromunda, as with an Arbitrator (Necromunda speak for a Games Master) running the campaign you can start to include some really cool narrative and roleplaying elements while also having the feeling of the gangs actually having a reason to fight each other. The book does include a number of different scenarios from both the previous core book and the Ash Wastes book, however my one main criticism against the book is that it does not contain them all – It would have been ace if all these different scenarios had been included here, and due to the fact that some are missing I’ll probably end up keeping my original rulebook and Ash Wastes books just in case I fancy playing these missing scenarios in the future. That said, we still get a total of 11 scenarios in the book which gives players a decent number of missions both set in the underhive and out in the ash wastes.

One of the additions to the book that a lot of people will be excited to see is the new Trading Post – this is updated and completed to offer all of the gear, chems, weapons, servo skulls, creatures and status items that are available to buy for all gangs – this has been reworked a little and is now a single listing of all items with the illegal items now marked with an “illegal” keyword – there is now a modifier present when searching for items that makes a lawful gang hunting for illegal gear more unlikely (-4 availability level) but still possible. Outlaw gangs do not have this modifier and so have much easier access to those naughty forbidden items! This is a chunky part of the book with the following pages containing all the rules, stats and traits – again meaning that a lot of this can be looked up on the fly during a game without having to flick back and forth through multiple books.

Summary

So its been 5 years since the previous Rulebook for Necromunda, and I feel that this new Core Rulebook does a decent job of integrating material from the books that have come out since 2018 while also doing a pass over a few areas that have received some welcome tweaks. Some people had been worried that the new book would fundamentally change how the game plays, but this is very much the Necromunda you remember, just with some tweaks such as accelerating XP gain and making injuries much more interesting while giving some struggling skills some love. From a book keeping point of view, having all of the rules in a single volume reduces some of the book bloat you sometimes get when running a game – especially when you have the Ash Wastes elements like vehicles involved too.

For new players, this is a great jump on point as all you really need to start playing is this new Necromunda Core Rulebook and the House book for your faction – oh and your gang of course!

This is a worthy addition to your collection, though I would still hang on to your previous rulebooks if only for the missions contained within them, but a decent amount of scenarios are still included for any players new to the game,

The new Necromunda Core Rulebook is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 29th July

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.