Vicious Nemeses that hunt the players, Living breathing settings and even gangers brought back to life through arcane means are all things that are available in Necromunda Apocrypha, up for pre order today.

Christmas is often the time for annuals and collected volumes of Specialist Games publications, with things such as the Blood Bowl Almanac usually getting released that gather together the various releases of the year into a single tome. This year we get some love for Necromunda in the form of Apocrypha, a book that collects and expands some out of print rules and presents them along side some brand new content for the game.

In this review we’ll be taking a look at what is in the book, what is new and decide if this is worth adding to your Necromunda Library.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us a free review copy a little ahead of time. If you would like to support the site then why not order your Necromunda goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

Don’t forget the awesome new Tauros Venator is also up for pre order today, which we’ll be doing a video on as soon as it’s available!

So gather your gang, and let’s check out what’s in Necromunda Apocrypha

Necromunda Apocrypha

So first up, I have to admit when we got sent this I was expecting it to be a volume collecting together all the Apocrypha articles over on Warhammer Community. There’s some really fun stuff in those articles, and so I was really excited to have a physical book gathering them all together for use at the gaming table. Strangely however, despite sharing the same name this is more a collection of updated articles from White Dwarf, stuff from Gang War 3 and the Dark Uprising campaign alongside a couple of new bits.

So there are some players that will already have a good chunk of this content, even if it has been updated and expanded in places, with the brand new content totaling about 50 pages of the 130 page book. The other content is from all over the place, and thankfully non is reprinted from any of the new sourcebooks (outside of Gang War 3 and Dark Uprising), so a lot of newer Necromunda players and even some veterans will be seeing this content for the first time here.

Also, a lot of this content is best suited for an Arbitrator looking to run fun and interesting campaigns – Necromunda is at it’s best when you have an Arbitrator writing some interesting and unique stories and events to weave into your campaign, and this book gives them a toolkit from which to craft these

So let’s take a look at what we get, and where it comes from

Underhive Nemeses – New Content

First up in the book is a system for creating a Nemesis for your players to come up against during a campaign. Every good movie or videogame has the big baddie that is pulling the strings in the background, or is the unstoppable threat hounding the hero. Immortan Joe chasing down the War Rig with his army, Darth Vader hounding the rebels, or the sinister T1000 pursuing John Connor.

The Underhive Nemeses rules allow you to create a bad guy just like these who can be scaled up in power based on the events of the campaign and turn up at key moments for dramatic effect. Perhaps your gangs have unwillingly trespassed on his territory, and so he sends his personal army after you while watching from the sidelines. But then maybe over the course of the campaign one of the gangs manages to acquire a valuable artifact that belongs to him, leading him to having to take matters into his own hands and go after the gangs himself…

This is really cool and gives the arbitrator a threat they can use sparingly in the campaign to up the stakes from time to time. The Nemesis can be made as powerful as you need, but the book uses a “threat rating” system that shows how powerful he (and any goons and minions he may have) are against any single gang. Mechanically it works much like the bounty hunters, with a number of profiles based on different races and combat preferences, which is then augmented with purchased skills and equipment in order to tune him in line with the power of the gangs currently in play. Games Workshop actually go a step further here too and have some guides to giving him some motivations and background in order to flesh out your character and have him feel a part of a living, breathing universe, as all good bad guys should. In addition to this there is also material here dedicated to coming up with a weakness for him – let’s face it, you could get to the point where the big bad is fully tooled out and pretty unkillable, so the book suggests coming up with some narrative hooks that can lead to the defeat of the Nemesis over the course of the campaign such the Nemesis requiring a certain drug or serum in order to survive, and the Arbitrator coming up with a story arc that has the players trying to shut down the supply of this drug so that they can face him on a more even setting for the grand finale.

I love stuff like this, as it really captures my imagination, and as an Arbitrator having the excuse to roll some dice myself with a little bespoke force of murderous nutcases hellbent on taking out the players is always something I will lap up!

Living Settings- New Content

The next piece of new content in the book is a guide to creating a living setting, your own little slice of Necromunda that has been fleshed out with named characters and hangers on, the wildlife and the environment and even what sort of economy exists. This again is a great tool for an Arbitrator for making a campaign setting that feels real and evolves along with the events of your games. They are encouraged to make sure that anything that happens is meaningful – so for example, you may have written a small border shanty town out in the Ash Wastes as the setting for your campaign. Maybe gear is hard to come by because of infrequent deliveries from the hives – but maybe that means that scrap from destroyed vehicles is very valuable and the players will be rewarded greatly for what they can recover. But if the players push the status quo too far then maybe their actions cause the settlement to be undefended against raiding Nomads which in turn leads the contents of the trading post to dwindle even further.

Along with some nice guidelines to building a setting, Games Workshop also provide a number of pre made setting ideas, all fleshed out with background and their in game impact in order for Arbitrators to adapt and amend.

I really love stuff like this, as it really scratches the RPG dungeon master itch I sometimes have, and anything that adds more narrative and roleplaying elements into a Necromunda campaign is a massive win for me. While maybe people wont go as far as writing background, maps and characters for their campaign, the inclusion of pre written ones gives even new arbitrators some great examples of what can be done when you take the time to create a living setting for your campaign.

Resurrection Packages – Originally in White Dwarf 453

With the two largest pieces of new content out of the way, the majority of the rest of the book focuses on expansions to articles and features we have seen in other books and White Dwarf. Resurrection Packages is the first such thing, and this gives Arbitrators 10 different things that can be done in order to return a slain ganger back to life. The book stresses that there is always a cost associated with cheating death, and each also has an end game scenario that may result in a fate worse than death for anyone willing to take this devils deal.

For example, in order to return a dead gang leader to life, the Arbitrator may decide that they have been possessed by a Daemon. This daemonic entity holds the fragile remains of the hero together in exchange for the life essence of freshly killed victims, with the champions toughness dropping by 1 for each battle in which they do not kill someone. This may result in them having to sacrifice their own fighters in order to sate the beast, however at some point the Daemon will have it’s fill and simply return to the warp, discarding the dead body it has been wearing up until that point.

Or perhaps a mysterious stranger appears, offering the fallen leader the chance of being fitted with some device that will restore their vitality. However every deal has a cost and this restored character now operates only as a bounty hunter in a debt of service to the stranger, being able to be hired by any gang with deep enough pockets.

While I think these should be used sparingly, I think this is a fun way of being able to throw in a cool twist in the event that a champion is killed too early in a campaign – I also think it would be quite fun if the Arbitrator kept the cost or consequences secret until it is time to pay up, leading to a little panic and strife for the resurrected player’s faction.

Arbitrator Scenarios and Gang Raid Scenarios – Originally in Gang War 3 and White Dwarf December 2019

Next up we get a collection of scenarios from the old Gang War 3 book and a 2019 issue of White Dwarf – while some people will still have the publications these were originally printed in, these have been updated to make them work a little better for the current edition of the game, and having more scenarios for the Arbitrator to draw from is never a bad thing.

One thing these battles are particularly suited at are for multiplayer games, so these make a great end of a campaign arc battle or before the mid campaign break to give everyone the chance to get involved together before they look to expand their gang.

The Uprising Campaign – Originally in Dark Uprising

The full Uprising Campaign from the Dark Uprising box (The one that came with the Zone Mortalis scenery) is also reprinted here. Now, a lot of people will have the original book for this and so will have this to hand and may find this to be wasted pages within the book.

The campaign is a great one that revolves around the corpse starch butcher staff going mad under the influence of Khorne and absolute chaos erupting on Necromunda leading to meat itself being the most valuable resource during the second half with credits not having their value any more. lots of bloodthirsty antics ensue and there’s some really fun stories you can create.

Now, this book has been out of print a while, so it’s certainly something that people want to add to their collection – but the book is pretty easy to find online and so I’m not sure if I’d have dedicated over a quarter of the page count of Apocrypha to it (Especially as the target audience for this book probably have the original) and would have perhaps rathered a book dedicated to collecting together a number of campaigns together into one volume, and leave Apocrypha to more Arbitrator tools like the great content surrounding Nemeses and living settings. But I do recommend people playing through the Uprising Campaign as it is great fun!

Outlaw Brutes – Originally in White Dwarf 458

We get another reprint from White Dwarf in the form of Outlaw Brutes. This gives Outlaw players some really fun Brute options that each make for fun modelling projects such as Corrupted Ambots, Mutated Ogryns, Sump Beasts and Warp Horrors. A lot of these can use other models from the 40k or Age of Sigmar ranges, and gives you something unique to add to your Outlaw gang.

Additional Clan House Vehicle Rules

Finally we get an expansion to what gear each of the houses have access to for vehicles, and this essentially adds a lot of the more flavorful heavy weapons as options to mount on vehicles, allowing you to make something more in line with your gang. So for example in an Escher gang you can now mount Chem Throwers to your vehicles, or Mining Lasers and Seismic Cannons for Goliath (Giving them a great base for vehicles with the Genestealer Cults kits). Each gang gets their weapon lists for vehicles updated, and Delaque get their own crew (As they did not get a profile during the Aranthian Succession) alongside their own vehicle gang tactics. I do think it’s a shame the Delaque didn’t get their own vehicle alongside this book though, as I think GW could have added some fun stuff for them!

Summary

So what do I think of Necromunda Apocrypha and is it worth adding to your collection. That very much depends on what type of player you are. If you are a casual player who is in a group with an established Arbitrator then while the book is a good read, you probably are not going to get much millage from this tome. This is very much a book for Arbitrators and contains lots of tools for creating a Necromunda campaign, or for sprinkling cool things into your existing campaigns.

If you are the kind of person that likes to create a detailed campaign with a living setting, and want to add some memorable things such as a recurring enemy for your players to come up against and add some fun new missions into the mix then I’d say this is deffo one you want to pick up – but even that comes with some caveats in that there’s a lot here that is reprinted and some Arbitrators may already have a lot of this content.

For myself, I think the new content is great and I much rather having the returning White Dwarf content in here than a dogeared magazine (Plus stuff like the resurrection rules and scenarios are expanded further and updated). The one bit that seems a little redundant is the Uprising Campaign. It really is an amazing campaign, but you can easily pick up a copy of the original book for around £10-£15 online as so many people bought that big box for the scenery and so had a couple of spare copies.

That said, even with a quarter of the book dedicated to the Uprising Campaign I still think this book is worth picking up for those who like to craft a Necromunda campaign and make it something special.

Necromunda Apocrypha is up for pre order today and is released on the 6th January 2024

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