It’s been said before, and it’ll be said again: even in a setting predisposed to unfettered misery, the planet of Necromunda is one of a kind. The world’s surface is long-dead, witheringly toxic, and wracked with hostile mutant terrors. Its residents are packed by the billions into towering, unsanitary hive cities, breathing endlessly recycled air, eating reconstituted corpse starch, and scrapping for sustenance in their crumbling metal cocoons. And now there are Genestealers…
Necromunda: Hive Secundus is a new boxed supplement for Necromunda, a self-contained dungeon crawl through the worst city on the most unpleasant planet in an unmitigatedly vile galaxy.
Hive Secundus was once a centre of learning and enlightenment, a rare bright spot amid the ceaseless struggle of the far future, and the so-called jewel of Necromunda. Then a certain Tech-priest Biologis Hermiatus* decided it was the perfect spot for some unsanctioned Genestealer research. The plan, as these things do, went awry – and before long, the hive was riddled with xenos corruption.
House Helmawr first tried to retake the hive and then to contain the disaster – Necromunda being deemed too important for Exterminatus – with a giant perimeter wall and permanent surveillance from the Planetary Defense Forces. Even the Imperial Fists got involved at one point, but as the cult grew in power and audacity, the then-Lord Helmawr did what any reasonable ruler would do: he pummelled the hive from orbit with graviton missiles.
This collapsed the structure in on itself, the accumulated mass of millennia sinking deep into the ground. And yet the infection survived – albeit changed by such esoteric weaponry into something new and horrible: the Malstrain.
You may remember at the end of the last Necromunda campaign book, The Aranthian Succession Part 3: Ruins of Jardlan, when Lady Haera met a surviving brother in his Spyrer suit, and the pair of them then descended into the darkness of the Underhells.
This was, as we say in the trade, a clue. For Hive Secundus has become a happy hunting ground for Necromundan high society, young rousters who love nothing more than wiring themselves into high-tech battlesuits, enlisting gangs of meatshields from the lesser houses, and entering the Underhells to collect xenos heads. And now you can join them.
Necromunda: Hive Secundus is a full game in a box. It contains two complete gangs from three diverse factions: two Orrus Spyre Hunters, a Caryatid Prime, eight Van Saar Tek Hunters, six twisted Malstrain Genestealers, and four Malstrain Tyramites, all new in plastic. There’s also eight plastic Brood Scum, made using the existing Hive Scum in combination with new heads.
The two Orrus Spyre Hunters can be built with a range of top-tier weaponry,** while their Van Saar allies are a new type of specialist with access to additional guns, equipment, and specialist skills.
As for the Genestealers, these aren’t your run-of-the-mill Purestrains. From their Patriarch down, these guys have been changed by the destruction of Secundus – it’s not even clear that the Hive Mind would even want to pay them a visit by this point.
The game itself pits two players in a linked campaign as a Secundan Incursion gang, led by an imperious Spyrer and bulked out by House Van Saar Tek Hunters, infiltrate as far as they can into infested Hive Secundus. The Spyrers are on the hunt for glory, but the Van Saar seek to plunder datacores. As they get deeper, the environs become more hazardous – and the Genestealers hungrier.
In the box, you get a bulkhead terrain sprue containing barricades and doors, a 176-page softback rulebook, a token board, two double-sided paper gaming mats, range rulers, templates, 88 cards, and 16 dice in a suitably sickly hue.
We’ll have loads more to show you from Necromunda: Hive Secundus in due course – and more from both the Spyrers and the Malstrain, alongside new ruined Zone Mortalis terrain, and a new book. In the meantime, click here to see the rest of today’s reveals.
* Remember him from White Dwarf 145?!
** And whose suits upgrade in an intensely satisfying fashion as their kill counts increase – more on that in later articles…