The Unnamed Gorkamorka Site

In my recent terrain article I gave a few bits of advice on spray paint, I actually went a bit overboard I feel, given that I was trying to just mention the subject. Then again, it’s a subject that is pretty important in my eyes, so this is actually going to be my first two-part entry.

I could go into why to use spray paint, but I don’t think it’s worth it. If you want to use spray paint, I’m sure you’re already aware of some of the reasons. Instead I’m going to give some tips on paint selection and protection. You can also contact experienced HSP Painting Contractors to get more tips. I also apologise for the UK-centric nature of many of the bits of advice I’m going to give, but there’s probably plenty of stuff for those of you in the US. As for the rest of the English-speaking world, I’m afraid I can’t help with where to get paint – I don’t imagine it’s easy to get hold of in Australia, for example. I favour paint designed for graffiti simply because it’s leagues ahead of anything else I’ve tried.

Characteristics of spray paint

1. Coverage
2. Consistency
3. Cap
4. Pressure

Not in that order, admittedly, I just wanted to spell CCCP.

Coverage

Depending on the manufacturer and techniques used, some paint cans contain more than others. I don’t know whether it’s just marketing noise or not, although I’m inclined to believe in “double thickness” claims by some manufacturers. Low quality paint cans don’t contain as much paint and quickly run out, make sure the paint you get has decent coverage or you’ll end up needing to buy more all the time. A single 400ml can should easily cover many terrain pieces and a crazy amount of miniatures.

Consistency

Generally-speaking the paint you’ll want to use should be quite thick. Runny paint quickly drips and ruins surfaces with built up paint where it has collected. Good quality paint sticks and stays there unless you lay it on insanely thickly – it’s designed to stick to vertical surfaces if it’s for graffiti – drips are a huge no-no on the graffiti scene, after all.

Cap

I plan on explaining more about caps in the second part, but let’s just say this – if your paint comes with a tiny cap on top, chances are it’s garbage. All the good quality paint I’ve bought either has no cap or a chunky cap. By “tiny” I don’t mean the spray it produces, I mean the physical size of the white lump of plastic.
Low quality paint often comes with a cap that is not only gives a terrible spray shape, but also leaks. Not good!

Pressure

This was something I learnt about later and recently noticed properly for the first time. Low pressure paint is a lot more controllable, it’s easy to press the cap just slightly to add a few finishing touches without showering a thick layer of unwanted paint on whatever you’re coating.
Good quality paint shouldn’t be high pressure, unless that’s its selling point (high pressure isn’t bad per se, it’s just not desirable for our purposes). Check the can to be sure it says “low pressure”.

Bad paint

In a great many shops one can buy plasti-kote paint, either in small tins as seen in the photo, or in bigger tins (400ml). It’s runny, high pressure, supplied with a terrible cap and takes many coats to become properly opaque.

On the right is a can of some random stuff I got along with some other stuff. It’s essentially a no-name brand of paint and is both irritatingly glossy, high pressure and drippy.

Now, this is at least somewhat excusable because it cost me next to nothing (I think it was part of an offer on a site and I was curious). Plasti-kote on the other hand is NOT cheap – that can of gold set me back £2.99, according to the label at least (I needed it at a few hours notice).

I’ve done a quick check online for the 400ml tins and am getting results between £6 and £10. Six pounds for a can of terrible paint, dear gods..

Good paint

Here’s a selection of some of the brands of paint I’ve tried and liked, from left to right: Belton, Bombers Best, Racing and Monster Colors.

Of these, my two favourites are Monster and Bombers Best, although they’re all good.

Other notable brands include Molotow, Montana and MTN.

None of these cans cost more than £4, I think. Well, the Belton might have, but the Bombers Best was £2.25 I think, £2.99 or so for the Racing and £2.95 for the Monster.

As you can see, the price is far more reasonable and the product much higher quality.

Protection

Finally, safety first (hah). Ideally, wear a gas mask, not just one of those papery covers for your mouth – the gas is just as bad as the particles. A gas mask won’t set you back much, £10 – £30, depending on your choice. It’s worth it for your body’s sake.

A handy addition is latex gloves, not required, but useful. They stop you getting paint on your hands (this stuff isn’t water soluble!) and makes handling painted stuff a lot easier whilst it’s drying.

I’d also recommend a decent layer of cardboard or newspaper to protect the surface you’re painting on – I use half an old pizza box.

That’s about it for this tutorial, you can read the second part here. Any questions? Leave them in the comments below.

Here’s a two-part article that I think was originally published in White Dwarf, unfortunately we currently don’t have access to those, so this version comes from Gubbinz and therefore is in black and white. It was originally in two bits but we’ve included both parts in the PDF below, worry ye not.

It covers rules and how to model some extra gubbins, including wheel slashas and boosta rokkits, amongst other random odds and ends.

Download PDF

(image by rpeschetz licensed under a Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 license)

A long time ago, back when Gorkamorka was still supported by Games Workshop, White Dwarf had an issue dedicated mainly to the Dark Eldar, the newest race for 40K at the time.

Personally I never liked them much and didn’t buy that issue. A friend had it and I must have looked through it once or twice. Unfortunately, recently I learnt that the hazardous conditions rules for Gorkamorka were published in that issue!

What are they?

Well, Necromunda had them, I think Mordheim too. They’re extra rules that make play a little more interesting. I don’t know whether I’m going to use them myself, but it annoys the hell out of me that they’re not available online, or anywhere else for that matter.

Thankfully, copies of White Dwarf 227 are still out there and I got my grubby mitts on one from an eBay seller. Score! Well, one scanning session later and I present it here for all to find.

As with all official stuff, it’d be nice if GW could see their way to publishing them on their own site, but until then, here it is:

Download PDF

(image by Nimrod Bar licensed under a Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 license)

I felt like trying to build a cheap terrain project this evening, so I set about building a Mutie tent, inspired by the card ones in the Digganob box.

As you can see, the end result isn’t too bad.

These tents are fun to make, cost basically nothing (the paint and foamboard off-cut are probably the dearest) and best of all – they’re functional in-game:

Mutie tents block line of sight normally, and models on foot inside a tent cannot see out or be seen. Vehicles which move into a Mutie tent, voluntarily or otherwise, suffer no damage but stop moving immediately. A tent is destroyed if a vehicle moves through it. At the start of each subsequent turn, roll a D6. On a roll of 1, 2 or 3 the tent is wrapped around the vehicle obscuring the driver’s vision. The vehicle will move out of control as if it had no driver. On a 4, 5 or 6 the tent has been shredded and falls to one side, allowing the vehicle to move normally from then on (no further rolls are needed).
-MUTIE TENTS (Digganob, page 79)

To build one you will need the following:

• Wooden stirrers/ice lolly sticks (“popsicle sticks”)
• A few sheets of tissue paper, such as kleenex
• PVA glue (white glue, uh, “Elmers”?)
• A little string or wire

For basing you’ll need some card or foamboard and a bit of rough sand (I got mine from a nearby beach, it’s made of crushed shells).

To start off with, I selected a suitable bit of foamboard for the base and decided the rough shape of my tent.

Then I chopped/cut at the wooden sticks in order to remove the rounded tips. On one end of each I created a short, sharpened point.

That done, I used the point to pierce the top layer of card on the foam board and positioned them so they crossed. Once that was done I used a little metal wire to wrap around the top, holding them together, although thread or string would have been just as good.

Later I added a Y-shaped beam made from two pieces spliced together, but I’ve no photos as I tried that after adding the first layer of tissue paper.

I’d originally planned to put a raised door on the tent (like the card ones) but I felt that it didn’t quite work using the materials I had to hand, so the plan was changed.

For this I used PVA glue, putting some around each hole in the foam board to secure the bases of the poles, I also applied a thin layer to each so that the paper would stick. Each piece would be carefully torn to about the right shape and then wrapped around.

Then I used some diluted PVA glue (about the consistency of paint) and painted over the paper, taking care not to tear it. After it dried, I added a few details – a patch to cover where I made a small hole accidentally, a bigger patch for a door and a tightly wound piece to act as a draping strap around the top:

After that was done, I took a sharp knife and carved out a base from the foamboard, keeping a small edge, but not too much. I also made sure to make the edges sloping, rather than an abrupt end to the base.

Using yet more glue I painted the base, making sure to not get much on the tent (which was dry by this stage). Dunking it in sand and tapping off the excess gave the result you can see in the following photo.

At this stage I should probably share how I kept moving so quickly – I cheated. I had a hair dryer with me the whole time and would use it to quickly dry the glue (and later the paint) so that I’d be able to keep going at a decent pace. This probably prevents it from being as sturdy as it could be, but whatever – it’s a model and should be handled with care regardless.

Next up was the undercoat. In this case I used Signal Black “Monster Premier” spray paint. I give the brand because it’s paint designed for graffiti. If you’re in the UK or anywhere else that sells that gods-awful Plastikote crap, never buy it. It’s high pressure, low quality and drips like crazy, not to mention being very expensive. I think I paid about £2.95 per can of Monster, available from their site. This stuff is double-thickness (so each can contains a fair bit), it’s also hard-wearing and sticks to just about everything, no cleaning or preparation required. Lastly, it’s low pressure, this means you can easily spray small bursts carefully with it – ideal of going over those bits you missed!

Oh, one more thing – because it’s designed for graffiti, it dries very quickly. This stuff will be dry to the touch within a minute or so. I went over mine with a hair dryer and then snapped this photo.

Here I’ve painted the base with a watered-down dollop of “Snakebite Leather” (Citadel) although I often use “Leather Brown” (Vallejo). I’ve also found that for bigger pieces, “Sand Brown” from Monster Colors is about right.

Once that was dry (hairdryer to the rescue!) I drybrushed on some paint from one of my Dulux tester pots, “Cookie Dough”.

You may of course want to base and paint yours differently.

To paint the wood I used Bestial Brown or equivalent, watered-down. A mixture of browns drybrushed onto the tent itself gave the colour you saw at the start of the article (I used a fine-point permanent marker to do the stitching on the little patch).

There you have it, one simple Mutie tent!

One thing I hear a lot is that the Necrons appear in Gorkamorka. They’re not a playable faction, although they can appear in a battle and even then, there’s pretty much only one published scenario in which they appear, which happens to be the one available in the PDF below.

As the Necron legions sweep nearer and nearer to Mektown, they destroy mob after mob, until they find yours. The scenario is intended to be played as a grand last battle.

Download PDF

Some questions regarding the scenario, with answers from the author, Andrew Mcaleer.

Q) It says an Ork can pick up a gauss flayer from a dismembered Necron. When? When it’s down? Before it fades out of action?
A) Yes, unless the Ork is in base-to-base contact with the Necron, he will be unable to pick up the Gauss-Flayer as it will have faded away. (Get hand-to-handing if you want rare and meaty gunz!) This is most useful if your mob won’t be retiring at the end of the game.

Q) If it’s when the Necron is down and an Ork has his gun does it still have one if it gets back up again?
A) Correct, if its gun has been stolen, it’s a hand-to-hand only machine. Obviously, therefore, no Ork can steal another Gauss Flayer off it either.

Q) Can Necrons run/charge?
A) Necrons can indeed run and charge, just as in 40K2E.

Q) How far do destroyers move? Treat them like bikes? If so can they thrust?
A) Destroyers follow the rules for skimmers from the 40K 2nd Edition Rulebook. Their slow speed is 8″, Combat speed is 20″ and Fast is 30″. If you lack the 2nd edition 40K rules, treating as a bike is the next best thing.

Q) Destroyer armour penetrated. Do you roll on a damage table? If so which one?
A) The destroyer has its own damage table in WD216. on a 1-2 the Necron Warrior is hit, and the normal rolls for a Necron being shot then take place. If the Necron is killed, the Destroyer moves out of control until it leaves the table, is destroyed, or the Necron makes a successful I’ll be back roll.

On a 2-3 the Destroyer is hit. Roll a further D6 on the Tin’ead Destroyer Damage table:
Tin’ead Destroyer Damage Table(D6)

Q) Metal Flayer
A) As for the Metal Flayer question I’ve seen elsewhere, yes, if you roll a 6 on either dice for Armour penetration, you can roll a further D6 and add that to your Armour penetration roll. That one was GW’s fault for not completely reprinting the Metal Flayer special rule in Gubbinz. It’s in WD218 (pg. 25) if you need the full text again.

(image by slworking2 licensed under a Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 license)