Escher & Goliath Journals

There are two ways you can review the new Underhive Journals: review them for what they are replacing or review them for what they are. Since the new edition of Necromunda is still so new, it’s difficult to separate the two because the rules that these journals are taking the place of were the rules, seemingly, yesterday.

As I was reading them over the weekend, having been lucky enough to get them on a Friday to have the whole weekend to digest them, I honestly felt my heart sink a little bit. In part it was because the roleplaying game had already been announced, so I knew that was coming but also because I was trying to put myself in the shoes of someone new to the game and seeing if these journals would bring the same feeling that opening one of the old House of books brought me.

So, cards on the table time because to understand where this review will go, it helps to know from whence it came. I’ve been actively involved in Necromunda since the Ash Wastes box. So, not the longest a person could be playing the game but since May 2022. In that time, I’ve collected all of the rule books that have been published because I, honestly, love the story world and just want every bit of information I can find about it. I played N95 back when and, getting back into the game over four years ago, had an idea of who the factions were. But I remember cracking the House of Iron book for the first time and just loving the detailed backstory that made up the clan house. I felt that double when I got House of Blades. Ideas for gangs and themes just seemed to pop out of every paragraph. The limitation was not my imagination, it was in my ability to paint and model what I had dreamed up.

In typical Games Workshop fashion, the books weren’t perfect. There were typos and there were badly worded rules. There were elements that were too complicated to ever see a game table. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with gang specific terrain or sub-plots. But that really doesn’t matter when they can serve to inspire other ideas. The original House of Blades book had 22 pages of just Escher backstory.

The new House of Blades journal has 12 pages if you’re being generous and including the two pages featuring Gangs of Legend.

The old book had rules for Chem-Alchemy that featured ten types of chems each for Stimms, Toxins, and Gases. And it encouraged players to use those ten to mix and match to create new, custom named chems. The new journal still has Stimms, Toxins, and Gases but they have three each. And they can’t be combined. We went from eighteen gang tactics to six.

I had been hoping that the journals would bring some of the color back to the game that had been streamlined right out of it but, after having read through them, I feel like I’m still seeing everything in grayscale. Where there was once an overwhelming amount of depth in terms of gangs, histories, strategies, and equipment, the new edition introduced gangs with minor cosmetic differences but stats that were largely similar, backstories simplified down to little more than a few “facts” and custom rules that don’t take away from the game but definitely don’t add a lot to it.

And lest I be criticized for being too sensitive about my favorite gang, this isn’t just about the Escher. The Goliath got it in the neck just as badly. Gene-smithing has been reduced to eleven items from which you can select one. Goliath players used to mix the positive and negative smithing traits to play around with value and add a little character but if a player can now only take one smithing trait, why would they ever take a nega-trait?

Compared to what was, what is has become a pale shadow. And this makes me a little sad, not for myself because I have all the old books. I know what these gangs are supposed to be. I feel bad for the new player, the younger player, who hasn’t been involved with the story world before. Yes, the old game had grown very large and more than a little cumbersome. But people who took the plunge were rewarded for it. Now, there hardly feels like there’s a plunge to be made and the reward may be a fun skirmish game but without the thing that made Necromunda unique, a deep and interesting backstory. A fun skirmish game is great! But there is no shortage of those these days.

That’s reviewing the journals for what they were. Now about what they are. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a lot to love on this front either.

Both the Escher and the Goliaths got two new variant gangs. And these are interesting, not least for me because it gives me something fun and thematic to do with the miniatures I used the least in either gang box. The Wyld-runners were pretty close to useless in the last edition, so I’m pretty sure I have more than a handful still on the sprue. And the same was more or less true about the Unborn and I know those are still on their sprue! Now I have gangs where they are the center so it could be fun to finally put these models together and run them as fresh gangs. I don’t know that they’ll be any good. But I have the models and the composition rules at least look interesting enough to try out.

I am glad to get some house specific tactics cards, even if it’s just a tiny half-dozen. This is one of the things that can make gangs feel unique as they’re essentially one-time use extra skills for a given house and, if you remember to play them, they can add color in-game.

There’s also the house specific territories. These get added to the territories deck of the scenario generation cards and have unique battlefield effects that will probably benefit the specific gang house more than their opponent. And house side jobs get added to the side jobs deck. I have a piece about the way scenarios are generated forthcoming but, at least for now, I like bringing in some extra elements like these. It’s a good add, I would just criticize it a little by saying that they should have also added a couple extra house objective cards that maybe had more than just some random point on the board denoted by whatever was handy. It was a prime opportunity to make a sumpkroc cage an objective or a Phyrr Cat milk dish or something.

Having the new miniatures rules is nice though, I think, largely unnecessary with the new skill system for standard gangers. Introducing things like the Chem Witch and Gun Maiden are more a necessary side effect of creating the secondary gangs mechanic so as to limit selection than to make up for anything the gang had been lacking. But more is better than less and any model can fill any role if armed correctly, so these new rules fall as neither good nor bad in my book. They just are part of the ruleset now.

What should be criminal is this page:

Forgetting the weapons for the new fighter types that were only just detailed in this booklet, why the actual fuck weren’t the rest of these weapons just in the Gangs of the Underhive book? This doesn’t read as supplemental, that would be if this list only included new weapons for the new fighter types. Instead, this reads as fucking lazy, like someone forgot to add a Boltgun to the book list so, oops! We’ll just toss it into the journal we’re putting out a month later. Wyld-runners were part of the previous edition and have been in the Escher Death-Maidens & Wyld-Runners box for years. Did they just forget about the different bow types?

I understand streamlining. But since the equipment page in Gangs of the Underhive didn’t even consume the whole page… like I said, this just feels like an oopsy-daisy.

The worst part of all of this, honestly, is that for what you get in the journal, especially in comparison to the older books, I don’t want to recommend that people buy these journals. Especially since you can buy the rules for the tactics, side jobs, and territories as part of a card pack. But, unfortunately, if anyone wants more than the unseasoned white-rice version of the gangs as published in the Gangs books, these journals are almost required.

I typically want to end on a positive note. But, unfortunately, I feel like this review has basically captured my overall disappointment with these journals and has also dampened my hopes for them going forward. But, what’s a scummer to do? It’s still my favorite game. I have all the fucking miniatures. I’m still involved in several campaigns. I guess I’ll just have to see how things develop as more journals are published and they eventually, hopefully, make up for the sheer amount of content that was cut in this edition.