I’m not sure why I started an Ironhead Squat gang.
I hadn’t been playing Necromunda for very long. It couldn’t have been because the squats came out with the Book of the Outlands, the one that offered fuller gang rules for the Nomads.
Dollars to donuts, I looked at their miner theme and thought… oooh… another outside Ash Wastes gang! Cool! And that was probably the sum total of my thinking.
One thing I can say for certain is that it was before they put out their weapon’s sprue, the champions and leaders box, and definitely before they put out the exo-kin suits because I struggled like hell to make different models that would stand out. For instance, one thing I remember doing was putting eye protection on standard gangers because, you know, faceless average gangers, whereas the juves and champions had exposed faces. Was it successful? Eh…
I even went so far as to buy a couple of Forge World characters, which was great at the time but less so now that they can basically all be put together from the weapons sprue and be rules compliant. (I’m looking at you Claim Jumper!)
I do also remember, because the initial loadouts were so limited, that the squats were the first gang I ever attempted to do weapon transplants from one hand to another because I wanted a specific loadout but could only get it if I took a left-handed gun and put it on the right (or vice-versa, I don’t remember).
For that reason alone, I have warm feelings for this gang. Having come from Blood Bowl where there is very little modification of off the sprue team miniatures because they usually offer at least one variation of every position, doing small modifications like weapon hand switching was enough to build my confidence to try large miniature modifications, my Bad Zone Enforcers being the most expansive attempt.
But there are obvious problems that I can see just from looking at the pics I’ve included. For instance, each of the Ironhead auto-gunners look essentially exactly the same. Eventually I “solved” this by putting number decals on the back of their helmets. My champions and leader don’t look quite as “heroic” as the ones that come in the champions and leaders box but, then, I’d already built my gang by the time that came out.
There’s one more problem with this gang. But this one is probably exclusive to me. And that’s that I just find them kind of boring.
Don’t get me wrong! They’re a strong gang. I played a small in-store campaign at our local Warhammer store in Hamburg. The idea was everyone started a gang with 500cr, no leaders, one champion, and one juve required on the roster. And, I have got to say, the firepower they could lay down was impressive. There were a couple of games I was trying to play badly in order to teach someone the game and I accidentally slaughtered them because they are very strong. But I’d come from playing Escher where melee was 50% of the game. Being slow and shooty, well… it just wasn’t very exciting!
Maybe you find your excitement as you play more with a deeper campaign. But, in this short campaign, I just never found it, myself.
That said, they are undeniably cool and if you paint them up more creatively than I did, maybe their sameness would be less of a problem. Still, I like to use them as an arbitrator’s gang when I arbitrate campaigns some times. And, like all the minis I have, they’re still just fun to look at!
Last thing I’ll add… I loved the 40k squats they came out with just before (or just after?) the Ironhead release and I especially loved their bikes. I looked into the Wasteland Workshop rules but I hated that there was a cost/stat penalty to the Custom Vehicle rules. I mean… why? So I used the Wolfquad as a base, added anti-grav generators and then stuck a heavy stubber on it to represent the gun in front.
Obviously, to run this you would need arbitrator approval, but I can’t see how that would be an issue. The costing is all based on an existing vehicle, just not the Wasteland Workshop stuff. But I think it’s a pretty solid basic stat line if you want to run hover bikes instead of the trikes that are standard Ironhead kit. This also factors in the cost of a Gearhead crew. I haven’t built one for the two-man bike but… I think this gives a good baseline set of stats to work from.
The key art to this piece was generated by GPT Image 2 based on a tableau created by the author with his own miniatures.
