Necromunda New Edition

[ThePenitentOne]

So I didn't watch the stream, just read the article, and it doesn't seem to explicitly say the Ash Wastes and vehicles would be usable at launch... But I can't imagine even GW doing an own-goal of that magnitude.

[Indy Techwisp]

5 minutes ago, ThePenitentOne said:

So I didn't watch the stream, just read the article, and it doesn't seem to explicitly say the Ash Wastes and vehicles would be usable at launch... But I can't imagine even GW doing an own-goal of that magnitude.

 

From what it sounds like the Ash Wastes/Hive Secundis factions are all in the 2nd book where as the main Hive factions are in the 1st book.

I guess the cults and stuff might also be in book 2, idk.

 

Edit:

Found the books in the article.

 

So anything in the Underhive on the left and anything outside or in Hive Secundis on the right.

Edited June 26 by Indy Techwisp

[Northern Walker]

I think having female Goliath is a huge misstep both in theming and especially when they're put in opposition to Escher. 

[Castellan Wulfrik]

I'm getting Horus Heresy 3.0 vibes, oh dear. Whether they've actually ruined the game or not the marketing team has massively dropped the ball with this one. The wording, the lack of information; it just creates panic rather than hype. Shows a deep lack of understanding of the game, and the target audience. Sackable offence, frankly. 

[Silvereyes]

To be honest, I felt like this was going to happen sooner or later. Considering how most GW game systems (that they still support) have gotten new editions in the last couple years, I'm not sure why Necromunda would be excluded.

 

It definitely feels like a monkey's paw situation. Because honestly, as much as I love Necromunda 2nd edition, there is lots of reasons why a new edition makes sense. 2nd edition has produced a lot of books, and a lot of bloat over the years. The game has changed and evolved since really the launch of 2nd edition was the game's relaunch. As a couple users have talked about, we've seen the rulebook revamped a few times, with it being a bit more like edition 2.5. The game has a great number of models and gangs, but can be hard to understand if you don't want to do a standard House gang, something GW themselves seem to acknowledge with how the Squats and Palanite Enforcers recently received House-like books.

 

Stuff like Hired Guns especially are an absolute pain if you want to run them just by having to track down what book their rules reside in. Hired Guns will benefit massively from having all of them consolidated within a couple of a book. Also if we've reached the point now that the House gangs are in need of some refreshes and range expansions, and therefore new books, why not just strike with a new edition in the process?

 

And I guess on a personal level: again, love the game, but it absolutely could be made better. Hell, I think there are aspects of it that could be, dare I say, "streamlined", without losing complexity or fun. With so many books to keep track of, I don't think it's that surprising that they would hit the reset button. 

 

Now, I will say, I am worried too. There are ways that they can screw this up. Oversimplify things that don't need it. I don't want to see a ton of stuff from the Trading Post ejected because they don't have dedicated models. Hopefully all gangs that aren't House standard don't get left in the dust, and need to wait years for their own book to bring them back properly. Vehicle stuff is a concern, especially when already feels pretty unsupported anyway. (I don't believe GW even sells the vehicle dice in any capacity?) And I'd certainly hate for them to want to make the game like Kill Team. Kill Team's great, but Necromunda has its own niche, which is very much in how much role playing is involved, and it's campaign XP system. It would be a total shame to lose sight of that.

 

And honestly, even if the 3rd edition launch is a bit of a :cuss: show, I don't think staying with 2nd edition should be that difficult? Considering how the game doesn't have much online connectivity, certainly not as difficult as it would be to continue playing 10th edition 40K for instance. So I don't feel too worried about losing the game if things go south. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some Necromunda fans continue to support 2nd edition into the future, even adding new models and giving them 2nd edition stat lines, etc.

 

As a final thing, the slight rebrand is interesting. I think it makes sense to call it Warhammer: Necromunda, but I find it curious why it isn't "Warhammer 40:000: Necromunda"? Perhaps they think it's too far from the 40K armies to be under the same umbrella? Or GW wants to keep Necromunda as its own branding? The Skirmish sub-title is a bit on the nose, but, well, it is a skirmish game, and this is going to be a big jumping on point. Wouldn't be surprised if that sub-title is dropped eventually.

[Antarius]

The game could definitely stand to be streamlined, but I'm just not going to buy this unless everyone consistently says it's amazing.

I know people says Necromunda isn't on  the edition cycle, but I'm not sure that whatever it is, is any better. I mean, since 2017, we've had:
Launch rulebook
6(?) "gang war books"
Revised rulebook
Gangs of the Underhive (that compiled the gang war stuff and a bit extra iirc)
15ish "House of..." and similar books that invalidated "Gangs of the Underhive" almost immediately
3 (or is it 4?) slightly revised rulebooks in different sets
One more big revised rulebook

So I mean, it's not like it wouldn't be easier to just be on the release cycle, at least that way you'd have three years between having to buy new rulebooks and have the direction of the game change. As it is we've had a new rulebook almost every year and the amount of extra rules you have to keep track of is ridiculous, especially for a skirmish game.
And now we're getting yet another new rulebook and a couple of books, one of which is even called "Gangs of the Underhive", which is just a little too on the nose for me to take the bait this time.

And honestly, while the setting is great, almost all the models are fantastic and the game is obviously a work of love, it has not actually functioned well as a game at any point past the first "Gangs of the Underhive", where I guess things were at least "okay" and the game hadn't spiralled completely into madness yet.
Actually, I was very surprised and quite overwhelmed at how much better the ´95 version was, when I tried it again a couple of years ago. It's not just nostalgia either, it's just a much better skirmish game and a lot less clunky than the current one. It feels a little annoying to say it, but it's true.



The minis and terrain are nice, though.

[ZeroWolf]

5 hours ago, Silvereyes said:

To be honest, I felt like this was going to happen sooner or later. Considering how most GW game systems (that they still support) have gotten new editions in the last couple years, I'm not sure why Necromunda would be excluded.

 

It definitely feels like a monkey's paw situation. Because honestly, as much as I love Necromunda 2nd edition, there is lots of reasons why a new edition makes sense. 2nd edition has produced a lot of books, and a lot of bloat over the years. The game has changed and evolved since really the launch of 2nd edition was the game's relaunch. As a couple users have talked about, we've seen the rulebook revamped a few times, with it being a bit more like edition 2.5. The game has a great number of models and gangs, but can be hard to understand if you don't want to do a standard House gang, something GW themselves seem to acknowledge with how the Squats and Palanite Enforcers recently received House-like books.

 

Stuff like Hired Guns especially are an absolute pain if you want to run them just by having to track down what book their rules reside in. Hired Guns will benefit massively from having all of them consolidated within a couple of a book. Also if we've reached the point now that the House gangs are in need of some refreshes and range expansions, and therefore new books, why not just strike with a new edition in the process?

 

And I guess on a personal level: again, love the game, but it absolutely could be made better. Hell, I think there are aspects of it that could be, dare I say, "streamlined", without losing complexity or fun. With so many books to keep track of, I don't think it's that surprising that they would hit the reset button. 

 

Now, I will say, I am worried too. There are ways that they can screw this up. Oversimplify things that don't need it. I don't want to see a ton of stuff from the Trading Post ejected because they don't have dedicated models. Hopefully all gangs that aren't House standard don't get left in the dust, and need to wait years for their own book to bring them back properly. Vehicle stuff is a concern, especially when already feels pretty unsupported anyway. (I don't believe GW even sells the vehicle dice in any capacity?) And I'd certainly hate for them to want to make the game like Kill Team. Kill Team's great, but Necromunda has its own niche, which is very much in how much role playing is involved, and it's campaign XP system. It would be a total shame to lose sight of that.

 

And honestly, even if the 3rd edition launch is a bit of a show, I don't think staying with 2nd edition should be that difficult? Considering how the game doesn't have much online connectivity, certainly not as difficult as it would be to continue playing 10th edition 40K for instance. So I don't feel too worried about losing the game if things go south. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some Necromunda fans continue to support 2nd edition into the future, even adding new models and giving them 2nd edition stat lines, etc.

 

As a final thing, the slight rebrand is interesting. I think it makes sense to call it Warhammer: Necromunda, but I find it curious why it isn't "Warhammer 40:000: Necromunda"? Perhaps they think it's too far from the 40K armies to be under the same umbrella? Or GW wants to keep Necromunda as its own branding? The Skirmish sub-title is a bit on the nose, but, well, it is a skirmish game, and this is going to be a big jumping on point. Wouldn't be surprised if that sub-title is dropped eventually.

On the branding, I don't think its supposed to be Warhammer Necromunda Skirmish but instead Warhammer Skirmish: Necromunda. I just think the logo has been badly designed. I think the idea is they can swap out the Necromunda title for a different game system...maybe one set in the old world where gangs fought over warpstone for instance...

[Bouargh]

My fav part of the reveals. The zone mortalis scenery is especially attractive.

[brother_b]

Check the rules when they’re released. If they’re better, play them.

 

If not, play the edition you prefer.

[m0nolith]

Necromunda is the main game I play, I love it, imo it’s the best game GW has ever done, with Mordheim a close second. 
 

From my end, I do feel sad to see an obsolescence to an amazing series of campaigns books that were available for this edition, but not wholly unexpected given the nature of GW. 
 

As for the rules, like many I love this present edition and I’m anxious about the “streamlining” they’re talking about as the complexity of Necro is one of the things that really appeals to me about the game. I feel the market for more simplified games is more than covered by GW’s other offerings, but then again we have presently no idea what they mean by that. 
 

I’ll reserve judgment until I have the book in hand and I try a few games to get a sense of it. If I and my local group doesn’t like it, we’ll continue playing N17, which usually doesn’t work for larger games but is possible for smaller games like this as the community is a lot more tight knit. Believe it or not there’s people out there who still play N95! 

 

Regardless, I think there has been way too much doom and gloom about this, as is the case with every new edition for every game. Granted, few other GW games have had to suffer the loss of 9 years of campaign books, not to mention that no other games have campaigns as central to its core and as a robust campaign system as Necromunda does. Still even with that, I’ll wait and see what Specialist gives us.

 

That all being said, new models look amazing!

Edited June 27 by m0nolith

[Petitioner's City]

19 hours ago, Northern Walker said:

I think having female Goliath is a huge misstep both in theming and especially when they're put in opposition to Escher. 

 

Again this is not the first female Goliath necromunda has had - the first such model was the forgeborn released back in 2020 - six years ago! So it feels like you haven't been paying attention? 

 

And alongside it House of Chains, and other stories from then, such as the brilliant December 2020 novella Spark of Revolution, featured female Goliath (as well as scandalously goliaths without mohawks - what is more controversial????? :p )

[Doghouse]

I think it's a case of make you sure download any errata or PDFs from the GW site now rather than wait and see if the new system is better. The current edition has a ton of existing material and you can easily carry on playing as you did before. Just look at the new edition as a means to source more models worst case scenario.

 

Campaign cards sound a bit iffy and the two main army books sound like Indexes to me with later fleshed out versions.

 

My gut is telling me this may be a soulless edition but I could be wrong. 

[Northern Walker]

12 hours ago, Petitioner's City said:

 

Again this is not the first female Goliath necromunda has had - the first such model was the forgeborn released back in 2020 - six years ago! So it feels like you haven't been paying attention? 

 

And alongside it House of Chains, and other stories from then, such as the brilliant December 2020 novella Spark of Revolution, featured female Goliath (as well as scandalously goliaths without mohawks - what is more controversial????? :p )

Ok? Just because it happened a few years ago it doesn't alter my opinion that it's a thematic mistake and dilutes the oppositional nature of escher and goliath.  Dumb things remain dumb even as time passes.

[Antarius]

Why would there not be female Goliaths? It's not a "gotcha" question or even a rhetorical question, I just don't understand why there wouldn't be.

 

I mean Escher have a strong  in-world reason for being (essentially) and all-female house and definitely only having female gangers, but none of the other houses/gangs have anything like that. Sure, they could just make something up, but as it stands being all women is an essential part of House Escher lore and gnag concept and it just isn't like that for Goliath or any of the other gangs.

[Ripper.McGuirl]

It’s refreshing that most people here actually aren’t dooming about this. 
I love Necromunda and am my group’s main arbitrator and organizer. I do silly custom skins for our campaigns and make lots of handouts and what not. I am INTO it. But I can’t deny it’s hard to onboard new people and I can’t say I hate the idea of a way to go back to the “gangs of” book where everyone is a bit easier to manage. I also like the idea of skirmishes being a bit more fleshed out and intentional as an option.

I love campaigns. They are for sure the best way to play Necromunda, but they just don’t always logistically work out. If I had a better way to say “this month we are doing skirmishes from the Gangs of options” it would be great. Currently that would mean people not being able to use half the weird fun stuff (some of my players would prefer that as it would be closer to old 95).

I also think there are real issues with campaigns either immediately snowballing into insanely lethal craziness and with people ultimately never using like 75% of the options available because they are just too annoying to figure out. In 5 campaigns I don’t think anyone has used a hired gun, gang terrain, booby trap, or like half the equipment options.

There are real reasons to be worried about what they are doing to the rules, GW does not have a great track record with edition changes. But this edition has been going strong for almost a decade, none of my books or pdfs will be destroyed when the new edition comes, and if the game mechanics are mostly the same, it won’t take much to update whatever I need. 
The new models are sick (including the female Goliaths), so regardless of the new mechanics, they’ll get used. They seem like they’re adding Secundus style specialists to all the gangs, which could be fun or could be too much. 
Long story short: we’ll see!

[Petitioner's City]

3 hours ago, Northern Walker said:

Ok? Just because it happened a few years ago it doesn't alter my opinion that it's a thematic mistake and dilutes the oppositional nature of escher and goliath.  Dumb things remain dumb even as time passes.

 

The oppositional nature of Goliath and escher is arguably only a modern thing - and a kind of reading on to them. Confrontation of course didn't have the houses. N95's opposition wasn't Goliath and escher, as the box featured orlock and Goliath, for example. N03 didn't have any oppositional set, as there wasn't a starter.  Instead only prominently did 2017 and especially two early modern BL texts (terminus overkill and wanted dead) featured escher and Goliath in conflict.

 

This is just a reading on to one box - one which wasn't actually condoned by the text of the 2017 box. Of course it's a vibrant image, muscly men versus differently muscly women, but it's just reading on to the image of that box as some kind of platonic ideal of very set ideas of warrior men and warrior women. But it's a retrograde one, given our modern world and what you can see in any gym, any park, any martial arts club, today. 

 

As Antarius writes, why wouldn't there be women? Indeed the idea Goliath were vatborn was a 2017 idea Beforehand they were just men and women doing what men and women did to make more men and women. With 2017 the idea of the vat was introduced but it was not defined as the only thing - it was an evocative idea, but it wasn't presented as the universal. 2 years and four months later, that was clarified and expanded with the names vatborn, natborn and unborn. 

 

Another idea 2017 introduced was the idea that the six clan house and six great houses dominated every hive, rather than just being the twelve houses in Primus - n95 left open what houses were in other hives - this introduces a scale the lore really hasn't addressed since 2017, outwith the unborn. So I often look at the clan houses through a mix of diaspora studies and race theory and fashion history - asking what *are* the houses? And what are the underhivers - who are far less in focus in modern munda than in 95/03 and those edition's BL offshoots. Are they all descendents of houses, or something else? Again, what really are the houses? Yes the books present simplified ideas, but they dont go deep into it - it's a fun 2000ad comic version of Warhammer, after all!

 

So I tend to think of the houses expansively as diaspora or even fashions - and Goliath lore did the best at evoking diaspora with the unborn idea. Surely many Underhive and even city gangers are unborn or mixed in origin - we are dealing with hundreds of generations leading to the modern moment in the hive, and an astounding number of people. So these gangers - I often think they are people without a specific origin coming to embrace a particular idea or culture, whether they were born into it or not. That was an idea that I feel terminus overkill also suggested, with its orphans who join the gangs. 

 

Probably thinking too much about this though :)

Edited June 28 by Petitioner's City

[phandaal]

18 hours ago, Petitioner's City said:

 

Again this is not the first female Goliath necromunda has had - the first such model was the forgeborn released back in 2020 - six years ago! So it feels like you haven't been paying attention? 

 

And alongside it House of Chains, and other stories from then, such as the brilliant December 2020 novella Spark of Revolution, featured female Goliath (as well as scandalously goliaths without mohawks - what is more controversial????? :p )

 

In my head, Goliaths will always be roided-up street punk dudes, and Escher will always be punk rock ladies crossed with Tank Girl. The tropes are just too strong. I don't keep up with Necromunda close enough to pretend to know when GW started mixing the two, but 2020 sounds about right, given the way the various entertainment/gaming companies started shifting around 2015/2016. That would fit GW's supposed design cycle time pretty well.

 

It is simple enough to only use the minis for whichever version fits your head canon though.

[Xenith]

On 6/26/2026 at 8:44 PM, Evil Eye said:

Firstly putting Necromunda on the edition churn machine, resetting the rules and invalidating all the content released so far is laaaaaaaaaaaame. I'd considered getting into Necromunda but I'm absolutely not willing to engage with it now.

 

 

If this is a decent consolidation, then it'll be the best time to get into NM. Munda struggled with rules being all over the place. The NM23 book did some good work in consolidating things, however I'd also say if you havent got into it in the 30 years NM has been out, you probably never will so it's a weird complaint.

 

On 6/26/2026 at 8:46 PM, Lord Marshal said:

In fairness, the current edition of Necromunda is what, nine years old? I wouldn't call that a churn machine. Most non-GW games don't go that long without one.

 

A new core book was released in 2023, which compiled all the old stuff - so maybe an edition 2.5? But this puts us 3 years later, which is GW'd edition churn timeline...

 

The 2023 book btw, is all you ever need to play - the house books only add a little flavour and some discount gear/skills. It did get a bit sprawling and hard to digest with the shotgunning of kits and rulebooks. 

[Gamiel]

4 hours ago, phandaal said:

In my head, Goliaths will always be roided-up street punk dudes,

They still are. They don't stop being that just becouse some of those roided up dudes are ladies (some with beards according to one of the books).

[Laurence]

On 6/26/2026 at 9:29 PM, Evil Eye said:

Fair enough; weird retcon to make, not sure it really adds anything much but...sure?

 

It's not a retcon; in the original Necromunda the Goliaths were just regular people that loved steroids.  The retcon was in House of Chains, where it was established that they were meant to be a sterile vatborn slave stock, but sabotage by the Eschers and Van Saars (each hoping to harvest a cure for their own House's genetic curses) resulted in them being capable of breeding, they break loose and then vamoose.

[Cactus]

6 hours ago, Xenith said:

The 2023 book btw, is all you ever need to play - 

Not really. With just the rulebook there's no way to form a gang to play with, and it doesn't tell you the distribution of the symbols on the dice.

 

That book was my introduction to the current edition I was disappointed that it failed to even be a whole game in a book. A sad contrast to my beloved N95+Outlanders hardback which is probably the best book GW ever published.

 

I've been buying up all the Necromunda hardbacks and some of the starter sets over the last year and a half, have painted a malstrain gang, haven't played once. I regret nothing because the world building in those sourcebooks is so good and so in tune with 40k's core sensibilities. Go and read the description of Mung vases, their contents and why they're so prized if you don't believe me.

 

This new box looks a lot like how James Hewitt has described his brief for the 2017 game. I expect the sourcebook hose to be turned back on quite soon. I hope that the new rules are close enough to the old that some back-porting or foward-porting is possible, but I have two complete editions of Necromunda to play and the model range is full of absolute bangers. I can't lose out too badly, no matter what happens.

 

 

 

Unless they bin all the superb guild entourages before I can get them ....

[Antarius]

Yeah, I left the official game behind some time ago and just focus on my own homebrew stuff, but the minis are pretty consistently great (there are a few that don't match my conception of Necromunda, but they're easy enough to avoid). I think and hope they'll continue to sell them, but what will be really interesting is where they go from here, as all gangs are pretty complete.

I don't think we'll see Ratskins again, but Scavvies might make an appearance. Other than that I don't really know what they could do that they haven't already done, but one would think the releases are meant to continue at roughly the same pace, so it'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

Edited Monday at 07:43 AM by Antarius

[Blindhamster]

I had just been looking to make an outcast gang lead by vandoth… no idea if it’ll be viable now lol. One project I’ll put on hold

[Castigator]

30 minutes ago, Blindhamster said:

I had just been looking to make an outcast gang lead by vandoth… no idea if it’ll be viable now lol. One project I’ll put on hold

The beauty of the Munda community is that everyone is eager to make your creations work and we embrace the weird and wacky to flesh out our Munda history and create our own tales of murder and intrigue. With that in mind, I would continue with Vandoth and his band of rag tag miscreants, GW will never stop us house ruling the game to how we want to play because whatever they do or don't do, it's our sandbox and we're gonna play in it however we want!
I'm halfway through creating my Inquisitorial Ordos Pronatus warband and come what may, I'm going to damn well use them to 'protect' the citizens of Necromunda from dangerous artifacts....whether they like it or not! 

[Lord_Ikka]

I'm on the fence about this- Necromunda is a game I love quite a lot but also have a lot of issues with. The main problem with Necromunda, especially for new players, is that there was no real consolidated rules (even with the '23 book). You needed the main rulebook and then your own gang rulebook as a bare, bare minimum. If you wanted to run a newer hanger-on that wasn't in your gang's book, then you needed another gang book just to get that single hanger-on. Rules were scattered about and the updates were inconsistently done. 

 

Now, that being said, I love the non-competitive, story-driven nature of a Necro campaign. One of the best gaming moments I've ever had was on my first game of a new campaign, my Venator Champion outfitted with a plasmagun was one-shotted out of the game and then out of life by a Chaos grunt, in the first turn. So epic! As long as that spirit persists, I don't think any changing of the rules will damage the game's reputation. Necro has always been about the fun, funny, and weird- that will hopefully stay.

 

As far as the new models, they're ok. I don't tend to get starter/big boxes, so I probably won't get this one, but I'm intrigued about the new crew boxes. What I would like is a box that gives you 8-10 models: 4/5 similar to the old gang boxes and 4/5 that are similar to the specialists. Throw in a sprue of weapons upgrades and I'll be buying at least three different gangs-worth. That would be the kind of box that gives everyone something they want: enough basic gangers to fill out a starter gang and a selection of champs/specialists that you need for later play (but not requiring you to buy a full box of just specialists). 

 

My other want is some sort of vehicle/mount for the Delaque. Come on GW, I know they are sun-adverse spies, but they use the Ash Wastes just like everyone else. Give them some sort of bike or covered dune buggy!