Down in the Underhive — Necromunda Night with Different Not Less Models

Somewhere beneath the towering spires of Hive Primus, in the stinking, flickering dark of the Underhive, two gangs met last night. Shots were fired. Blades were drawn. Someone's favourite ganger took a lasgun round to the leg and will be limping for the next three campaigns. And every single person around that table had an absolute blast.

West Allotment Wildlings ran Necromunda last night in partnership with the brilliant Different Not Less Models — a local gaming store that shares our belief that tabletop gaming should be accessible, welcoming and open to everyone. It was a brilliant evening, and it felt like exactly the right moment to talk about where Necromunda came from, what makes it so special, and why we think more Wildlings should be playing it.

Thirty Years in the Underhive — A Brief History of Necromunda

Necromunda has been lurking in the darker corners of the Games Workshop catalogue since 1995, when designers Andy Chambers, Jervis Johnson and Rick Priestley unleashed it on an unsuspecting hobby public. It wasn't an entirely new idea — between 1990 and 1991 White Dwarf had been publishing a looser ruleset called Confrontation, set in the same hive world, featuring gangs of undercity warriors, mutants, spire nobility slumming it for thrills, and Adeptus Arbites dispensing Judge Dredd-style justice in the tunnels. Necromunda formalised all of that into a proper boxed game and the result was something the hobby world had never quite seen before.

Where Warhammer 40K was about armies — hundreds of models, sweeping tactical battles, entire companies of Space Marines — Necromunda was about gangs. A dozen fighters at most. Every model with a name, a history, a set of skills they'd earned through play. The scale was intimate and the stakes felt personal in a way that pushing thirty Guardsmen across a table simply couldn't match.

The game was built around campaign play from the ground up. Gangs weren't just collections of miniatures — they were living organisations that grew, suffered and evolved across a season of games. A ganger who survived enough fights might develop into a formidable veteran, acquiring skills and characteristic increases that made them genuinely different from everyone else on the table. But the Underhive is a brutal place, and those same veterans could accumulate injuries just as fast — a lost eye, a dodgy leg, a nervous condition that made them flinch under fire. The risk was the point. You cared about your fighters because you'd invested in them.

The World Beneath the World

The setting is one of the most evocative Games Workshop has ever created. Necromunda is a hive world — a planet almost entirely covered by a single, impossibly vast city that has been built and rebuilt over thousands of years, each generation constructing new levels atop the ruins of the old. At the top, the Spire: the domain of the noble houses, clean air, natural light and extraordinary wealth. Below that, the Hive City proper — overcrowded, industrial, dangerous but functional. And beneath all of that, the Underhive: a lightless, toxic labyrinth of collapsed tunnels, abandoned manufactoria, polluted waterways and ancient ruins where no Imperial law reaches and the only authority is the barrel of a gun.

It is, in other words, a perfect setting for a skirmish game. The Underhive is three-dimensional in a way that most Warhammer battlefields are not — buildings have multiple floors, walkways connect at different heights, snipers control elevated positions and close combat erupts in the corridors below. Necromunda's terrain has always been a statement of intent: this game rewards players who think in three dimensions.

The Gangs of the Underhive

The original game launched with six House gangs, each tied to one of the noble houses that control the Underhive's resources and trade. House Escher — all-female, lithe and lethal, trading in chem-alchemy. House Goliath — enormous, augmented brawlers bred for the forge pits, essentially walking tanks in human shape. House Cawdor — fanatic cult warriors draped in rags and faith, armed with improvised weapons and absolute conviction. House Orlock — road warriors and gang fighters, rugged and reliable, the everyman of the Underhive. House Delaque — silent, hairless information brokers who see everything and say nothing, their true motives as opaque as their pale eyes. And House Van Saar — tech-adepts in advanced exo-armour, brilliant and dying slowly from the radiation of the ancient STC fragment that gives them their technological edge.

Beyond the houses, the Underhive is home to Enforcers, bounty hunters, Chaos cultists, Genestealer Cults, Venator hunting packs and stranger things still. The modern version of the game — Necromunda: Underhive, relaunched in 2017 — has expanded to encompass almost every corner of the setting, with Forge World producing resin characters, specialists and mercenaries to fill out any roster.

Why It Went Away — and Why It Came Back

Necromunda had a complicated middle period. After the original run wound down around 1997, the game was absorbed into Games Workshop's Specialist Games division, receiving a revised edition in 2003 under the Underhive title. That version quietly persisted, beloved by a dedicated community, until Specialist Games was effectively discontinued around 2013 and Necromunda went dormant entirely — surviving only through fan-maintained rulesets and the loyalty of the Yakromunda and YakTribe communities who refused to let it die.

The 2017 relaunch was a triumphant return. Games Workshop brought Necromunda back as a full boxed release with stunning plastic miniatures, a dramatically improved rules system and a clear commitment to supporting it properly this time. Since then the range has grown enormously — Ash Wastes added vehicle combat and open desert battlefields, Hive War streamlined the entry point, and the Forge World resin range has expanded to cover almost every faction imaginable. Necromunda in 2026 is the most complete, most supported and most exciting it has ever been.

Last Night in the Underhive — With Different Not Less Models

Last night's session was run in partnership with Different Not Less Models, a local gaming store whose values align perfectly with everything the Wildlings stand for. DNL Models exist to make the hobby accessible — to break down the barriers that have historically made tabletop gaming feel unwelcoming to newcomers, neurodivergent players, and anyone who doesn't fit the hobby's traditional demographic. Running Necromunda together felt like a natural partnership: a game that rewards personal investment, creative expression and storytelling, played in a space that actively welcomes everyone to the table.

And what a game it was. The gangs met in the cramped corridors of the Underhive, terrain stacked high and the light kept low. Dice were rolled. Nerves were tested. A couple of fighters who should have stayed in cover definitely did not stay in cover. By the end of the evening, every player had a story to tell — and isn't that exactly what the best tabletop games are supposed to do?

Want to Try Necromunda at the Wildlings?

If last night's session has piqued your interest, we'd love to have more Wildlings in the Underhive. Necromunda is a game that rewards investment — in your gang, in the narrative, in the hobby craft of building and painting a small warband that truly belongs to you. It's more accessible than a full 40K army, more personal than a matched play tournament, and more fun per model than almost anything else Games Workshop produces.

Come down to the club on a Friday night, join our Discord at discord.gg/QWzyXKZhRt, and ask about getting involved. And if you're looking for models, paints or advice on building your first gang, check out Different Not Less Models — a local store that genuinely cares about getting you into the hobby in the right way.

The Underhive is waiting. Your gang won't build itself.