Building vogen City – 02

Of the land-dwelling inhabitants of Khai-Zhan, most serve as menials in the massive industrial districts of Vogen and Ashshore, working for one of the powerful family cartels. The life of a menial is a monotonous routine of twelve hour shifts serving as a tiny cog in a massive, rusty and brutal machine.

Like so many other worlds, the manufactories on Khai-Zhan were built many generations ago. The rusty machinery still works, mostly, outputting massive amounts of Kelp cakes for export. The menial knows not how or why the machinery works. That is a domain jealously guarded by the tech priests, who are few and far between. If something does happen to their little piece of the giant machinery, and output is hampered however, it is the menial who is held accountable. Brutal pit-bosses, recruited through connections or bribery, walk the gantries above the clanging machinery, keeping a vigil eye on their underlings. With shouts of how the malfunctioning machinery is somehow almost an act of heresy by the poor menial, they wield batons, shock staves and whips with a hard hand. In Vogen, beatings will continue until morale improves.

Under such conditions, being at the mercy of rusted, oil-sputtering machinery, many are those that seek aid from the machine God.

With little insight into the cult of the machine, their way of worship is a warped one. It is not uncommon to see a menial bend down in prayer, dedicating a lengthy sermon to something as mundane as a rusted ladder, hoping that the machine God will keep the rickety ladder whole for one more trip, so the menial can return from work one more day. Blood offerings are common, the thought being that by offering their blood into the spinning cogs, the machine will be satisfied and not crave the menial’s arm today.

When Vogen rebelled against the Imperium, it was perhaps not too surprising to find that hordes of menials were among those who joined the rebellion early. Imperial losses very staggering among pit bosses, most being fed to the machinery as an offering to the almighty machine God.

The industrial part of Vogen has been chugging along lately. I found a new way of painting terrain that has drastically reduced the burden of starting a big piece of terrain, and which gives me totally good enough results for little time invested. Painting terrain is really a fantastic break from minis, as you can just slap it on, barely looking, while enjoying a good show.

The promethium refinery and the powerplant at the back left and right have been “tabletop ready” for a while, painted using my old method. The administratum in the middle back and the tanks / scatter have been painted over the last weeks.

This is terrain from a lot of different sources, but mainly Archon Studio, Games Workshop and Mantic. Having painted this up now, I have to say that the GW terrain is just amazing. It is decisively the most expensive of these producers, but the detail is bonkers. Deep detail below grates, tons of details to pick out if you want to, and also looks good if you just decide to keep it mostly the same color and just drybrush. And it is really modular too. The terrain designers making the Necromunda and Sector Mechanicus terrain are geniuses.

I’m planning one more larger piece for the industrial part of Vogen. I have a ton of industrial scatter terrain, so I need a more open “building” where I can have space for machinery, power generators etc. I do not have any concrete plans for how this will look, other than Necromunda columns and walls playing a part, and that it will probably be multi-level for more playing space and space for scatter terrain.

Then it is on to the administrative part of the city.