Pit slaves – formerly property of the Transcore Mining Consortium – prepare for heavy metal war. Equipment designed for cutting rock and demolishing plascrete prove brutally effective at mauling mutants and cutting though the hides of lumbering ash waste crawlers. Treated like machinery – or worse, like servitors – these cyborg killers are still men, and they remember what life on the surface was like, before the implants, the bionics and the constant drone of electric generators! Pit slaves have an axe to grind and the tools to grind it!
Emerging blinking into the light from the cavernous depths of Transcore Hive, the pitslave warband finds the world much changed, abandoned to mutants and lunatics, ruled by warlords and despots – or not ruled at all! It’s a world where you can carve out your own future if you have a sharp enough chainsaw and these pitslaves mean to take back what was theirs!
Pit slaves, start your engines! Prepare for heavy metal war!
Leader and Technos
Pitboss Kuno has three weapons, a chainsaw painfully grafted to his arm, an axe and a buzzsaw implanted in his skull, to deliver a mean headbutt. He braves the ash wastes without a respirator or visor, sometimes you just have to look tough to impress your peers. Hardhead, the techno fire support specialist has a shoulder-mounted autoslugger, while Ark has equipment to repair and maintain machinery.
Pitfighters
Some pit slaves have more of a natural aptitude for fighting. Dead End has additional armour plates and an industrial buzzsaw, he will often advance first to soak up incoming fire. The predatory Scavenger has a harpoon gun, while Bludgeon uses a jetpack and a crude mining pick. Minutor has a heavy duty mining drill.
Pit slaves
Veterans of the pit. Armourdillo has a cutting saw with intergrated autopistol, and a heavily armoured carapace. Powerslaav has an industrial shear implant while Kobushi has a lifting claw and a wears a sinister glass mask.
Psychos
You don’t have to be mad to be a pit slave, but it helps. Actually madness is a serious problem: many young pitslaves lose their minds, unable to cope with the grueling labour and long hours. Free of their bondage, these deranged pitslaves are fearless warriors, throwing themselves into combat with reckless abandon. Rack uses a chainblade mounted on a polearm, while his brother Ruin uses an enormous electrified mace that probably never really served much purpose in the pits. Scrapper has a retractable hooked chain implant and a serious personality disorder.
This is the second pit slave gang I have made, the first was based on gladiatorial pitslaves that had broken out of the fighting pits (and was loosely based on Spartacus). This warband is a group of ex-industrial pitslaves: miners, demolition servitors and heavy machinery, escaped from a Mechanicus strip mine at the massive Transcore Hive. I’ve always loved pitslaves – or really anything with a chainsaw for a hand – they are great fun to build and chipped, rusty machinery is great fun to paint too. I decided to do them all in a very uniform paint scheme: I imagine the mining site has all the equipment painted the same way and they are all branded and barcoded. Some of their tattoos will have been made illicitly, like prison tattooing, carried out by crude bionic hands, rough simulacra of aquilas and other half-understood symbols.
There’s a bit of a Mad Max vibe to some of them, I was really pleased to see the Mechanicus Electro-Priest kit, finally a well-sculpted, mostly bare male torso! There is an odd shortage of these parts and the rest of the conversion parts fell into place easily after that. I would probably have made them all using Electro-Priest torsos if I had thought to buy more, I think those are my favourites – the psychos. Also the two technos turned out well.
This warband is for use in Inquisimunda (an offshoot of Necromunda that allows for a wider selection of gangs), they use the rules for Pit Slaves found in the Necromunda Outlander Community Edition, which is compatible. They may also get some vehicles for use in Ash Wastes.
Fantastic!
Thanks
Love the Pit SLaves,great convertions see ya at Adepta Con (hope so)
Where did you get the legs for the conversations?
They are from Forgeworld Tech-Thralls
Awesome group of minis! Really enjoyed looking at these, great conversions. Remind me a bit of early blanche, but with your own painting style/colour scheme! Brilliant!
Thanks, they are painted pretty quickly, maybe three evening’s work so I am pleased with them considering. The conversions I am happy with, but there is only so wrong you can go with pit slaves I think!
Absolutely brilliant, Jake.
cheers!
these are amazing work, your kitbashing and amazing painting style are a constant inspiration, I hope they saw some heads for you in the game
Cheers, might have a game with them soon. I’m just thinking if I should make them a vehicle or two.
These just made my day. Thanks Jake :)
Cool, glad you like them
Nice variety of bits used on these. Cohesive, but each unique. Well done.
Thanks. I think I would have liked to make them even more cohesive, by using the electropriest torso on nearly all of them, but I couldn’t resist a few experiments.
Bruticus, you consistently make some of my favourite models of all time. Wish I could see them in the flesh.
Cheers, maybe one day – I’ve taken them to Warhammer World before. They don’t have much flesh left though.
Amazing! I totally love them. Such fun conversions and a very effective paint scheme. Really makes we wish I had used electrophoretic torsos on my tech gang!
My favorite may be the stubber techno. And I say make some vehicles for sure! The kataphron tracks would be perfect for these guys. For a little Spartacus fun you could put Chariot type vehicles (mining carts in fluff terms) on the tracks ….
I had a feeling you’d like that techno for some reason. Maybe because he could almost fit in your gang.
My last set of pit slaves had the Spartacus theme, these ones are strictly business. I’d love to get them some giant bits of industrial mining equipment to cruise around in, but I’m set on working on AoS next.
Brilliant gang mate.. and out of the blue too.. like the spot colours .. loads of character to each poor soul.. wouldn’t mind seeing these up close..
i think the pit boss is my favourite his face is so anguished ..
Thanks Neil. I tried for a quick but effective scheme. I’m not so keen on the leader myself, I think his pose is just a bit off. I’m not surprised he looks pained though, imagine that headache.
You can see them pretty closely in the images no? I’ve used such large photos that it gets quite unforgiving with my somewhat haphazard painting style…
yeah loads of detail in the photos .. just want to get my grubby mits on them ! turn em around and such.. get a 3d vibe from them..
What a fantastic group! No one does schemes based on lighter colours quite like you, man, and that is possibly the highest praise I can come up with. Marvelous!
Thanks Kraut, truth is I just don’t really like painting other colours besides black and white!
Just brilliant! I love the contrast between the matte, pragmatic, industrial bits and the dark shiny metals. The spots of colours are great too. The bare torsos remind me of the warboys from Fury Road.
Thanks! I did really love Fury Road although to my mind, everything in it already existed somewhere in 40k.
Amazing work, Bruticus! I love looking through all your work and these really took me back to when I first started reading your P&M Blog on DakkaDakka. The contrast between then and now is astounded and you can really see how your modelling techniques have evolved over the years.
Cheers. I think the first thing I did was a Goliath gang, maybe I should do a new one of those too.
Excellent work Jake, your work has been a big inspiration to me lately! Julian pointed me to your blog and I’m glad he did, it’s a veritable treasure trove of awesome ideas and conversions not to speak of the painting as well!
Also, I was wondering if there was any chance if you would take a quick look at my new blog and let me know what you think?
Krokodiltears.blogspot.com
Thanks for the comment, I will check out your blog. Make sure to post over on the Ammobunker if you have Inq28 models to share
Thanks Jake, I’ve just joined the Ammobunker so I can do that. I’m on there as gabe1329 so I’ll be posting some of my INQ28 stuff up on there real soon. . .
These are absolutely beautiful conversions. I have to ask, where are the heads from, especially the ones on the psychos. They look familiar but i can’t place them.
Thanks, the heads are Forgeworld Iron Warrior upgrade helmets, with a bit shaved off the sides
This is some amazing work, and definitely inspiring me for some of my own additions to my pit slaves. I’m wondering, I would guess you’re more in the camp of model first and find rules to apply later, but how do you play these? It seems hard to include some of these options, like the harpoon launcher or maybe some of the random models that aren’t so “obviously” using the classic pit slave weapons. Do you just go by the rule of “This guy counts as using X weapon” or do you play with a looser set of rules? Either way, a great gang and amazing conversions and paint job. thanks for sharing. It may be from two years ago but I’m definitely keeping a look out on this site’s work.
If I remember correctly, I used the rules for the Scavvy harpoon – it’s not very powerful so we didn’t think it would cause any issues. I think everything else works as a counts as (shield = armour plating, etc).
I came across the site yesterday, and this is some really great work right here! Would you mind telling me you make the bionic attachments like the chainsword on the boss graft into the arm like that?