Welcome to Hyam's Landing

At first glance it might seem odd that the settlement of Hyam's Landing was ever founded. It occupies a dusty patch of plain that is remote from any major starport or what passes for a city on backwater fringe worlds. Water is hard to come by and the gases in the local atmosphere begin to corrode any structure almost as soon as it is constructed. But Hyam's Landing is ideally placed as a staging post for the long trading caravans that wend their way deeper into the interior. Prospectors and miners from the adjacent lowhills come to town with their finds and to spend their cash. And in spite of the presence of a foreboding Imperial Blockhouse and its garrison, the facilities offered by the discrete starport are attractive to off-world traders looking to keep a low profile.

The Iron Fist - Block House #5

Illustrations of Imperial architecture are pretty rare in the Rogue Trader rulebook. Yes, there's the fantastic spread of Helsreach illustrations as well as the Emporer's Palace, but for the rest of the book we only see glimpes of background shapes, walls, ruins or ductwork.

I was delighted to see Tony Ackland's brilliant unpublished* Rogue Trader townscape when he put it up on Facebook a little while ago. The image shows a backwater frontier town complete with rickety shacks, landing pad and an imposing block house festooned with gibbet, observation cameras and spikes.

*correct me if I'm wrong.

Illustration by Tony Ackland.

You Can Buy Anything IF You Can Find It - The Bazaar

If the first part of a project involved some vendors and goods to sell, then the second part of the project needed to be a location for them to do some selling. It's not the fantastic Necromunda market (although I will get round to doing that at some point). It's another creation build for me by Graham at Grimsforge - a bazaar with some little commercial units for my vendors to occupy.

Vendors and Their Wares

If you've read this blog for a while, you're probably aware that I like a nice sci-fi civilian model. It's been a little while since I last painted any, but over the last couple of weeks I've been working on a project to paint up some nice new bits of scenery and set dressing. The first part of this project is a trio of vendors and their goods. I settled on a carpet seller, a tech merchant and a general food seller based on the models I had to hand.

L-R: Astropolis, Crooked Dice (Colony 87), Crooked Dice (Colony 87)