Salutations, scummers! This week we’re talking about Gyrinx, a new platform that has launched to help you manage your Necromunda gangs and campaigns. Gyrinx just entered public beta, meaning you can sign up and check it out now!
We sat down with our very own manofwaaagh, one of its creators, and Gyrinx’s resident enginseer Tom to find out more.
What’s Gyrinx?
Manofwaaagh: Gyrinx is a new set of tools to help players build and manage their Necromunda gangs and campaigns. We’ve been Alpha testing for a few months, and have now opened to the public for Beta testing. We’re open source, and totally rad (in the non-Van Saar sense).
So, like YakTribe?
MoW: Short version: Yeah. Longer version: YakTribe is a fantastic set of tools, without which Necromunda certainly wouldn’t be where it is today. But, unfortunately, for whatever reason its admin has stopped developing its content — which is a pity for people who want to play with the latest rules.Â
We’re massive Necromunda fans, and didn’t want to see the community suffer from a lack of tools. So we decided to make a new platform and do a few things differently while we’re at it, rather than just cloning YakTribe.
If you log on to Gyrinx, you’ll see that we’ve got support for all the gangs, including new ones like the refreshed Ash Waste Nomads and Spyrer gangs. But there’s a lot more going on than just newer content.
You say you’re doing things differently — what does that mean?
Tom:  The two key focuses for us are that Gyrinx is both accessible and adaptable. So there’s little things and big things.Â
In terms of little things, we’ve kept a familiar gang-building core, but have made interface tweaks to get rid of some of the common pitfalls we’ve seen new players encounter. For instance, exotic beast profiles are generated when they are bought and link directly to their owners, while weapon attachments can be directly connected to weapons.
You can also clone lists and fighters, which is really helpful in certain situations. Plus, the site as a whole has also been designed to be accessible and mobile-friendly. So there’s fewer hazard stripes than you might be used to.
Thinking bigger, we’ve tried to ensure that Gyrinx is a platform that helps you do things, rather than overly restricting you. So throughout the interface, there are lots of opportunities for things like overriding costs. We think this offers the best balance of helping users without putting everything too much on rails — trying to strictly enforce the standard rules as written through an interface leads to trouble because Necromunda is riddled with edge cases and exceptions.
We’re also open-source, meaning our code is public. That is really important because it means the development team can grow and change over time and that if for any reason we can’t continue with the project, it would be possible for someone else to pick it up and run with it. It’s also reflective of our commitment to making a product that is free to use, forever.
MoW: In time, we plan to develop a really powerful suite of tools to let players adapt the platform to their own needs: whether that be setting house rules, or doing things like adding new characters and gangs. So on a basic level, if you want to restrict an entire campaign to stub guns and fighting knives, you could do that. But it will go much bigger: eventually, we want to make so — if you wanted — you could use Gyrinx to power an entirely different game setting based around Necromunda’s gang and campaign mechanics. Like Mordheim, or some other crunchy tabletop RPG.
What is Gyrinx’s best feature?
MoW: For me, it’s having a simple tab option on each fighter’s gang card, that lets you include rich notes, including images, about that fighter — it’s a really neat and powerful way of tracking each fighter’s lore and development.
We’ve also got great integrated search and filtering tools for gear/weapon pages, which is a lot easier than spending ages trying to remember what weapon category a Necrotic Beamer falls into.
Tom: My favourite feature is action logging: in our conversations with arbitrators, we’ve heard a lot about how difficult it can be to keep track of what all the players in a campaign are up to. So there’s a lot of really clear logging and tracking tech, which makes it easier for everyone to see what’s going on! We’ve integrated on-site dice-rolling as part of that, which is also fun.
We noticed the dice roller button on the top bar! Is there anything else you thought about to help players use the site in real-time during the Post-Battle sequence?
Tom: We’ve also put dice rolling directly into some features like advancements and ensured that the roll is immediately added to the campaign log. That way there’s total transparency for everyone in the campaign.
The Campaign tools have Battle Logs where, amongst other things, each player can add their own notes about the battle. And we have free-text notes in a few useful places that should help players keep track of stuff between battles.
What’s yet to come?
Tom: There’s loads of improvements planned during this beta phase, and we’re releasing new stuff all the time. The big thing missing right now is vehicles, but they’re our top priority now we’re in public beta. So they should land really soon. And then after that, the main focus will be custom content tools.
MoW: Custom content is going to be awesome. But also because of how horrendously complicated this game is there’s a tonne of scope for steady quality-of-life adjustments to improve the user experience around certain fringe cases. Here’s looking at you, Outcasts.
What has been the hardest gang format to implement so far?
Tom: Anything that is unique and special to a gang has tended to be a faff — Squat ancestry, Goliath gene-smithing etc. Equipment that adds rules and skills too… but I’d like to think we’ve got pretty good support for them.
Stash items that confer a fighter to the gang (Iron Automataaagh) or gear that gives you more gear — those have been fiddly too. One bit of magic was being able to implement the gang’s Stash as a special-case fighter, which meant we could reuse the equipment assignment system. But actually one of the more time-consuming pieces is performance: if getting things built and working is hard, making it fast can be even harder. We’ve definitely got areas where we can improve on speed.
Outcasts are supported but only with workarounds, because they are so different to everything else — that hurdle is ahead of us.
MoW: We’re hoping to steadily improve support for Outcasts, but they are a unique headache, with so many oddities.
As an illustrative example, consider a Merchant Guild-affiliated. All the fighters in that list get any gear that Guild’s delegation have as equipment lists items. So you need to define the guild, ingest its delegation fighters, bundle them as a delegation, extract that delegation’s collective items into a single pool, and then make it so all the Outcasts on the list treat that pool as an augmentation to whatever list this may already have.
It’s doable — and we’ll do it — but it takes time to address all those cases.
Why ‘Gyrinx’?
MoW: They’re my favourite Necromunda item. Plus, the old-school Rogue Trader lore says they change appearance to suit their owner… which is kind of what we’re going for with Gyrinx’s design approach.
How can people get involved?
Tom: Right now, the best thing people can do is to sign up and get testing! You can join our Discord here to provide feedback and let us know about any errors.Â
We also have a Patreon here. Gyrinx is free to use but certainly isn’t free to run so any support we get is tremendously appreciated.
That money goes just onto operating costs which we’ve tried to make transparent: even though we’re not commercial, we still have to host the application on proper infrastructure, monitor for errors, protect ourselves from hackers, backup users’ data, send email while avoiding spam filters, and follow laws like GDPR. All of that takes time and cost.
Any money received will help us keep Gyrinx running. And if we start covering our costs, we’ll spend any excess on improving website performance. And in the event we end up with more money that we can use on the site itself, we’ll start running some community competitions or hiring (real, human) artists to do cool things in and around the site.
And if you’re a coder or designer or tester or security person, we’re on GitHub at gyrinx-app/gyrinx. There are loads of issues in the tracker. Feel free to message us on Discord if you want to get involved or need a hand.
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