There’s a box under my desk with three Kal Jerico graphic novels in it. I bought them off eBay in 2019 for about eleven quid, back when GW re-released the plastic Kal and Scabbs kit and I got briefly, stupidly obsessed with a game I have still never played. The spines are cracked. One of them smells like somebody else’s house. I read all three across a weekend, put them in the box, and did nothing else about it, which is roughly my entire relationship with Necromunda.
The joke holding those books together is that Kal Jerico is the son of the man who owns the planet and it has never once helped him. He’s a bounty hunter in the underhive, permanently broke, permanently being shot at, and every so often the spire remembers he exists and hauls him uphive to clean up a mess his relatives made. Then he goes back down and nobody up there thinks about him for years.
GW changed that last week.
Fiftieth in line, give or take a hundred and fifty
White Dwarf #441, April 2019, ran a short story told from Scabbs’ point of view. Scabbs is Kal’s half-ratskin sidekick, the one who crawls out of the collapsing floor covered in gunk while Kal is already standing there with his braids intact. About halfway through he stops to correct the reader:
“Now it’s at this point I should debunk some of the rumours about Kal being next in line to the title of Lord of Necromunda and command of the Imperial House. He’s not next in line, it’s more like 50th.”
He goes on to say Kal is one of Gerontius Helmawr’s bastards, “one of over 200 depending on who you talk to.” That’s the whole character compressed into two sentences. Royal blood, statistically meaningless. Scabbs even reckons the arrogance makes sense once you know where it came from: “You don’t just learn to be that arrogant; it’s something you have to be born with.”
For anyone who’s only met the planet through the new edition, the setup is this. Lord Gerontius Helmawr is the Imperial House and the 137th Lord of Necromunda, planetary governor of a world with something like a thousand billion people on it. Seven Great Houses sit beneath him, listed in White Dwarf #424 as Helmawr, Catallus, Ty, Ulanti, Greim, Ran Lo and Ko’iron. They’re investors. They make nothing and provide no service. The actual law downhive is House Helmawr’s private army, the Palanite Enforcers.
Kal’s mother is where my research fell apart. Lexicanum has her as Inquisitor Heleana Jerico, who described conceiving him as “just one of the many disagreeable things one has to do for the greater good of the Imperium,” which might be the coldest line anybody has written about Necromunda. But the same page carries an image captioned as Kal meeting his mother, Inquisitor Jena Orechiel. Two names, one woman, and I honestly can’t tell you which one is current. The surname is doing a lot of work in the first, so I lean Heleana, but that’s a guess dressed up as reasoning. His own name won’t sit still either. Some sources say Jerico, some say Jericho, and WD #441 dodges the problem by having Scabbs blame Kal’s handwriting.
What Gerontius actually said
On the 29th of July, GW put up a piece catching people up on Necromunda’s story ahead of the new edition. Most of it is a house-by-house state of play, the sort of thing you skim. Sitting in the middle is a vox log, dated Wyndspyr 008.2, from Lord Gerontius Helmawr to a High Justicar named Verdaine.
He’s talking about surviving the assassination attempt that nearly finished him:
“It appears the latest attempt on my life has had a lasting effect on my heirs. Namely that many of them are now dead. My youngest daughter became rather overzealous when the prospect of succession arose and slaughtered a number of her siblings over dinner.”
And then, a few lines later:
“Thus I would like it on record that I have elevated the most promising of my illegitimate offspring, Kal Gerontius Helmawr. I am sure that, when the time comes, he will prove a new and exciting challenge for little Haera.”
Kal Gerontius Helmawr, middle name and all, spoken into an official log by the man himself.
I want to be careful about how heavy I make that, because it’s a vox log in a marketing post and GW’s Necromunda writing has a long habit of signing enormous cheques it doesn’t cash. The Aranthian Succession ran across roughly three years of supplements and the throne question is still open at the end of it. So there’s a version of this where the log is set dressing for the new core book and nobody mentions it again in eighteen months. I keep coming back to that reading and I can’t fully talk myself out of it. But “I would like it on record” isn’t gossip. Gerontius is filing something with his chief judge, which is a different sort of sentence to a bit of colour.
Haera has a phase sword and a body count
Lady Haera Helmawr is the thirteenth daughter, and she’s the reason any of this has teeth. When her father was left dying by an assassin and put into stasis, she took the chair. White Dwarf #494 in November 2023 ran his obituary, “the supposed passing of Lord Gerontius Helmawr, the 137th Lord of Necromunda,” with a commemorative pull-out across pages 3 to 32. The next issue printed a correction. Lord Helmawr is not dead. He’s badly wounded, and Haera is acting in his place with his full blessing.
GW ran an obituary and then a retraction in their own magazine, in character, exactly like a local paper getting it wrong about a councillor. I think about that more than is healthy.
Her route to the chair was killing about a dozen of her siblings. GW’s own reveal called her a sociopath and a backstabbing murderer, which is not the register companies usually reach for when introducing a model you’re meant to buy. She carries a phase sword and a teleporting power spear, and her enormous high collar is held up by three servo-skulls that give her a refractor field and 360-degree vision. Her skills are Backstab and Dodge. My favourite horrible girl in the whole game.
During all of that, Kal stole his father. Got hold of the stasis casket with the comatose Gerontius sealed inside and made off with it, with Haera actively trying to stop him. GW’s own recap of the war notes that on the way out he “left a single security door yawning wide open,” which is the most Kal Jerico sentence in the entire saga and I refuse to believe it wasn’t deliberate on the writer’s part.
So the vox log is Gerontius reaching for the one bastard who has already beaten Haera once, and pointing him back at her.
Kal Jerico keeps ending up back down there
The character doesn’t work if he wins, and every Kal Jerico story is built to make sure he doesn’t. He gets summoned uphive. There’s a conspiracy, usually involving a relative who wants him dead and a faceless crime lord called Nemo playing everyone including the reader. He survives it on luck and lying. Then he goes back down. WD #441 says it flat out: “no matter how high Kal climbs or the friends he makes he somehow always ends up back in the Underhive.”
He got married, at one point. Actually married, to Yolanda Catallus, a duchess of House Catallus, in a ceremony that was itself a sting operation to draw out the cousin behind the assassination. Neither of them was asked. They walked out of the hall legally wed and mainly irritated about it. That’s the kind of event that reorganises a normal person’s decade, and for Kal it’s an occasional inconvenience.
So yeah. Kal. Blond bloke, green coat, two laspistols, a dog. The dog’s called Wotan, it’s a cyber-mastiff, and it wasn’t even his to start with, it belonged to his half-sister Merelda. Point is he’s a rogue. That’s the engine. He’s a rogue because being a Helmawr means dinner parties where your sister does twelve people between courses. Strip out the refusal and you’ve got a noble with pistols. There’s four hundred of those on any given spire.
Although the version I actually want is him on the list and hating it, which is a far worse spot than 50th and beneath notice. Fiftieth means nobody bothers to send anyone. Named in a vox log to the High Justicar means Haera has a target with a surname attached, and Kal’s habit of sliding back down into the underhive turns into how he stays alive.
What you can actually field him as
The Dramatis Personae are split across two books for the new edition. Gangs of the Underhive and Gangs of the Outlands carry the profiles for the headline characters, including Ozostium Aranthus and Haera in her Sthenian-pattern Hunting Rig. Everyone else who already has a miniature, Kal included, goes into a free download called Necromunda’s Most Wanted, which GW says is coming to Warhammer Community shortly. Characters who got rules in the last edition but never got a model don’t make the cut, though the studio says it’ll revisit some of them so your conversions aren’t wasted.
The first Kal Jerico miniature was a Black Library limited edition in 1999, which is older than any memory I can actually verify having. The plastic Kal and Scabbs kit is from 2019 and still turns up on shelves at my local store, usually behind the Blood Bowl. If you want to play out whatever the succession turns into, that’s the box, and the rules for it are going to cost nothing. I should probably dig those comics back out first. Same weekend I finally read Sacramentus, maybe.
