House Goliath cannot be House Goliath without House Escher. Those vat-bred furnace brutes, the ones White Dwarf cheerfully points out are often bigger than a Space Marine, don’t get that way on hard work and a good breakfast. WD #424 said it flatly back in the 2017 relaunch: “the brutes of Goliath are entirely dependent on growth stimms provided by their arch rivals, the hated Eschers to attain, and maintain, their prodigious frames.”
So every slab of Goliath meat on a Necromunda board is, in the fiction, running on a subscription that a rival house bills him for.
I keep coming back to that because it reframes the whole house. Escher get written up as the fast ones with the knives and the hair, and the miniatures lean into that hard, all heels and mohawks and blades. The chem labs are where the money actually is, and chem labs don’t sculpt as well.
What House Escher actually sells
The same White Dwarf describes the house as producing “a staggering range of exotic pharmaceuticals, from gene-hancing elixirs to luxury drugs,” deriving its wealth from supplying these to the other Houses, “in so doing maintaining the vital balance of power between” them. That last bit is the sentence to sit with. Escher aren’t a supplier the way a shop is a supplier. They’re closer to the only landlord in a town where everyone needs a roof, and they get to decide who’s late on rent this month.
The all-women part everyone knows about has a nastier root than the aesthetic suggests. Generations of chemical and genetic tinkering left the house with what the lore calls the flesh curse: male children born stillborn, or infirm, or too fragile to do anything except reproduce. Plenty of Imperial institutions are built on a bloodline they can’t replace, and most of them get treated as aristocracy for it. Escher got a birth defect and a chemistry set. GW’s own 2020 write-up put it at “some nine out of every ten male children died before reaching their second cycle” and dated it to M39. I’ve also seen 519.M40 given elsewhere, and I genuinely don’t know which is current, because Necromunda’s dating has been revised more than once and nobody’s obliged to tell me. Either way the matriarchy is what the demographics left behind, and the house built its politics on top of that afterwards.
Before all that they were the Eschaki, a secret sect inside noble House Ulanti, who took themselves into exile. The lineage supposedly runs back to a band of warrior women called the Blades in M32, which is where the House of Blades name comes from. It’s a decent origin story and almost nobody uses it.
The Council of Crones, and a job title that is also a warning
GW published a hierarchy chart for House Escher in Hive Primus a few years back, presented as a scroll set down in 995.M41, and it’s one of the better bits of worldbuilding they’ve done for the game. At the top sits the Matriarch Primus, named there as Queen Adina Sabine. Below her, the Council of Crones, “who rule all Escher of Necromunda.” Then the house splits into three columns: the Maidens, Enclave of the Young. The Matriarchs, Enclave of the Ancient. The Mothers, Enclave of the Artisans.
Under the Maidens you get Death-maidens, Gang Queens, Wyld Runners. Under the Matriarchs, Oracles and Shivvers and Wydlings. And under the Mothers, the artisan line, sit the Factorum Sisters, the Hab-Matriarchs, and the Clan Chymists.
The Clan Chymists’ epithet on the chart is The Poisoned Chalice.
Somebody at GW wrote the org chart and gave one department a warning label. Which brings me to the bit that made me want to write any of this down.
Cyniss, the Mother of Poisons
White Dwarf #494 ran a piece called The Chymist Coven’s Wrath, and it’s a proper piece of political fiction rather than a paragraph of colour text. The setup: Matriarch Primus Adina had been trying to cripple House Goliath through chemical starvation. Cut the stimms, watch the muscle come off. Reasonable move if you’re the only one who makes the stimms.
Except the covens who actually brew the stuff were living off those sales. Adina’s blockade cut the Chymists off from “their most reliable source of creds,” and Cyniss, the Mother of Poisons and the single most powerful member of the Council of Crones, could see where that ended for her personally. So she organised a coup, passing messages between the covens hidden in the gene-coding of blood and tissue, which is an absurdly Escher way to send a text.
Then she went and got a backer. Varran Gor, Over-tyrant of House Goliath, and his friends inside House Helmawr, agreed to recognise Cyniss as the new Matriarch Primus. Their price was the chem trade restarting. Their condition was that Adina be dead first. So the head of the house Escher was strangling got to pick the next head of House Escher, and the candidate on offer was Escher’s own chief chemist. Varran Gor arranged that without leaving his own hive.
The attempt itself happens at an audience honouring a dozen gang queens after an inter-house war. Adina on her throne, Lady Credo at her left shoulder, her gene-sister Athera at her right. Cyniss stands up and fires a bio-explosive dart. One of the gang queens being honoured throws herself into its path, and White Dwarf does not soften what happens next: “As the chemical bonds within her cells broke down, the gang queen’s body began to melt, then exploded.”
Guns are forbidden in Adina’s presence. So a dozen gang queens with ceremonial blades go at a coven armed with toxin-coated daggers and hidden digi-weapons. Athera puts Cyniss on the floor and is about to finish it when a dozen hands drag Cyniss clear, and the covens withdraw with their leader. Adina lives. The story closes on the line that the Matriarch Primus surviving was not the end of anything.
Cyniss, for what it’s worth, isn’t a one-off invention for that story. She turns up in the 2020 material as a master of poisons with needle pistols. GW have been building her for six years, which is about as long as I’ve been doing this blog, and I only put the two together last week.
The new kit is the schism, boxed
Right, the news, finally. The Escher Matriarchs & Phyrr Cats kit went up for pre-order on the 1st, riding the back of the new edition, and with it the first of a new supplement line, Underhive Journal: Escher – The House of Blades. The kit gives you a Gang Queen in a longcoat with a power axe, five Gang Matriarchs, and two Phyrr Cats. One of the Matriarchs wears the skin of a Phyrr Cat, which GW notes “should keep the rest in line.”
The journal is where it gets good. It adds two alternate gang lists: Wyld Hunts, who field menageries of lethal creatures, and Chymist Cults, who brew the toxins everyone else buys. GW describes them as “more restricted rosters and equipment lists that allow a greater focus on their specialty.”
Restricted, note. You give things up to play either one. You pick the beast side or the chem side, you live with the gaps, and those two halves of the house tried to kill each other over money three years ago in print. The announcement doesn’t mention any of that. It says the lists allow a greater focus on their specialty and moves straight on to campaign territories and side jobs.
Both those lists were sitting on the hierarchy chart already, which I hadn’t clocked until I put the two documents side by side. Wyld Runners are down the Maidens column as Children of the Badzones. The Clan Chymists are down the Mothers column with the poisoned chalice attached. GW drew the org chart, wrote the coup three years later, and has now cut the gang along the same seam. There’s a third rank on there I’d like a list for eventually, the Death-maidens, filed as The Glorious Dead, who are Escher fighters brought back from death by chem-alchemy. If the covens can do that, then they hold the revenue and the roster both, which is an awful lot hanging off one seat on the Council of Crones.
The cats cost more than the gang does
Phyrr Cats come from a death world called Phyrr, where they’re the apex predator of the plains and forests. The oldest reach the size of a small pony. They’re carnivorous, extremely reclusive, and good enough at hiding that you could walk within four metres of one in Phyrr’s forests and never know. There’s also a suggestion they have some ingrained psychic sense that lets them hunt without eyes or ears, which nobody has ever nailed down properly.
Getting one into a hive is close to impossible, so they’re rare even among Escher leadership, and gang chiefs will do more or less anything for a breeding pair. Which puts my horrible little striped boy somewhere around the price of a house deposit, with teeth.
Which reminds me, and this is a tangent. I bought the 2017 Escher and Goliath box for the Escher, painted four of them, and then used those four as counts-as Wyches in my Drukhari Kill Team for the better part of two years because I could not be bothered to buy actual Wyches. They looked right. Nobody minded except Kiran, who spent most of one evening arguing that the base sizes were wrong and therefore my charges were measuring from the wrong edge. He was correct. The argument lasted longer than the game did, and I still didn’t buy the Wyches, and those four Escher are in a foam tray somewhere with the wrong faction written on the lid in marker. I’ve been meaning to fix that since before the pandemic.
Anyway. The other Great Houses are all getting their own Underhive Journals, which means Goliath’s is coming, and Varran Gor’s half of that arrangement with Cyniss has never been shown from his side. Whether the covens ever went back to selling, and whether Cyniss is even alive, GW hasn’t said in anything I can find. She fled the chamber and the trail stops there.
