Getting Started with Legitimate Salvage: Sci-Fi Horror Skirmish from Your Existing Collection

Legitimate Salvage has been sitting on my radar for a while now, and if you play skirmish games and have a shelf of sci-fi or grimdark miniatures already painted up, this is absolutely worth your time. It is a free-to-download sci-fi horror skirmish ruleset with a strong survival horror atmosphere, small model counts, and enough flexibility in faction building that your existing collection can almost certainly field something playable right away.

Here is how I would approach getting a warband together from scratch, whether you are buying new or raiding your bits box.

Step 1: Understand the Scale

Games run at around 5 to 10 models per side, sometimes fewer for elite warbands. That is genuinely good news. You do not need to paint an army. You need a tight, characterful squad. This makes it an ideal project for anyone who wants to paint something with real attention and care rather than batch-painting thirty infantry in a weekend.

Step 2: Pick a Faction Concept First, Then Find the Models

Legitimate Salvage leans into body horror, infestation, and cosmic dread. Think less clean military sci-fi, more abandoned station with something very wrong growing in the lower decks. When I look at the game, two broad visual directions immediately make sense: corrupted military forces and bio-organic swarm creatures.

For a swarm-style warband, something like the Hive Swarm Sporemorph Hunter is almost tailor-made for this game's aesthetic. The bio-engineered, predatory silhouette reads immediately as a threat on the table, and painting one of these as a centrepiece gives you a focal model that does a lot of narrative heavy lifting.

For a corrupted infantry direction, the Diseased Planetary Guard Corrupted Infantry Squad gives you ten bodies to work with, which is plenty to build a warband and have options. The sculpts have enough plague-tech detail that even a relatively quick paint job reads well on the table.

Step 3: Establish a Palette Before You Touch a Brush

Cohesion matters more in a small skirmish warband than in a big army, because every model is visible and scrutinised. Pick two or three dominant colours and stick to them across the whole group. For a corrupted guard force I would go with a desaturated green-grey armour base, something like Vallejo Model Color Luftwaffe Uniform, then dirty it down with Agrax Earthshade and stippled Ryza Rust for the corrosion. Sick, yellowed skin tones tie everything together and reinforce the diseased theme without needing to reach for a single pot of "plague" paint.

For swarm creatures, zenithal priming is your friend. Prime black, then a quick blast of grey from 45 degrees and white from directly above. From there, thin washes of green and purple build up chitin tones fast and the zenithal light already gives you your shading for free.

Step 4: Basing Ties the Warband Together

Bases are where a lot of people underinvest, and in skirmish gaming they matter a great deal. For a Legitimate Salvage aesthetic I would use a dark, wet industrial scheme. Black base coat, stipple on some dark grey, add small pieces of cork or slate for rubble, and seal everything with a gloss varnish before adding a thinned Nuln Oil wash to pool in the recesses. It reads as a flooded or contaminated floor and it photographs well.

If your warband has a leader model, a Hive Swarm Hierophant on an elevated or more complex base immediately communicates hierarchy on the table without needing any rules explanation.

Step 5: Start Small, Play Fast

Get four or five models painted and play a solo or two-player game before you expand. The rules are free, the model count is low, and getting actual play experience early will tell you whether you want more melee threat, more bodies, or a harder-hitting centrepiece. That feedback loop is more useful than planning a full warband on paper before a single game.

The hobby side of this game rewards the kind of careful, characterful painting that most of us got into this for in the first place. Small count, high detail, strong theme. That is a good combination.