Anatomy of a Campaign

Having played mostly competitive tournament 40K with a sprinkling of Apocalypse games mixed in, I’ve wanted to play a narrative campaign for some time. I’ve had the Crusade of Fire book Games Workshop released last year, but I was too new to the scene in Austin to get in on the game when other local 40Kers played it. Well, now that I’m all in with my Tyranids and the last Dataslate with extra missions focusing on the invasion of Hive Fleet Leviathan, I decided now was the time to work up a campaign of my own. As with all worthwhile things, the first step was research and here’s what I’ve found to be necessary for embarking on a narrative journey in the 41st Millennium.

Story

Unsurprising to some, the first thing you need to construct your campaign is the seeds of a story. If your plan is to string missions together from Dataslates, gathering elements for the story won’t be very difficult. There are pages in each Dataslate describing the dangers the Imperial world of Satys was threatened with from Hive Fleet Leviathan. If you’re creating your own story from whole cloth, you’ll have to work a bit harder. The starting point is what the thrust of your narrative will be about, whether a Xenos invasion of an Imperial world, a chaotic rebellion leading to a sector-wide civil war, or the reclamation of a pivotal artifact whose use could affect the fate of billions. After you’ve decided the main conflict you’ll need to fill in the details of what factions are vying against each other. If you’re planning on including more than 2 people in your campaign, this is a great opportunity to play with inter-faction combat as well. Imperials may team with Eldar against an army of Chaos Marines and Daemons, but just because they have a common foe does not mean each Warlord does not have his own goals to achieve. In my years of being an RPG GM, I’ve found it doesn’t matter what the campaign idea comes from as long as it fulfills two things — promoting conflict and allowing the players to affect it.

Setting

Once you’ve got the initial idea down you should then focus on the setting for the campaign. Will the battles be fought on a single world or on several worlds throughout a sector? Will there be engagements on space stations where gravity has little hold or on a Daemon world where the laws of physics barely apply? The setting for your world is a great way to introduce variety in how the games play and I’m a big fan of planetary conditions having influence on the narrative you’re forging. From Hive worlds to Death worlds, you’ve got a lot you can pull from and you should use every element you think will make for a fun game. Especially if there are elements you can use in more than one battle which can help create a cohesive feel for the conditions the armies are being met in. If your campaign lasts for more than 6 sessions and you can include these sorts of elements throughout different locations your players will enjoy experiencing the familiarity of challenges each location provides. As the wise games developer Andrew Greenberg has said, “the setting is often the most engrossing part; take full advantage of it,” and the galaxy in Warhammer 40K is no exception.

Creating Missions

With so many Altar of War Dataslates as well as supplemental Codexes having additional missions, it shouldn’t be difficult to use any one with your planetary conditions inter-mingled. At a base level, simply doing this with one of the 6 missions in the main 40K rulebook can give you a wildly different game than you would see if you played a book mission straight. If you do not have access to any Dataslate missions you can combine 2 of the main rulebook missions to vary game play, just remember there should be a narrative point to each and every engagement. Perhaps you’ve decided to merge the Emperor’s Will mission with the Relic mission. Instead of just playing them as is, you could make it so your force has to take the Relic, which is a dangerous bomb, and must deliver it to the location of your opponent’s Emperor’s Will objective and clear out its defenders so the bomb can be set. You can also use the narrative itself to give bonuses to the armies fighting it out. For example, in the last stage of a Tyranid invasion you could give each of the ‘Nid Troops, Elites and Fast Attacks the Endless Swarm rule and the beleaguered defenders know the fate of the entire world is on the line and have the Zealot special rule to show their heroic fortitude. There is no limit to what you can do as long as fun can be had by all the players involved.

Different Ways to Play

The next thing I’ve considered is involving several of the variations of playing Warhammer 40K available to play my campaign. With a Tyranid invasion I decided I would use Kill Team missions as a prelude to each major engagement. In this way it would be like a scouting party had come across the vanguard of a larger invading force. If there was a planetary condition I would use that in the Kill Team prelude, then I selected one of the six Kill Team missions that would best complement the main invasion mission. I then created a victory reward for the the Kill Team mission that would be used in the main mission, setting stakes on the line to give further incentive for winning the prelude. Next, a full-size game of 40K would be played with all the setting conditions and Kill Team results applied. The winner of the main mission would receive a bonus for the climax of the campaign, which I set as an Apocalypse game. In this way, a tally would be kept throughout play of which bonuses each player would get for the apocalyptic finale in the campaign of 6 sessions with Kill Team and full-size 40K. Your campaign can be further expanded with 40K supplements such as Cities of Death and Planetstrike. In the end, you have a multitude of options available to play out the events of your campaign and there is nothing stopping you from creating even more.

Well, that’s my game plan for running this invasion campaign. Seasoned narrative players will have noticed I’ve not mentioned dedicated GMing or branching path engagements but perhaps in the future after I’ve tested this campaign I’ll explore those options as well.