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My dear Dakkites/Dakkanauts, next week myself and some friends are going to be having a week of Warhammer 40K, and we want to play a campaign, but we're not sure how to go about making rules for it. I suggested that we do a province based campaign in a similar vein to Dawn of War: Dark Crusade/Soulstorm, but then had no idea how to go about it... Have any of you ever done something like this, or have alternative suggestions? If it helps, I play Necrons, one friend plays Space Marines, one plays Eldar, one plays Dark Eldar and one plays Imperial Guard.

If it's just a week, then you can make a simple map of a random continent or continent and divide it up.

You pair off, and the winner gets one of his opponents territories if he wins.

To keep someone from getting wiped out, and thus sitting on their hands for the rest of the week, give them some sort of bonus like +50 points for each territory few that they have than their opponent.

If you're willing to play over several months, then the Badab War campaign rules are excellent. (Imperial Armor 9).

I would suggest set up several different battle scenarios and start from there. After that I would designate one side the invaders, and one side the attackers. Following that the first game could be a game of planet strike. The winner of that game can choose from one of your scenarios or make up their own. The winner of that game can choose the next battle. Repeat until you have as many battles as you can fit in and whoever has the most wins, wins. Make it more or less fluff detailed as you want. You can say "the invader is trying to conquer a forge world from the Imperium" and as a result have every battle be a cities of death battle (perhaps make the first one a planet strike game combined with cities of death), or at least have dense urban terrain.

You can have each battle expand on the fluff, like if the defenders barely won a 1500 point game you can say "The XX company of the (insert some marine chapter or guard regiment or whatever) managed to successfully defend Manufactorum (insert latin sounding name here), although the losses were heavy, and the battered company is likely to faulter without reinforcements." which could lead up to the next battle, which is an attempt by the winner to break through and reinforce the people at the manufactorum.

Adding a theme or story can help a lot to making a campaign interesting. If you are just fighting "battle XXX on unnamed world XXX" you don't care as much about the outcome as "if I don't win this battle, all of my guardsmen who bravely defended the manufactorum in the last battle including the Guardsman who (insert something amazing that the guardsman did) will die"