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Hi all.

One of the things which drew me to Warhammer in the first place were beautifully painted models, engaged in desperate battle brought upon by events connected to the rich backstory of the game. However, my gaming group haven't really tried to focus on this part of the game so far. I know several of the players have at least some interest in the fluff, but falls very easily into a waac-attitude unless there's an appealing reason not to.

I've been considering trying out the following:
- Playing campaigns or Mighty Empires
- Writing army backgrounds and battle reports, either as a blog/web page or in a journal we keep in our gaming area.

Since we're a close-knit group of people, which will most likely be playing each other regulary for many years, it would be great to be able to create our own fluff which we can refer to and look back upon.

I'd love some feedback, either regarding my ideas or other suggestions/examples of how others have done this

A tournament is a good place to create a basis for narrative gaming. It allows you to force battles and then just sort of fill in the blanks with some story.

Here's the problem though: Someone has to be interested in writing the narrative. If you try to leave it to each person, it will fail. There needs to be one person that takes the reins and writes the "fluff" between each game. It's more work than you'd think. Of course if someone else really wants to write one of them, let them, but one person has to rein it in and make it happen, and be willing to write whenever everyone else doesn't want to.

My most fun narrative gaming has been when something surprising has happened. Back when we had the Dogs of War army, I made a new unit for it that my group adopted as a legal unit. I managed to kill a cannon by destroying the actual cannon with a single jezzail team rolling perfectly. It was a shot that shouldn't have happened.

As a result, my friend's cannon and crew were affected by the warpstone lodged in their cannon, and became a part of Dogs of War. They started praying to a God called the Sightless God, which may have been their own name for a chaos God, or just their delusions.

Either way, they joined armies for what seemed to be random reasons to anyone else, hauling their cannon around. I think that sort of thing is awesome. It wasn't something anyone else knew of, but to my group it was a legendary cannon crew.

People really like hearing about themselves. If you made a newsletter/blog/webpage or even used here, I can almost guarantee people would take an interest.

But every battle would have to be portrayed, not just yours. And other people aren't necessarily going to be interested in writing.

They work until the person doing it gets burnt-out. Which pretty much always happens.

If you can, get yourself a copy of the General's Compendium. Its OOP, but should be available second hand since its from an older edition of WHFB.

That being said, its a great resource for running campaign (narrative, map, node, etc) with two baked in map campaigns. Plus is includes skirmish and ship fighting. I highly recommend it. We still use it, and make adjustments as necessary depending on the edition of WHFB we're playing.

A series of linked games is a good place to start, as many people, particularly "power-gamers" may not be up for a full-on campaign.

Perhaps have the first game be a series of patrols (1200-1600pt games), which affect the sacking of a small town (2000pts, with a few cool special rules, perhaps) then leading up to a big 2400-3000 game. We did pretty much exactly this with our group, and it was good fun. I'll see if I can find the exact rules we used for you.

I'd also like to recommend the original 1990s Mighty Empires rules. They're written for the tiles they used, but there are a lot of mechanics/ideas that can be used in developing narrative and map based campaigns

http://www.games-workshop.com/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m1340009_Mighty_Empires.pdf