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With the Kill Team rules coming out now, I'm thinking of brainstorming some ideas to pitch to the players at my local GW for a narrative style campaign using Kill Team rules (we also have a few people that have started the hobby, but I never see them, so I'm thinking something like this might get some new blood to show up). Also I only have a small force myself so Kill Team is good for me personally as well. Problem is, I can't think of a way to do it. Like, I don't know where to begin, although I can likely come up with a backdrop story.

Is there any resources or the like for this? I heard there was an old issue of White Dwarf, 300 if I recall, that had a campaign but I'm not able to find it, only the UK version which from what I can tell doesn't include that (it was only in the US/CAN version). Basically I'm not sure how I should structure it, I had the idea of doing something similar to the Seasons of War for AoS, with a different mission each week to represent forces doing their thing, but it seems to me that in a true narrative type of game, each force might do something different so having one set of missions for everyone doesn't seem that good. I also don't want to have the thing entirely GMed (because I can't be there all the time) but I think that some small tweaks and customization could work out if people were up for it.

Any suggestions on doing something like this? Since this would be my first go at it I don't want to bite off more than I can chew, but I want to at least convey that it's more structured than just "Hey show up and play Kill Team games". Like something in between a league and a campaign is what I'm thinking, but closer to campaign.

There's some god forsaken planet in a radioactive deadzone somewhere in space. It's surface is a warren of blasted out cities and rotting industrial sectors, that have been too irradiated for anyone to come near for Millenia. But now, the levels of radiation are finally dropping enough to allow bold scavengers to send raiders to the planet to search for long lost archeotech and STC files.

The hunt is on.

As for campaign rules etc you could do a lot worse than looking at the heels of ruin stuff.

I LOVE campaigns... we are currently running a large-scale 3 sector campaign using the Forgeworld (horus heresy book 4) "Conquest" campaign system, which is really just amazing. You don't need to play 30K or the 30K-narratives to use it; in fact every game could be Kill Team style if you wanted and it'd work just fine, or some sort of escalation etc...

I wrote quite a bit about it in my blog haha... in fact with just that information and some of your own ingenuity (creating warzones) you could easily run that system without the HH4 book. This might help:
http://atticwars40k.blogspot.com/2016/05/conquest-campaign-for-dummies-part-3.html
http://atticwars40k.blogspot.com/2016/04/conquest-campaign-for-dummies-part-2.html
http://atticwars40k.blogspot.com/2016/04/conquest-campaign-for-dummies-part-1.html

If you're looking for cool narrative ideas, I think this one is just perfect for a Kill Team campaign - it's from a BL "short":
http://www.blacklibrary.com/new-titles/new-qu-re/keeler-image.html

The story is about:


I think a very cool/fun base concept and I'm trying to write a campaign narrative for just this purpose using it myself!

I'm a huge fan of the Horus Heresy "Conquest" Campaign system as well, so I can second the above. In fact, we use a set of Planetary Empires/Mighty Empires tiles to physically represent/build our Warzones. Its a ton of fun, and can easily become an ongoing, year-long thing.

Using it for Kill Team would be a no brainer... only adjusted narratively (maybe make the "Warzone" a single city, so it makes sense that these tiny squads are fighting for control).

Hi all sorry I lost track of this thread. Those are some good ideas, thanks, I'll look at the Conquest campaign and maybe restructure it to be over a single area instead of entire planets... my GW store has just three tables but one is almost perpetually for AoS and the other two are an Ice board and an Imperial City, so that gives me some ideas to fit the narrative.

Thanks again

I had an idea for a Kill Team campaign about a Genestealer Cult rising up and taking over. If you're looking at a narrative campaign, make the first Kill Teams easy, but let them carry through to later missions. The rise of a Genestealer Cult is a great way to slowly amp up dramatic tension. You can also have units not normally allowed in Kill Team take part to offer unique high-powered bosses.

My biggest thing would be to make it a generic enough system to not exclude anyone. I think most of the armies at the shop are Marine (I'm doing Khorne Daemonkin) but if I pitch this the main idea is also to get some newer players involved; the GW store puts up pictures whenever someone brand new buys something (whether it's a unit or a starter box) but I can count on one hand the number of people who I've seen at the shop afterwards. So part of the idea would be get these people who may have just bought like a tactical squad or something into the shop to play some games, albeit small games.

Some basic ideas are mulling about that essentially is making a world split in two (because we have two boards), one that's an imperial city and one that is like the frozen tundra with imperial outposts or the like. But coming up with reasons for people to be there is hard at such a small scale, so I'm almost thinking that it should focus on small parts of a larger thing going on (which would also tie nicely into a larger campaign in the future in the same area), maybe even like a prelude (small forces are dispatched and then when things escalate, a larger force is deployed), but I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of how to fit it in with the Kill Team rules/scenarios (as this would be my first campaign, I don't want to go too much into customization). Also I don't want to come up with too much right away since I don't even know if anyone would be interested in it.

Well, if it's a narrative thing, you'll want to know the armies involved before designing it. You can craft a much better story that way.

If you're looking for a more generic campaign, make it a campaign where it's a fight for a Space Hulk. There can be planetary combat (controlling land-based defences and satellite arrays), ship-board combat (controlling the Space Hulk itself), or anything in between.

In fact, you could even make it a "scoring" campaign, so instead of it being about controlling areas, the games are to get bits of information and score points. First to so many Victory Points wins, or some such.

 Yarium wrote:
Well, if it's a narrative thing, you'll want to know the armies involved before designing it. You can craft a much better story that way.

If you're looking for a more generic campaign, make it a campaign where it's a fight for a Space Hulk. There can be planetary combat (controlling land-based defences and satellite arrays), ship-board combat (controlling the Space Hulk itself), or anything in between.

In fact, you could even make it a "scoring" campaign, so instead of it being about controlling areas, the games are to get bits of information and score points. First to so many Victory Points wins, or some such.

That's true, it might not be a bad idea to gauge interest first, see who is interested in playing and then see what armies they have, could help with the narrative approach. I mean that would technically leave some people out if they don't respond, but depending on their armies could still work them in (e.g. Tyranids or Necrons just kinda show up unannounced and uninvited)

One idea I've been wanting to use is Necron tomb world activating and having learned they hold the secrets of bio transferrance (some way or another), your teams missions is to destroy the main "reactors" and blow the tomb up before the legion awakens...

Obviously this will restrict you to needing someone who has Necrons and a fair few of them but basically the attackers can have kills teams from any army as they have decided to work together to bring this menace down against 1 or 2 Necron players who will have to work together to prevent you.

So you start off attempting to infiltrate the tomb to blow up the reactors whilst avoiding the patrols of Scrabs flitting about performing maintenance, if one team is spotted the systems are activated to start awakening the legion, the turn after the scarabs have spotted you the first "mini-boss" activates which is a Wraith which starts tracking your teams through the tomb (you could have like a secondary mission to destroy a Spyder which is producing more scarabs each turn or every other turn) turn 2 after being discovered Warriors start to spawn (in units of 5 to make it a bit fairer on the kill teams) and so on so forth until the Kill teams have succeeded in destroying the reactors or Necrons have destroyed the teams...

I still need to work out all the details on this but should work hopefully