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Hey feel like I've gotten a little lost in the grind of straight up competitive matched play. Looking to try out some more narrative based scenarios. Where might I find some good stuff to use as a basis at least? Do you think urban conquest would give me what I'm looking for?
CA2018?
Any homemade fan stuff out there?

Abaddon303 wrote:
Hey feel like I've gotten a little lost in the grind of straight up competitive matched play. Looking to try out some more narrative based scenarios. Where might I find some good stuff to use as a basis at least? Do you think urban conquest would give me what I'm looking for?
CA2018?
Any homemade fan stuff out there?

City fighting gives alot of nice rule changes especially with cover.

Mission structure? Plan a small campaign.

Break the siege of Hive xyz.
1 Mission frontal assault with advantage for the break out faction
2. Siege line nomands Land. Breakthrough happened now the forces are scattered.
Slight advantage besieger.
Split scenario then 3.1 organized retreat advantage besieger.
3.2 final assault on the gun emplacement, advantage besieger, including fortified position (maybee one or two Earthshaker emplacements,rules in am index from fw)

?

Chapter Approveds have a nice selection of funky scenarios, I especially like the siege parts from the 2017 book. From time to time there are some in White Dwarf (and a huge selection if you read back to the nineties), for an example Ork's Drift / Glazer's Creek which is basically the situation of Zulu at Rorke's Drift with one side defending a hastily fortified farmstead in the middle of the table while their opponent attacks in waves, there's burning houses, a field hospital for those wounded between the attacks etc. Good fun.

Few tips on easy homebrewing interesting scenarios on the fly:

- Every great narrative starts with terrain. Seriously. Arrange your table so it is looking like a real place (and real places very rarely are symmetric and fair) and then decide what features make most sense to be key. If this stage is done right you should already have some core idea on what narrative you want to play out.

- Then look at the forces at hand or at the forces to be - are there any key elements that may play a vital role in a scenario? Or the opposite - what key elements should be missing this time or come delayed/separated? Should there be endless waves or should there be forces of asymmetric size? In my experience if you have done first step well enough decisions at this stage should flow naturally to fill in the story already seeded in the back of your head. Remember - two factions clashing against each other rarely have the same goal. They might fight for the same proverbial hill, but for different reasons and with different margins for casaulties, different secondary agendas or may both want something from the same general area, but aim at two entirely different key buildings. With factions as diverse as in 40K assuming that two armies see the battlefield exactly the same limits possible narratives. If you have access to large collections of models it is usually a good idea to build lists only after the rough idea of the scenario is prepared. And most definitely cross-tailor with balanced gameplay in mind. This step takes practice, as narrative games usually do not follow your competitive instincts - "solid choices" may often break the narrative while "trash choices" may make it.

- Then look at... Maelstrom cards and see if any of those can represent goals of the narrative. Don't deal them randomly - carefully prepare two mini decks of objectives to achieve to represent the narrative in victory conditions.

- Last but not least look at any special rules that may fit the scenario. Battlezones rules from Urban Conquest, specific stratagems, secondary "battlefield use only" fixed CPs for use with mission specific stratagems, that sort of stuff.

In the end you should have a fun and unique narrative to enjoy.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
One more thing - narratives play out better with dense terrain and bigger terrain-to-models ratio than typical competitive games, so if you don’t have bigger tables play smaller games.

Thanks guys lots of great ideas I'll get thinking!