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I've always wanted to run a 40k Campaign. Build up your army, buy upgrades, either one-use or permanent, upgrade a base, take on territory, etc. But I'm not sure how exactly to go about doing it.

So, Imma try to hash out some rules here. Feel free to critique and offer suggestions!

Ideas in no particular order...

Okay, I lied. Not ideas, IDEA.

Scout Missions

Scout Missions are smaller, lopsided games, played before a main game. Usual values should be around 400 points to 1,000. The smaller side is the "Scout Force" while the larger is the "Defender". The goal for the Scout Force is to acquire some information and get out-the Defender's goal is to stop them. If the Defender tables the Scout Force, the loser will have less points for his upcoming game. If the Defender wins, but the Scout Force escapes alive, the game is played as normal. If the Scout Force wins, his opponent has to make some of his list first and show the winner before the game starts. If by some bloody miracle the Scout Force tables to Defender, the Defender will have a large points penalty in the upcoming game.

Scout Missions should have around 1 objective per 400 points of the upcoming game, rounding down. (1,000 point game will have a 2 objective scout mission, 1,500 3, 2,000 5.) For each Objective the Scout Force recovers, the Defender must make 400 points of his list and show his opponent before the opponent makes his list. If both sides did Scout Missions and won, whoever won faster (in less turns, not necessarily time taken) makes their list second, though both make their list in alternating turns. If both players won in the same amount of time, roll off to decide who makes the list first.

For example, let's say Player Austin and Player Bethany both do Scout Missions. Bethany wins in 6 turns, getting 3 objectives for the 2,000 point game, while Austin secures 4 in 7 turns. Austin must then make 400 points (no less than that-but can be more) and show Bethany. His list is:

200-10 Skitarii Vanguard, Omnispex, 3 Plasma Culivers
155-10 Skitarii Vanguard, Omnispex, 3 Arc Rifles
150-Vindicare Assassin

Bethany then has to make HER first 400 points. She takes, to counter that:

220-Nemesis Dreadknight, Hammer, Psycannon, Incinerator, Teleporter
203-5 Man GK Terminator Squad, 4 Halberds, Daemon Hammer, Psycannon

Then, Austin must make the next 400 points. He already has 505, so he only has to make 295 points. To counter Bethany's psychic power, he decides to bring a Culexus.

145-Callidus Assain
140-Culexus Assain
35-Drop Pod (Space Marines)

Next, Bethany makes her next 377 points.

160-GK Librarian, ML 3, Liber Daemonica
100-Coteaz
120-3 Jokaero, 1 Death Cult Assasin

Austin then has to make his list up to 1,200, for 375 points now.

210-5 Man Dev Squad, 4 Grav Cannons
110-5 Man Dev Squad, 4 Multi-Meltas
125-5 Man Assault Squad, Eviscerator, Veteran Sergeant, Combat Shield

Bethany then has to make her list up to 1,600 and show Austin, since Austin scored 4 objectives, whereas Austin does not have to show Bethany any more of his list until the game starts, since she only secured 3 objectives.

Does that all make sense? In addition, does it seem like it'd be fun?

I think what you have is a good seed of an idea, it's definitely something worth kicking the tires over.

I'm not sure the "lose and have less points next game" is much of a fun inducement, but the "If I win, show me X points of your next army", or "my successful raid means you can't bring Y from your armory" or even "I completed secret objective Z, so I get this special rule/doohickey" might be a bit more feasible. Love the "complete A objectives, I get to see B points of your list, though.

Also, the older rulebooks (I think 3rd & 4th?) had a section on campaigns - rolling battles and map-based campaigns.

The former were along what you're proposing here; also the winner got some say in shaping the terrain of the next battle, with half the board being a "continuation" of the last. The winner might even have to use a certain portion of their force in the next battle as it continues to push into enemy territory. If one player starts having a losing streak, they could even be given extra troops, representing crashing into mounting reserves or defenses as the attacker strains his own forces in being able to catch up to the rampaging blitzkrieg.

The latter had a mapped out area divided into sections. Control of certain sections gave you certain advantages in battles - for example, if you seized the Manufactorum, you got a free tank or vehicle; if you seized the Armory, some of your weapons would be upgraded to Masterwork; seizing the airfield gave you a 1-per-game strafing run/bombardment, and so forth. The Dawn of War video game used some of these elements in the 2nd add-on and later.

Both have their merits and flaws; the former tends to have more balanced forces, with one side only gaining a slight edge - the battles can feel kinda samey. The latter is more tactical as you have to spread troops and anticipate the enemy's advance, but it can be prone to deathstar clumping that rampages from one sector to another if it's not done right.

I wasn't thinking it'd be huge penalty-definitely no more than 10% (although that is pretty sizable...).

I'm glad you like the list-making idea! And with what you've said, I'm thinking that it might be better to focus on making a singular campaign, rather than a set of rules for many campaigns.

Independent Characters

In a campaign, ICs have 5 states:

Battle-Ready
Ambulatory
Stable
Critical
Dead

Every IC starts off Battle-Ready. Only if slain in battle do they drop to another state.

If slain in battle, the IC must make a Toughness test. On a success, they drop to Ambulatory. On a failure, they drop to Stable.

If slain with an Instant Death weapon (including by being doubled out), passing the Toughness test makes them Stable, and failing drops them to Critical.

An Ambulatory character requires escort, but is mostly okay. They are treated similar to a Relic (in the Capture the Relic mission) except they may move any distance in any phase without being "dropped", the models escorting them may run or turboboost as normal, and may even board a transport (with the IC that is now Ambulatory taking up space as usual in the transport-this means, for instance, a Biker IC cannot board a Rhino). You may move off your table edge with the Ambulatory IC, in which case, the squad that escorted them off is placed in Ongoing Reserves.

A Stable IC is treated pretty much exactly like a Relic, except you can move off your table edge with them, in which case, the squad that escorted them off is placed in Ongoing Reserves.

A Critical IC is now a stationary objective-they are too injured to be moved with a battle raging.

If you control the Ambulatory, Stable, or Critical IC at the end of the game, move them off your table edge, or table your opponent, the ICs are recovered and may begin healing.

If neither side controls the ICs and neither side was tabled, roll 2d6 and add your Victory Points to the total for each character. Whoever rolls higher recovers that character.

If the enemy side controls the ICs, they recover the character and may choose to either kill them or hold them hostage. If they are held hostage, have them heal as normal.

Healing

An Ambulatory IC is automatically healed after the battle. They will be Battle-Ready in the next fight.

A Stable or Critical IC is ready for the next fight on a 4+ on a d6. For each fight they miss, add a cumulative +1 to this roll. (This may make the roll an autosuccess-in which case, no roll is required.) Critical ICs receive a -2 penalty to this roll. If a 0 or less is rolled after all modifiers, the character dies, and may no longer be used.

The exception is Daemons, who, when they die, merely return to the Warp. (Daemons in this case is any model with the Daemon special rule.) After each battle, roll a d6. On a 5+, the character returns Battle-Ready. Alternatively, if you roll a 13 on the Warp Storm table, any currently dead Daemon IC can materialize from the Warp, Deep Striking onto the table in that battle.

Rescue Missions

If an IC is held hostage, the controlling player may choose to mount a rescue mission. I'm not sure how to run these yet, so any input is appreciated!

Hostage Trades

You may be wondering why you'd hold anyone hostage, except for Daemons, of course. The answer is so you can trade them for your own ICs. Trades have 2 Objectives per IC involved-the IC themselves, and their equipment. Trades are typically conducted between 200 and 400 points, and follow Kill Team rules, but NOT Kill Team list restrictions. Before the mission begins, you must show your opponent your list. They may then choose to call off the trade, if they think your list is made for a double-crossing.

When the mission begins, deploy within 12" of your table edge, placing each IC and their equipment wherever you like within your deployment zone. (The ICs are treated as either Stable, Critical, or Battle-Ready, depending on their condition when the trade is made. Battle-Ready characters have no equipment and only one wound.) Then, play the game as normal, except no one shoots or attacks, and (before any fighting starts) you automatically run your max distance. At any point, both players may agree to end the game.

If both players are trading in good faith, there will be a few turns of individual soldiers moving to collect the ICs and their equipment, and then both players will end the game. If a player is NOT acting in good faith, they may, at any time, declare hostile action. At this point, it becomes a Kill Team game with the ICs and their equipment as objectives.

There are two issues I see so far here in terms of balancing a campaign structure like this, and they were things I ran into when I was designing some early campaigns awhile back as well, so I definitely understand the impulse.

The first is in your most recent post with the characters and prisoner items. The problem is that not all ICs are equal, and this campaign strongly favors either Daemons or not investing in ICs at all. After all, if I just buy the cheapest, most basic ICs and HQs for my army, I suffer far, far less than if my opponent invests in theirs and I just cap them as soon as I capture them. Thinking in terms of how to break this system, there is a clear winning strategy in using low or no-cost ICs, and never doing prisoner exchanges. I mean, my 60 point bare bones HQ I don't care about, but if I can snag your 200+ point beatstick, there's precious little for me to gain in an exchange.

I get the impulse, but I think systems like this fall short because it doesn't encourage players to make heroes and play them heroically. If I do have a valuable character, this system terrifies me because I know I can lose them forever, and on the other hand, I can just buy some minimum HQ and be fine. Instead of something like this, I'd just make up a basic injury chart for downed characters. Also, on a side note, I found that it is more effective for your players to have 1 or 2 "campaign" characters that are subject to these rules, rather than every IC. It's just less bookkeeping and paperwork, and it allows you to focus more on those rare heroes, rather than everyone with the IC tag. For example, do I really need/care about tracking my 4-5 Ministorium Priests, even if they are ICs? Not really.


The other issue I see, which you started to address, but I want to poke on anyway, is a concern about snowballing with regards to army penalties and bonuses for wins and losses. It's really easy to give a bonus that is too big, or a penalty that is too harmful so that the winner easily wins the next game and it just gets out of control. The solution to this I found was to have means of growth and change for each army, regardless of win or loss, so you get variety in your games, but you don't have a snowball effect. You want the losing army to find strength as well.

Okay. I'll take that into consideration, put it into my thinking brain machine, and see what pops out. (I'm hoping either good ideas, or cupcakes. I hunger! )

Let's see...

Gah, having trouble thinking thoughts. Any ideas?

Well, as far as characters go, my personal philosophy for it is that characters in a narrative campaign should always be growing and developing. So my injury tables tend to not be super harsh, and actually can have some benefits as well. That way, players think "I have my heroes, and I will benefit greatly for being brave, but not be crushed hard for it either".

So what I usually do is make a "victorious hero" chart with a set of benefits and a "defeated hero" chart with some zero-effect results (or temporary disadvantages), but a few benefits as well. You should encourage winning, so the victorious chart should always be a bit better, but losing shouldn't be a slow degrade of that hero until they are useless.

Also, on the subject of charts for rolling, I'd avoid making charts that just give +1 to a stat, as those can be pretty wonky for certain heroes. I mean, +1WS is not going to mean near as much for a IG Company Comander as it would mean for a melee hero.

On the note of charts, the official campaign rules I've seen that work along those lines had charts that you chose from, so that you could at least direct your bonuses roughly in the direction you wanted your hero to improve - you could have melee, ballistic, leadership, endurance, tactical, and strategic tables (potentially two version of each - one for a successful hero, the other for the "2nd place" hero).

Okay. Imma break down all the various rules by what table they should go in.

Movement
Acute Senses
Deep Strike
Crusader
Fleet
Hit And Run
Infiltrate
Move Through Cover
Outflank
Scout
Skilled Rider

Melee
Armourbane
Blind
Concussive
Counter-Attack
Fear
Fleshbane
Furious Charge
Graviton(?)
Hammer Of Wrath
Hatred
Haywire
Instant Death
Lance
Master-Crafted
Monster Hunter
Poisoned
Precision Strikes
Preferred Enemy
Rage
Rampage
Rending
Shred
Smash
Soul Blaze
Strikedown
Tank Hunters
Zealot

Ranged
Ignores Cover
Interceptor
Master-Crafted
Melta
Missile Lock
Night Vision
Pinning
Precision Shots
Preferred Enemy
Relentless
Skyfire
Slow And Purposeful(?)
Sniper
Split Fire
Twin-Linked

Endurance
Adamantium Will
And They Shall Know No Fear
Eternal Warrior
Fearless
Feel No Pain
It Will Not Die
Jink
Shrouded
Stealth
Stubborn

That's a nice place to start, but remember that not all special rules are equal. Plus some don't make much sense as part of a random upgrade chart. Like Daemon is a cool rule, but if someone gets that, it should be a major narrative moment in the campaign, not just "oh I rolled a 4, my Grey Knight is a Daemon now".

I think what you should post, if you have it, are the heroes you have in this campaign. How many players, and how they are running it.

 curran12 wrote:
That's a nice place to start, but remember that not all special rules are equal. Plus some don't make much sense as part of a random upgrade chart. Like Daemon is a cool rule, but if someone gets that, it should be a major narrative moment in the campaign, not just "oh I rolled a 4, my Grey Knight is a Daemon now".

I think what you should post, if you have it, are the heroes you have in this campaign. How many players, and how they are running it.

I know. I was just sorting EVERY rule into categories, to make it easier to sort them into tables. (Though Daemon should probably go away. It might technically be an Endurance rule, but considering its fluff implications...)

And so far, the only character I have so far that I'd want in a campaign is a Necron (Over)Lord, since that's the army I'm building up right now.

I did some digging in my old files and I found the advancement rules for my last campaign that I ran back in May. The setup for the campaign was that every player (4 in this case) had 2 or 3 'campaign characters' that were the named heroes of the storyline and it was the players' responsibility to give them some backstory and motivation, all that fluffy stuff. The players did not need to use all of those characters in every game, just that they had to use at least one, just so that games and lists could have variety. For example, my campaign characters were my Canoness, an Inquisitor and a Lord Commisar, and while they rarely were on the table together, having them let me have a nice variety of lists during the course of the campaign.

Anyway, for the campaign, character advancement and growth was broken into two pieces: narrative development and experience.

Narrative development were the major story moments of the campaign, rewards and change given for the decisions that the players, or more specifically, their characters made. These would be specific upgrades, but the player would not know what upgrades they would get, only the decision to be made. Each choice would have something for the character, but it was set up in such a way that the player chooses based on the character's personality and narrative, rather than "this is the better upgrade". An example of this from the campaign were:

The Mechanicum/Guard player had secured a vault of technology, but once they cracked it open, realized that the technology within was heretical xenos tech. The Magos in command could choose to use it and damn the scriptures, or to reject it and focus on what Humanity could provide. If he chose to use the tech, the Magos would gain Necron Reanimation Protocols and advance the story in that direction, pushing him away from human-focused abilities and slowly turning him and his followers into automata. If he chose to serve Humanity, he would gain an improvement to his leadership and his men would be further inspired, granted Zealot and a few other rules while pushing the Magos' story arc in that direction.

So all of these choices were providing something, but the important part was that it was not a known quantity. It made the players think in terms of the story, which is what you want.


The other side of development was the experience. And this was more straightforward, I'll copy paste directly from my rules:


Character random advancement

In addition to the story-driven decisions that will add significant narrative advantages, all of the named characters in each faction will grow as the campaign grows on. All characters will gain this growth whether or not they are used in a battle, so you should not feel forced to use each character in every single game. This represents growing experience and familiarity with the warzone.

Roll 2d6

1-2 - No advancement
3 - Gain Rage, Furious Charge, Precision Shots, Adamantium Will or Stubborn special rules (player's choice)
4 - +1 Toughness
5 - +1 Armor Save (2+ max, re-roll if this occurs)
6 - +1 WS or BS (roller's choice)
7 - The character may re-roll one failed to-hit, to-wound or save per game (cumulative)
8 - +1 Initiative
9 - +1 Attack
10 - +1 Strength
11 - Gain a free 25 points to spend on wargear. This does not count towards the army total. Gear must be normally allowed to be taken by the character.
12+ - Narrative glory. This is a special reward, and you'll need to contact me to work out an appropriate and narratively driven reward based on the character's deeds in the campaign turn.

Modifiers:
+1 if the character killed or was responsible for the death of an enemy named character (i.e. by orders or powers, agree with opponent on if this counts).

+1 if the character was involved in a heroic deed. This is intentionally vague, as it should be agreed with by your opponent. If a moment makes you say "that guy did amazing", then consider this. But it should be reserved for game-altering actions.

-1 if the character did not play in a game this campaign turn

 curran12 wrote:
Snipped for length

Thanks, Curran! I like that a lot.

For the "narrative" rewards, I'm assuming that the other players come up with the upgrades and DO NOT tell the player receiving it until after they pick?

Well, I as the GM of the campaign, plan out those choices and what the results will be for the players to get. But you are right on the second half, the player chooses what the story choice is, but only after it is made do they know what they get for it.

 curran12 wrote:
Well, I as the GM of the campaign, plan out those choices and what the results will be for the players to get. But you are right on the second half, the player chooses what the story choice is, but only after it is made do they know what they get for it.

Okay, cool.

Also, what happens if you roll an 11 and cannot spend the points?

Generally, I run campaigns with a broad rule of "if something doesn't work right, stop the process and work out a mutual agreement".

In a case like this, it would fall to the players to figure out something that is acceptable, then they pass it to me as GM and I give it approval or feedback. Generally, for something like this, it would be along the lines of "I don't have anything to buy with those points, so instead can I use those points to buy something else for the character, like another relic or piece from an allied codex"