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I've been really digging the idea of getting back to the world of Rogue Trader -era of 40K. There's something very refreshing in the RT setting as opposed to current, quite "static" landscape of contemporary 40K. However, I'd like to come up with a new rules system which wouldn't be so out of sync with current edition of 40K, in the hopes of getting some sort of broader support happening for such an activity - Easier for existing 40K players to get involved into it etc.

So now I'm thinking one possible approach to this could be by building on top of existing 40K Kill Team and its expansions, but to include a system for narrative progression with the force(s). So immediately I'm thinking the new 40K crusade rules: They are streamlined enough as to not bog everything down in RoleMaster RPG -tier complexity, but still offer enough to chew on so that progressing with your force is interesting and meaningful.

I was thinking I could start devving such a system up once the new KT expansion for 2021 drops. I'm hoping the 2021 expansion will bring the existing KT datasheets and rules more in line with the 9th ed 40K rules. The biggest obstacle obviously would be vehicles and monsters, which currently do not have rules in Kill Team, so I'd need to come up with rules for them somehow?

Also, I'd like to be able to keep the open-endedness of RT so that in addition to existing datasheets, you could also have "custom" things like all the various "typical tracked/walker/hover vehicle" generation tables allowed in RT.

In addition to these, I also want to include the mutants and the psyker abilities from RT, or some version of them anyways.. Obviously some of the stuff might need toning down a bit if they were ridiculously OP / game-breaking, but I definitely want to include them somehow. They offer a lot of conversion potential, and with the existing model range being almost completely plastic, now is better time than any to pull off such conversions!

In terms of players, there would have to be some sort of GM, both to act as a "judge" and to act as the player controlling various villains the players would face during their games. Another option would be to adopt the "D20 + table" approach to controlling enemies present in Blackstone Fortress? Might be fun too! But probably some sort of GMing would be necessary in order to keep the game enjoyable.. I'd prefer if one wasn't necessary, but I'm thinking one would be necessary anyways since someone needs to have all the required terrain, the collection of models required to represent the various enemies and so on, so being a GM on top of it might actually work in the end.

Each player would start with a small band of characters, either built around a Rogue Trader or other suitable authoritative figure (Lord Inquisitor, a High Lord of some Imperial Planet, a Pirate/Raider band boss, Space Marine Blackshield with the highest rank, Ork Nob, Stealer Patriarch etc) and missions would be either selected by the GM or rolled randomly from a table. Requisition points would be generated by winning games etc, Agendas could be completed during missions and so on, like in current 9th ed narrative play. I think the crusade rules for each player should be dictated by the faction of the leader chosen for that particular "party", which of course would get a bit more complicated due to not all characters of the party necessarily being from the same 40K faction keyword, but I'm confident I could get it to work somehow..

In terms of current lore, and how such a setting can exist within, I'm placing the events of such a game on the fringe worlds of the imperium, which haven't been actually visited by the Imperial authorities in over a millennia, and have reverted to independence. Such worlds are a melting pot of almost all existing 40K cultures (sans woke Necrons & Tyranids - GSC & Canoptek do exist), the lack of central authority draws all the scum of the galaxy towards such systems. T'au mercenaries who have lost their faith in the greater good, Space Marines gone blackshields escaping the imperial rule, Demiurgs (yes I want Squats back!), pirates, various paramilitary gangs and mercenary groups hired by Rogue Traders, even the lone Inquisitor or two on a secret quest, looking for something hidden in the mess of it all.. Lex Imperialis has no hold on such worlds, mutations and heresies (including heretek!) are commonplace, wealth, status and power are everything.

I'm thinking of mainly doing this for myself, but would love it if there were other people on this board who'd be interested in either collaborating directly or giving critique on the specifics of such endeavor. Thoughts?

I want to bring the weird and wonderful back into 40K; Enough of the epic battles! I want to see hormone-enhanced Kroot raiders (think kitbashing stealer Aberrants with kroot) battling Hive Spyrers with Ork mercenaries, Rogue Traders with combat robots fighting rogue Space Marine blackshields, Chaos worshipping mutant refugees (one of them is actually a psyker) battling Eldar pirates (a mix of harlies, eldar guardians & drukhari)... we need more paramilitary skirmish!

Sounds like fun. A little vague and scattered, but fun! A few random thoughts:

* Rather than requiring a dedicated GM, have you considered doing something like the 4th edition Kill Team rules? That is, one player plays the smaller, smarter force of vaguely protagonistic dudes, and their opponent controls a bunch of semi-AI mooks and a decked out miniboss (plus all the traps/defenses of the lair that is their battlefield). Perhaps that's a bit much though.

* I get the desire to include really customizable units. It may be a good idea to steer (hyuck hyuck) clear of vehicles initially though. Especially if you want them to behave dramatically differently from other units. Their high cost/durability/size compared to infantry units presents some significant design challenges.

* It sounds like you want a lot of emphasis on each individual model. Would it make sense to come up with a handful (5?) of classes for each major faction, give each class a base statline, and then make a couple upgrade tables for each faction? So chaos might have a mutation, relic, and servant table. Tau might have a Gear, Training, and Reputation table, etc.

Sorry. That's probably rambly, disorganized advice from my tired brain, but I wish you well!

I've tried doing something kind of similar to this by tweaking the new Necromunda rules to rescale the game for 40k models. I've slowed down work on it due to lockdown/lack of people to play with, but the design isn't that far off of what you're talking about here. I've got a vehicle rules expansion (inspired by Rogue Trader, you need to track people in the vehicle, crew skills can affect the vehicle's operation, and you can board and take over other peoples' vehicles) but no vehicle stats right now; warbands and campaign rules are kind of bare-bones. No custom statline creation rules right now but it's something I'd consider adding at some point.

Link at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kmGsw6bnlWHv9n6y5smgiQweHFEq8RxO_Om1LbeKUtU/edit?usp=sharing if you're curious about trying these rules or if you're looking for inspiration for your own.

 tauist wrote:
...So now I'm thinking one possible approach to this could be by building on top of existing 40K Kill Team and its expansions, but to include a system for narrative progression with the force(s). So immediately I'm thinking the new 40K crusade rules: They are streamlined enough as to not bog everything down in RoleMaster RPG -tier complexity, but still offer enough to chew on so that progressing with your force is interesting and meaningful...

I'd be wary of trying to use Crusade or Kill-Team as a basis for this project; they're both very married to keeping the exact same statlines as 40k, which compresses the design space and the amount of interesting progression you can get out of them. Necromunda and Mordheim both managed to work well with a large design space and a sophisticated campaign system by breaking away from that paradigm, and as an added bonus Necromunda 2017 has an alternating activation system that's easier to track and faster to play than Kill-Team's (activate a model, do its turn, switch to the other player's activation instead of sticking to the move/psychic/shoot/fight phases and alternating activations in three of them).

...The biggest obstacle obviously would be vehicles and monsters, which currently do not have rules in Kill Team, so I'd need to come up with rules for them somehow?...

40k's vehicle/monster rules (where they're just effectively really big infantrymen) are there because GW wanted to make the game faster to play when you're using a bunch of them; you could try to do something like that, but you'd be wasting a lot of the potential of doing a skirmish game. You may find my implementation (where you track crew/passengers of the vehicle, which can't do activations on its own) too complicated, but I'd encourage you to at least consider doing some kind of subsystem damage and restrictions to movement rather than just making your vehicles/monsters big damage sponges.

...In addition to these, I also want to include the mutants and the psyker abilities from RT, or some version of them anyways.. Obviously some of the stuff might need toning down a bit if they were ridiculously OP / game-breaking, but I definitely want to include them somehow. They offer a lot of conversion potential, and with the existing model range being almost completely plastic, now is better time than any to pull off such conversions!...

The problem I'd always had with mutations is that conversions tend to take a while or require you to go looking for parts (even with a plastic range); random mutations are cool in theory, but I much prefer Mordheim's Possessed warband that let you spend points buying specific mutations so you could plan your conversions/painting ahead of time.

...In terms of players, there would have to be some sort of GM, both to act as a "judge" and to act as the player controlling various villains the players would face during their games. Another option would be to adopt the "D20 + table" approach to controlling enemies present in Blackstone Fortress? Might be fun too! But probably some sort of GMing would be necessary in order to keep the game enjoyable.. I'd prefer if one wasn't necessary, but I'm thinking one would be necessary anyways since someone needs to have all the required terrain, the collection of models required to represent the various enemies and so on, so being a GM on top of it might actually work in the end...

I'm with Wyldhunt on this one; I think you'll want both a PvP mode with no GM and a PvE mode with a GM/NPCs to give players more flexibility. As to automating enemies I've played Blackstone Fortress and didn't like the d20 table much; Corvus Belli's released a similar game called Defiance where there's a deck of cards with a simple flowchart to describe enemy behavior, and I found that faster/easier to use.

...Each player would start with a small band of characters, either built around a Rogue Trader or other suitable authoritative figure (Lord Inquisitor, a High Lord of some Imperial Planet, a Pirate/Raider band boss, Space Marine Blackshield with the highest rank, Ork Nob, Stealer Patriarch etc) and missions would be either selected by the GM or rolled randomly from a table. Requisition points would be generated by winning games etc, Agendas could be completed during missions and so on, like in current 9th ed narrative play. I think the crusade rules for each player should be dictated by the faction of the leader chosen for that particular "party", which of course would get a bit more complicated due to not all characters of the party necessarily being from the same 40K faction keyword, but I'm confident I could get it to work somehow...

This bit particularly really sounds more like you want to be looking at Mordheim or Necromunda rather than Kill Team/Crusade; the campaign system is a lot more sophisticated/detailed and a lot less abstract right out of the box, and isn't really any harder to play.


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Wyldhunt wrote:
...* It sounds like you want a lot of emphasis on each individual model. Would it make sense to come up with a handful (5?) of classes for each major faction, give each class a base statline, and then make a couple upgrade tables for each faction?...

I've seen the "classes" idea done in various Inquisimunda implementations over the years; when making a guy you select a species with one cost and statline, then a class or archetype that gives you some buffs and has an extra cost on top of the base cost. Whether or not something like that is a good idea is going to depend somewhat on how you want to do warband organization; everyone in Necromunda has the same XP advance and injury rules, but Mordheim separates your people into "heroes" (who have more complicated XP advance/injury rules) and "warriors" (who have a more streamlined version of both). Both sort of have "archetypes" that describe your dudes (Necromunda's leader/champion/juve/ganger/gunner, Mordheim's heroes are either leader, veteran, newbie, or wizard/priest and their troopers are newbies, grunts, veterans/heavies, animals, and ogres, sometimes also divided into shooty/melee versions), but in Necromunda every warband's got universal access to the same set of archetypes while in Mordheim warbands often have a more limited selection.

Thanks for your ideas!

I suppose what I'm looking for is kind of like Necromunda but with every concievable faction being a valid choice for a "gang". And I actually prefer the partial AA system of Kill Team over an AA system where a model activates and completes their entire turn without interruptions. I have played all editions of 40K, and have played one edition of Necromunda, and somehow I prefer the current Kill Team system over all of them, it plays fast but still has dynamic game turns.

I need to check that defiance out, thanks.

@AnomanderRake, I'll also take a look at your new system. I'm a semidecent graphics designer and a digital document creator so once you got your ruleset to a semi-mature stage, I could try my hand at making it look more presentable if you want? You seem to have a knack for creating rulesets, maybe you'd appreciate some graphic design help..?

I may take you up on that when it's more finished; I tend to focus on content before visual polish because I'm worried that the visual polish would make it harder to edit the content as I go.

I'd be ok with this if they made Abdul Goldberg a statted character in it.

 Matt Swain wrote:
I'd be ok with this if they made Abdul Goldberg a statted character in it.

You're referring to this fella?
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Abdul_Goldberg

Sure, why not! I see no reason why he and his retinue couldn't be fielded.


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 AnomanderRake wrote:
I may take you up on that when it's more finished; I tend to focus on content before visual polish because I'm worried that the visual polish would make it harder to edit the content as I go.

Sure! Just let me know when you reach that point.

Cheers

Years ago, back when playing 3rd and 4th edition, my group and I developed a set of advanced rules for a skirmish game we called "Gang Hammer". It borrowed ideas from necromunda and ported those into 40K rule set we were using.

I'm getting closer to finishing my re-write of ProHammer, which incidentally incorporates a lot of those advanced ideas (over watch, unit reactions, etc). When that's done I'm considering taking the ideas in crusade games (from 9th edition), and make that work with classic 40K. Then provide some parameters for smaller battles (thinking about 400 points) that relax certain rules to make it more of a skirmish game.