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Hello there! This is a 40k Campaign ruleset inspired by Risk and Planetary Empires.



I will be posting the rules so far to try and get my ideas all sorted in a coherent manour and to get opinions, first impressions and (hopefully) some post-test reviews of these rules. So without further a do...


AS YET UNTITLED

The basic premise of these rules is to adapt the rules of a Risk Campaign to a 40k one and apply that to the Planetary warfare style of map.

To start off a Campaign, you will need to build a map using the following different types of tiles:
- Open Ground, this is just open area.
- Fortresses, these are Hives/Citadels/etc. that can be used as fortified positions.
- Space Ports, like Fortresses but with the capability for large craft to port there.
- Capitals, these will be the starting positions for each players invasion forces.
You can build the map however you like (as of yet, being as no one has played these rules yet, there are no suggestions for map building).

Each player must then choose a faction (Imperium, Chaos, Eldar, Tau, Necron or Tyranids) and select where they wish to build their Capital on the Planetary map; simply pick a tile and replace it with that factions Capital.
Each player's forces are comprimised of two detachments:
A Mobile force - these are made up of your Warlords and their armies, each player has 3 Warlords. A Warlord is a none named Character HQ choice and must always be present when their army fights. Each Warlord starts off with an army of 50PL; these 50PL are spent at the start of the game to pay for the forces under each Warlord, once PLs are spent they cannot be retrieved and you are stuck with the units you bought for that army.
A Garrisoned force - these are the forces that stay to defend a captured tile region, the type of region depends on the amount of forces garrisoned there. Much like with your mobile force, once you have mustered a garrisoned force you cannot change the units that are garrisoned there.

Below is a table detailing the Garrissoned forces in each region and the bonuses each region gives:


All players rolls off once the Capitals are built and the forces have been mustered, the winner of the roll off goes first.

Turn Sequence
1. Reinforcements: The player gains a number of Campaign Points equal to the number of regions they control divided by 2 (rounding up). The player gains a number of reinforcement tokens equal to the number of controlled regions; a reinforcement token can be given to either a garrisoned army or a mobile army and is used up when that army fights a battle. When an army fights, each reinforcement token that army has is equal to 10PL of reinforcements in that battle, i.e. if an army fights with 3 reinforcement tokens they gain 30PL of reinforcements.

2. Mobilization: The player may move any of their mobile armies (along with the reinforcement tokens that army has) into an adjacent region or, if the mobile force started on a Space Port, may move to any other friendly Space Port. If that region isn't controlled by anyone, then said player takes control of the region and garrisons it. If the region is controlled by the current player then the army moves into that region with no repercussions. If the region is controlled by an opposing player then any armies in that region must fight in the following battle phase.

3. Battle: Any opposing armies that are in the same region must fight, i.e. the Attacker's mobile army (and reinforcements) and the Defender's garrisoned army (and reinforcements) as well as any mobile armies of theirs staying in that region (and reinforcements). Fights between armies use the maelstorm rules for 40k (players may want to use specific missions to represent the different terrain, circumstances, etc.) except for any additional rules due to the region type. The garrisoned and mobile forces should already have an army list written up from when they were mustered though any additional units may be added to these forces using reinforcement tokens.
After the battle has been fought, consult the below table to discover the outcome of the battle:

Each player may, at any point, surrender their position; this is treated as the player who retreated suffering a minor loss.
As well as the overall outcome of the battle, the damage done to individual armies must be recorded. Any unit that was part of a mobile or garrisoned force that was completely destroyed during a battle is removed from that army until it spends a turn at a Fortress (or better) re-mustering it's forces. All reinforcements used during a battle are discarded whether they survived the battle or not. If your Warlmaster was killed during a battle, consult the below table:

(more on Warmaster traits later)

4. Re-deployment: The player may relocate a single Mobile force or reinforcement token to an adjacent region.

Now move to the next player and start over.


With the campaign points you recieve for fighting battles and controlling territory, you can buy Stratagems or increase the effectiveness of your Warmaster using the following tables:


You may pay a Campaign point to increase your Warmasters effectiveness in each field, i.e. if you had 3 Campaign points you could give your Warmaster two levels in strategist and one level in Unstoppable to gain +1CP to use in a battle, a single re-roll per battle and +1W.


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This is what I have so far, let me know:
How simple it is,
How it reads,
Whether the rules are any good,
What I've missed out,
If I should add any rules/stratagems/etc.
Any other suggestions/critics?

This is just a small thing I was thinking about over the weekend that has clearly got out of hand so don't be afraid to point out every little problem so that maybe I can tidy it up a bit.

Also, well done for making it this far through my post!

Really neat!

I might make a suggestion though. Give a read through of the instructions for Twilight Imperium for how they build the board. It also uses capitols (though theirs are space systems) on hex tiles and I think those rules for building the game board would work very well for this. Both giving players a chance to try to screw over their opponents with unfavorable tiles and build up themselves with favorable tiles while keeping everyones capital more or less equidistant.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/f3/c6/f3c66512-8e19-4f30-a0d4-d7d75701fd37/ti-k0289_learn_to_playcompressed.pdf
Page 22 shows the map set ups for different numbers of players.

The green tiles is where a player starting location goes.

In the last edition you would shuffle and deal out the rest of the tiles to build the map with the central tile always being the same (a very valuable place) and the players would take turns placing 1 tile at a time, building concentric rings until they got to the outside ring where they placed their capitals.

Lots of cool stuff here! This seems like a reasonable foundation for a campaign. A few thoughts in no particular order:

* If you use this with more than two players at a time, you potentially end up with one or more players not having a battle to play. If you're planning on doing regular meetings to do the campaign-level stuff and then playing games over the next week or whatever before meeting up again, this potentially means that someone doesn't really have as much involvement as the other participants. As an interesting note, you can potentially mitigate this issue if you're playing smaller-scale games like Combat Patrol or Kill Team because you can meet up, do a campaign turn, play games within an hour, and then do another campaign turn.

* In my experience, having potentially very different army point values isn't a ton of fun for the guy with the smaller army. If my opponent brings a 2000 point gunline that can alpha strike effectively against my 1500 point well-rounded list, then I'm going to be looking at an uphill fight.

*Somewhat related to the last point, it looks at a glance like your mechanics encourage "snowballing." That is to say, the guy who takes an early lead will end up with more resources and advantages which in turn make it easier to win the next game even more easily which gives him more resources which makes it even easier to win the game after that... This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can speed up the campaign and give you a more decisive victor early on. However, it probably won't be much fun for the guys who keep getting steamrolled more and more easily as their losses leave them with comparably fewer resources.

You might consider some sort of "catch-up" mechanic that gives some sort of advantage to players that are falling behind. Consider looking at the Ruse and Sudden Death cards from the Open War deck for inspiration. Maybe a player that lost their previous game can utilize a Ruse once per game, or perhaps the player currently in the lead in the campaign (by some metric) receives fewer rewards for winning so that they run away with things less easily. This all assumes that you want to mitigate snowballing, which, maybe you don't.

*When I've kicked around campaign system ideas in the past, I've often set up mechanics in such a way as to prevent one side from having more than an X points advantage when designing their budget. So for instance, I often land on rules that allow one side to increase their maximum points budget by 10% and/or lower the enemy points budget by 10%. In a 1500 point game, a 10% advantage means you have 150 more points than your opponent. If your opponent also has a 10% disadvantage, then you have a 300 point difference. In a 2000 point game, you're looking at a 200 or 400 point differences. The intention here is to allow the points differences to be significant enough to let a player feel they have a meaningful advantage, but not so significant as to result in a blow-out. In systems like yours where units can be permanently removed from an enemy force, slightly larger points differences are more acceptable as one player can lose the game but still feel good about taking a chunk out of the enemy army.

* How do you calculate command points/detachments for a battle if key units have been slain? For example, if I'm fielding a Vanguard detachment as one of my Forces and all but 2 of my Elite units are destroyed, I no longer have the minimum requirements for a "Vanguard." If I didn't take any Troop units, I might not even have a legal Patrol. So how do I calculate how many Command Points I have the next time I attack with that Force?

* I suspect some armies will be hurt far worse by the rules for losing units than others. My drukhari expect to lose a ton of units most games. An Imperial Knight army or a gunline army, on the other hand, might have a good alpha strike and emerge from the game relatively unscathed. Armies like Death Guard with big, durable hordes (like pox walkers) are also less likely to have entire units destroyed than something like a fragile MSU army. I'm not sure how to elegantly address this particular issue. You could maybe introduce faction-specific rules that provided certain advantages (like X% of destroyed Drukhari transports come back to life, albeit at half health or something), but that has the potential to become unbalanced and hard to maintain very quickly.

I seem to remember the old Adeptus Mechanicus/Space Marine game having campaign rules.

Also, FFG did Forbidden Stars, not sure if there is anything salvageable for this, as FS concentrated more on multi-planetary conquest, rather that a single planet.

Forbidden Stars PDF Rules

Does Planetary Empires have rules for conflict resolution without going down to the 40K scale? I'd be curious for a system that lets you bypass the table game for a somewhat simplified outcome (moreso like a game of Axis & Allies, but with 40K pieces). A quick resolution system might be useful for some battles that might otherwise be a pain or unfun to set up on table. Maybe something based on unit power?