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So, I love big campaigns, however every one I've been a part of has been a kind of RISK / Dark Crusade points on a map kind of thing, and while that's fine and all, I'd love to run something with a little more tactical depth to it.

Something where the movement of large forces and where you engage your enemy shapes the battles you play one the tabletop. Where supply lines matter and forces can be cut off and surrounded, that kind of thing.

I've played around with a few ideas I've come up with, but none have worked quite the way I'd like. Particularly in that anything large scale would require so many games to play, but I also can't think of a way to reasonably approximate auto resolutions of battles that we don't want to actually put on the table so that we can move along the overall campaign.

In that regard, I wanted to know if anyone has ever played a campaign like this. Did you enjoy it and how was it run?

Make sure you create a section called: What to do when a player drops out or ghosts us.

Most of the time it's not intentional, but sometimes life gets in the way and a campaign just gets mixed into the background.

You need to have a clear "If A happens then B." plan set up in advance. One that everyone agrees to.

This last bit is important. I played in a six month campaign and the Crimson Fist* player just disappeared. We had a system set up to replace "Commanders," and a new player took over his territory. Then the campaign continued.



*Actual faction changed to protect the innocent.

This might be a long post.

As a Crusader, I use the Tau rules to generate star systems. It allows each system to have a randomized number of planets with random descriptions. Then I break each planet into a variable number of continental land masses, and then populate those with settlements and cities, which each include individual territories. We use NPC factions- jumped up Necromunda gangers with count as Guard rules basically. They can get GSC type vehicles- trucks bikes, etc.

Player factions start at 500 points and escalate; in each campaign round, everyone can play declare one 40k attack upon a territory in the same city or settlement and one Kill Team attack upon a territory in the same city or settlement. If people want more games than that in a round, fine- they just use NPC forces. The winner of a battle claims the territory, but they have to leave at least one unit from their roster on that territory to hold it. Reinforcements from within the same settlement or city can arrive beginning in turn 2; reinforcements can arrive from other cities or settlements on turn 3, but only if the player being reinforced controls a transportation hub territory in trhe settlement or city where the battle is fought. Reinforcements can arrive from other continents in turn 4, but only if the player controls an airfield territory.

Now the cool thing about this system is that even players with poor records will probably end up controlling cities or settlements- you don't need to control every territory to do this... You just need to control more territories than any other player in your settlement or city. And if you control more cities than any other player on your continent, you control that continent. And if you control more continents than any other player, you control the planet. And if you control more planets than any other player, you control the system.

Now this can lead to loose control- if players each deploy their starting forces on different planets, you might have nominal control of the planet based on your occupation of a single territory in a single settlement on a single continent. Other players can contest this nominal control without even fighting YOU- if they've got a space port territory, they can send an expeditionary force to another continent on your planet, steal a territory from an NPC army, and that might be enough to contest control at the planetary scale.

We set it up on a Google Drive with nested folders- so a folder for each system, which has subfolders for each of its planets, which have subfolders for each content, which have subfolders for every city/settlement, which have subfolders for every territory. After a fight, the winner drops the digital cards for each of the units that stay behind to control the territory. Since no one wants to look through a hundred folders nested five layers deep to figure out who is where, each player also maintains a list of their controlled territories.

We do use a GM, we are a small group of friends, and none of us have the time to play as often as we want to, so you do run into edition problems. The campaign is longer than any single edition.

Those are the basics, but there's a lot more detail if you scale down to skirmish level. We've only designed a single system, and while we know the lore associated with each planet in it, we've only mapped out continents for one of the seven planets so far. All of us are more concerned with the story of our army's growth than winning or losing, so we collaborate on story arcs with the help of our GM, who determines events that affect NPC populations.

Sometimes we go two or even three months between games, but the documentation is there should we need to pick it up after a long hiatus. It's my dream to do a youtube channel that tracks this campaign, but none of us have the time or resources to do that, and none of us are fabulous painters either.

That's enough for one post, but I'll probably follow the thread and return. This is the stuff I live for. Competitive pick-up games mean nothing to me, but we started designing this thing in 8th, rebooted it for 9th and then adapted the existing progress for 10th.

 Tawnis wrote:
So, I love big campaigns, however every one I've been a part of has been a kind of RISK / Dark Crusade points on a map kind of thing, and while that's fine and all, I'd love to run something with a little more tactical depth to it.

Something where the movement of large forces and where you engage your enemy shapes the battles you play one the tabletop. Where supply lines matter and forces can be cut off and surrounded, that kind of thing.

I've played around with a few ideas I've come up with, but none have worked quite the way I'd like. Particularly in that anything large scale would require so many games to play, but I also can't think of a way to reasonably approximate auto resolutions of battles that we don't want to actually put on the table so that we can move along the overall campaign.

In that regard, I wanted to know if anyone has ever played a campaign like this. Did you enjoy it and how was it run?

Honestly, I think step one of something like this is to make it its own game and *not* plan to play any actual games of 40k as part of it. If you want to simulate supply routes and asymmetrical battles and a number of conflicts that makes playing each battle impractical... You don't want a 40k campaign system. You want an entirely different game that uses 40k's aesthetic.

I was in a campaign that tried to do the whole hex map, supply wagon, etc. thing. (I think it was a modified version of an old world campaign system?) We had fun with it, but the campaign elements didn't work out very well. Some highlights:
* It was mostly about grabbing and holding territory. Which instantly made it kind of hard to "roleplay" as an eldar player. There was a win condition involving grabbing a relic from a bunch of sections of the map, but that essentially meant I had to fight my way through every other player's territory in order to win.

* We had "supply wagons" in each battle. If you failed to protect yours, you were at some sort of disadvantage in terms of points in the following game. This was a cute idea, but it basically just came down to whether or not your opponent felt like taking the time to line up a shot and wreck the supply cart. Also, again, not very xenos-friendly.

* The way giving up territory and checking for permanent unit death worked, you basically just ended up having the same fight over and over every week. Like, once one of the marine players started pushing for ork territory, the ork player was just constantly giving up a hex and then pushing back with the same army against the same opponent week after week until one of them finally gave up.

* Asymmetrical battles were a thing. However, 40k is really *bad* at asymmetrical battles. So rather than taking on a 1k vs 2k fight where you'd probably spend several irl hours losing badly, you were better off just surrendering pre-fight and giving up ground.

Since then, I've been a lot less interested in hex map style campaigns. If you're going to do something like that, you're better off just designign a game around it. Otherwise you just end up with a bad minigame that only lets you take a couple of actions per week before you have to stop and spend a week resolving fights between turns.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:
So, I love big campaigns, however every one I've been a part of has been a kind of RISK / Dark Crusade points on a map kind of thing, and while that's fine and all, I'd love to run something with a little more tactical depth to it.

Something where the movement of large forces and where you engage your enemy shapes the battles you play one the tabletop. Where supply lines matter and forces can be cut off and surrounded, that kind of thing.

I've played around with a few ideas I've come up with, but none have worked quite the way I'd like. Particularly in that anything large scale would require so many games to play, but I also can't think of a way to reasonably approximate auto resolutions of battles that we don't want to actually put on the table so that we can move along the overall campaign.

In that regard, I wanted to know if anyone has ever played a campaign like this. Did you enjoy it and how was it run?

Honestly, I think step one of something like this is to make it its own game and *not* plan to play any actual games of 40k as part of it. If you want to simulate supply routes and asymmetrical battles and a number of conflicts that makes playing each battle impractical... You don't want a 40k campaign system. You want an entirely different game that uses 40k's aesthetic.

I was in a campaign that tried to do the whole hex map, supply wagon, etc. thing. (I think it was a modified version of an old world campaign system?) We had fun with it, but the campaign elements didn't work out very well. Some highlights:
* It was mostly about grabbing and holding territory. Which instantly made it kind of hard to "roleplay" as an eldar player. There was a win condition involving grabbing a relic from a bunch of sections of the map, but that essentially meant I had to fight my way through every other player's territory in order to win.

* We had "supply wagons" in each battle. If you failed to protect yours, you were at some sort of disadvantage in terms of points in the following game. This was a cute idea, but it basically just came down to whether or not your opponent felt like taking the time to line up a shot and wreck the supply cart. Also, again, not very xenos-friendly.

* The way giving up territory and checking for permanent unit death worked, you basically just ended up having the same fight over and over every week. Like, once one of the marine players started pushing for ork territory, the ork player was just constantly giving up a hex and then pushing back with the same army against the same opponent week after week until one of them finally gave up.

* Asymmetrical battles were a thing. However, 40k is really *bad* at asymmetrical battles. So rather than taking on a 1k vs 2k fight where you'd probably spend several irl hours losing badly, you were better off just surrendering pre-fight and giving up ground.

Since then, I've been a lot less interested in hex map style campaigns. If you're going to do something like that, you're better off just designign a game around it. Otherwise you just end up with a bad minigame that only lets you take a couple of actions per week before you have to stop and spend a week resolving fights between turns.

I had thought of some of this already and pre-empted a few things, but this kind of account is also exactly what I'm looking for.

- I was thinking of possible asymmetric win cons, where it's not just conquer stuff (Though that is the Imperium's win con). Aeldari might be, stop the Necron player, but you start far away from them and need to either negotiate or fight your way to them. Orks would be about defeating enemy generals and large armies, ect.

- Yeah, supply is tricky, still trying to figure out a good way to work that.

- Asymmetric battles are a thing too, it seems from the experience I have had at it, that it's about making the asymmetric battle matter, even when you know you cant win, like covering the retreat of a larger force that you don't want to engage with, or luanching a feint attack / distraction raid to pull enemy forces away from a different location, ect.

Yeah, I have tried hex games and it's just not quite what I'm thinking of, but it's hard to figure out another system for it too, a way to easily represent everything while having more flexibility...

I think you need to answer some high concept questions to really get started.

Is this meant to be a campaign with a variety of factions involved? Or just two? If you're just doing an eldar vs necrons campaign, you can have mechancis that lean into the modus operandi of those specific factions. If you're trying to account for every faction under the sun, you probably need to avoid complicated bespoke rules for individual factions and go with something more abstract/simple.

What is it that you're looking for from this campaign vs a normal series of 40k games? If you're mainly interested in things like high-level logistics, macro level movement, etc., then I'd argue that games of actual 40k probably shouldn't be part of it. Imagine if after every turn of something like Twilight Imperium you had to stop to play a 2 hour game of 40k instead of quickly resolving the fight.

If instead, you just want a flavorful battle generator with some consequences that carry over between games, you can get more abstract with the map (if you use a map at all) and not worry making the logistics systems work. So for example, instead of having to figure out a supply route mechanic that is present in every game, you can just have a mission where the fluff is that one player is trying to disrupt another player's supply lines, and the outcome will result in a +/- 200 points of army size in the next battle or something in that vein.

Also, I feel like one of the best questions to ask yourself when designing a campaign is, "How many games/weeks do I want this to last?" If you expect the campaign to last, say, 2 months with one game a week, then your mechanics need to provide a satisfying experience over the course of 8 games.

Not had a lot of success in hex map campaigns.

Often the maps are way too big - so the whole thing starts feels pointless. Like having 100 Hexes but only 6-8 players. Then invariably 2-3 players are playing 3 times a week, while 2 players are lucky to play once per month.

Once people fall behind (or feel disadvantaged) they are often demotivated and will drop out (frankly this applies just as much to Necromunda or any other campaign based system - and is why knowing when to end them to start a new one is an art etc)

It requires people to trust a GM - but I think having a crafted story that produces interesting/relevant scenarios that in turn drive the story on is much better. It makes every game matter - and if someone is consistently "losing", then the GM can bail them out rather than asking them to just be miserable because the pre-determined rules of the campaign demand it.

I have been in two successful map based 40k campaigns in 30+ years of playing.

Back in 4th edition we had City Fight and the Vogan Campaign came out from GW. It was awesome. A turn typically lasted 2 weeks. There were automatic actions in case a player missed a few weeks. You did have assymetric battles but it wasnt a case of 1000 vs 2000. At most one player with everything in his favor would have a 300 point edge. It simplified the system where everyone went up the same amount. Even the bastion army was the same points, it just had the advantage of getting fortifications but lacked the advantage of having any named characters or any kind of advances if you played with those. Its been awhile since I played it. Each player started on the edge of the city map and we did the first three turns in one day before the first players encountered a hostile force to each other. The goal was the palace in the center of the map but you had to get so much resources before you could attempt the battle which was an Apoc style battle which the player could lose and get knocked back and lose territories(so they couldnt just attack again next turn). If a player didnt show up or give the GM his moves, he fortified one of his territories which you could do three times per territory. I think you could get an aegis defense line for 1 pip, a bastion for 2, and one of the big ones for three, or you could buff your bastion army by 100 points per pip. We actually managed to finish this campaign. The map isnt huge, there are a lot of unique territories that do things(starport gives deep strike, the defense batteries give preparatory bombardment), some provide units like a vindicare assassin.

The second campaign I played in was 9th edition. It was a planetary assault campaign with different planets with some special rules on each. It was a team based Crusade campaign where we had four teams starting in four corners. The goal was to hit ten points and each world was worth so many points. Team leaders would tell the GM where their team's two moves were going. At the beginning of each turn the GM updated the discord page and showed where all the moves were and then the team leaders assigned team members to go and fight individual battles. It was both well run and not well run. Every player on the team was supposed to play a battle for the turn. The team above us had a very intense WAAC player who played almost every battle and actually ran off one of his players who got tired of not having any say. I had my buddy on my team who while isnt a WAAC player(the nid play I talk about in some of my other threads) he is hyper competitive and knows how to use the rules act as my beat stick and play against the WAAC player almost every time and stomp him into the ground while the rest of us + the player that left that team,(we had an iffy fourth player anyway) took territory in the other direction. If you defended you couldnt attack. Multi-player battles were perfectly allowed since there were several areas where three teams could come together at the same time and no one saw the other teams moves before the GM posted them. It was a fun and WAAC player drama aside, was very easy to run as both GM and as a team leader.

Neither campaign was granular like the more intense detailed campaigns that I have attempted and seen attempted and failed. The city fight campaign, if a player didnt show up more than 3 weeks they were dropped and territories abandoned. If they didnt show up prior to that and a fight needed to happen then another player would do the fight with a bastion pip(unless the territory had more). This wasnt an issue in the other campaign since it was a team campaign and there was a rule that you only got the crusade points and exp from the first battle(something we think the WAAC player conveniently forgot).

 Wyldhunt wrote:

What is it that you're looking for from this campaign vs a normal series of 40k games? If you're mainly interested in things like high-level logistics, macro level movement, etc., then I'd argue that games of actual 40k probably shouldn't be part of it. Imagine if after every turn of something like Twilight Imperium you had to stop to play a 2 hour game of 40k instead of quickly resolving the fight.

Also, I feel like one of the best questions to ask yourself when designing a campaign is, "How many games/weeks do I want this to last?" If you expect the campaign to last, say, 2 months with one game a week, then your mechanics need to provide a satisfying experience over the course of 8 games.

You're talking to someone that would play out all of their Battlefleet Gothic Boarding actions in 40k... so yeah, on some level, I would freaking love to have a board of Twlight Imperium out on a table for a year and play out every space battle in a Battle Fleet Gothic Style subgame... well gak, now I want to make rules for that.

I hadn't really planned a cap on it in terms of a specific time. Kinds of a go until there is some kind of major lore objective / victory achieved or people get sick of it. Could even be a thing where a player completes their overall objective and exits the campaign with it still going on and new players join in later as new armies arrive with new goals. That's one of the reasons I like asymmetric win cons so much.

One thing you might want to do for a fun map based campaign is to put a macguffin (Holy Relic, Lost Archaeotech, etc.) in the center of the map.

The player must spend x amount of game turns to hold the map space as they retrieve the item.

If you want to extend the campaign further, you can add that once the item is retrieved, the faction must leave the map.

An awful lot of 40k factions are based around not having traditional logistics. Eldar, Marines. Then you have modified logistics like Orks and finally 'normal' logistics like Imperium and Tau. And all of it alters massively if one side controls the orbital space.

I find the best way is to have planets as all but the Eldar and Tyranids have planetary travel considerations. Each world can have key points to fight over, but again treat them a bit like battlemech style feudal rulers, so most of the population isn't involved. Otherwise you have whole of society considerations in terms of fighting back, and an awful lot of orbital bombardment.

So the more abstraction you can do, and instead use narratives to reinject crunch the better you are. Unless you just want a campaign system to play, with the idea that the 40k games are just instead of rolling dice to see who wins a battle.