While the Tournament Companion and matched play missions get all the hullabaloo and talk in competitive circles, Crusade players have received new updates each of the last two years to go along with those matched play updates. This year we’ve eaten particularly well, with the map-based Nachmund Gauntlet supplement and now the Armageddon supplement, which introduces a more tree-based campaign system to Crusade. But how do these rules stack up, and are they worth your time? In this article we’ll take a detailed look at the new rules and how to play with them.

Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of the rules for review purposes.

Armageddon: The Planet That Keeps on Giving

Much like Nachmund, the creation and upkeep of your Crusade Force remains largely unchanged from the Core Rule Book. The rules for gaining and spending RP are unchanged, and all the standard Requisitions are still with us. Similarly, Battle Traits and Battle Scars are earned and removed in the same way, and the generic Weapon Modification and Battle Scar tables here are exactly what you’re used to.

But Armageddon is anything but the usual, and the rules for your battles will really drive that home. Each mission will take place in one of several Hellscapes, which are sets of rules that will shake up your games and make each mission on offer a unique experience. If that’s not enough, you’ll also suffer through a number of Anomalies, which are a grab-bag of random effects that will occur a few times over the course of the game, with the precise number determined by exactly how much Chaos nonsense is going on at that particular time. And no self-respecting servant of Chaos would dare throw a party this big without sending out a few invitations, so you can expect to see Unbound Adversaries who will fight both sides in the battle following a fairly simple set of rules.

Hellscapes

Hellscapes is an interesting series of eight different battlefield mechanics that will change up how you play. Each Hellscape can come with a different combination of mission rules,  actions or a special Empyric Anomaly.

Hellscape Actions come with a bunch of conditions of course but they’re fairly straightforward. Units cannot start to perform an Action if one or more of the following apply:

• Aircraft units because they’re too busy zipping around.
• Battle-shocked units have more pressing concerns.
• Zero Objective Control characteristic? Suck it Scarabs.
• They have an enemy unit all up in their face.
• No running (Advanced).
• No Cowardice (Fell Back).
• And units not eligible to shoot this phase.

Those that manage to qualify can then start to perform the Action in question and until the end of that turn, they can’t shoot or declare charges unless they’re rocking the Titanic and Character keywords. And just to make sure you can’t game the system with a sneaky stratagem or ability, any movement other than Pile-in or Consolidation during your turn means the Action has failed. 

The Hellscapes also tend to hand out Warp Counters, which are just counters that stack up on units and then get cashed in for effects. Each Hellscape handles them completely differently, but whichever one you’re dealing with, you can be sure any unit carrying them is in for a wild ride.

Some Hellscapes are simple. For example, the Folded Space Hellscape gives you access to the Perilous Shortcut Action. This action can be used by one of your units within range of an objective in your deployment zone during the Shooting phase. At the end of your turn, you can then set them up anywhere in your opponent’s deployment zone so long as you’re more than 3” away from enemy models potentially snatching a poorly guarded objective. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the Banishing Rifts Hellscape is just wild. You’ll need to have two units holding different objectives to start the Banishing Ritual action. Doing so will let you draw a line between the two markers, then any unit the line passes over suffers D3 mortal wounds and is immediately placed into Strategic Reserves. No model may move over or through the line, unless they can fly, and no model can see over or through the line. The line remains in play until your opponent controls one or both of the objectives. (Beanith: They neglected to specify it had to be a straight line between the objectives… Do try not to be that guy please.)

Our pick of the bunch would be the Endless Nightmare Hellscape, which has a nice simple mission rule. No Respite means that, until the start of the fourth battle round, each time a unit with no Warp Counters is destroyed, the controlling player rolls a D6. If the result is greater than the current battle round, the unit is placed into Strategic Reserves at its Starting Strength. Sadly, your Characters are excluded from this fun little murder meat grinder.

Each Hellscape is tied to two of the missions on offer, and the mission rules will frequently interact with them in interesting ways. And while you could use Hellscapes with missions that aren’t in this book, you probably won’t want to: many of them just aren’t particularly fun when they’re not paired with the mission-specific rules or the various options in this book that let you manipulate Warp Counters.

That’s not to say they won’t be fun, though: of the eight options, very few of them even involve dealing mortal wounds, and the ones that do hand them out–like Banishing Rifts do them in interesting ways that allow for counterplay and often come with weird kicker effects. Just don’t plan on combining them with, say, Nachmund missions.

Anomalies

Anomalies are a series of randomly generated rules that typically affect units in the battle with the intensity often dependent on how many Warp Counters that unit has. When and how many of these Warp Events take place are either included in the rules for the missions included in this book or, if you want to bolt them onto another mission, you can randomly generate them by rolling a 2D3 to determine the Scale (how many) and Intensity (when they take place) of the Anomalies..

Minor Intensity are all nice and mild with just the one Anomaly happening, typically at the start of round two. Where things get really intense is when you have managed to roll for Planetwide (Scale) Catastrophic (Intensity) and end up with three Anomalies happening at the start of every turn.  Major Intensity dials it back a bit where the given number of Anomalies “only” go off at the start of each round.

As for what these Anomalies actually do? There are 16 possible Anomalies on offer that you will generate by rolling 3D6 on the chart of Happy Fun Times and then resolving that Anomaly’s effects as stated where possible. They can range from the very deadly Daemonic Assault which deals out D6 mortal wounds to every unit on the battlefield with one or more Warp counters; to Lost in Confusion, letting both sides choose a unit from the opponent’s side with Warp counters to be ineligible to Shoot; to the actually useful Penetrating Sight, which adds Ignores Cover to the ranged weapon of every unit with Warp counters. And for those rolling hot with three sixes, the Reality Blinks Anomaly heals or restores models to every unit with Warp counters.

But the most common results on 3d6–10 or 11–aren’t fixed results on the table. Instead, some Hellscapes and missions have unique Anomalies that interact with their particular rules. Roll a 10, and your Hellscape’s Empyric Anomaly goes off if it has one. On an 11, the mission’s Warp Surge Anomaly is triggered. These two results really help kick the chaos up a notch by pushing the unique rules for the mission you’re playing to their limits.

As with the Hellscapes, you probably won’t want to use these with missions that aren’t in this book, and you certainly won’t have any use for these without using Hellscapes. That said, if you’re looking for a more off-the-wall 40k experience than usual, these will certainly deliver.

Unbound Adversaries

Finally, there’s these jerks. Each of the missions in this book includes a set of rules that reflects how the unbound forces of Chaos will spill forth from the warp, running roughshod over your battleplans and the local scenery alike.

First, there’s the question of what models to even use. Obviously, if you have daemons available to you, they’re the easy choice, but you can use any models that fit the criteria for the datasheets provided in the book. Lesser Daemons are Infantry on 32mm bases, which will be easy for most players to source. Abominations might be a bit tougher, as they require Infantry or Beasts on 50mm bases, so things like Chaos Spawn or Obliterators. Daemonic Beasts are Mounted or Beast models on 75mm or 90mm oval bases, which will cover most bikers and mounted models in the game. Finally, if the rules call for a Greater Daemon you’re looking for a Monster or Walker on a 100mm, 120mm, or 130mm base. Any of the actual Greater Daemons will do, but you could use stuff like an Armiger or War Dog in a pinch.

Once you’ve got your rogue’s gallery assembled, the missions will tell you how they enter the battlefield. Depending on the mission and the situation, you’ll be told to deploy units of power level 1-3. To do so, roll a d6, then consult the table to see what you’re deploying, then follow the rules for the mission.

Next, there are rules for how they actually play. The Unbound Adversaries take their turn at the start of each battle round, right after all other start of round effects go off. Their turn is very simple: they move as close as they can to the closest enemy unit, then they’ll shoot at the closest eligible target, then they’ll charge the closest eligible target, and then they’ll fight if they can. Crucially, having Unbound Adversaries in your game doesn’t add another “turn” for the players: only Unbound Adversaries can fight during their own fight phase, and they don’t get to fight in anybody else’s.

The datasheets are simple, offering a single generic option for each category of unit. None of them have datasheet abilities to keep track of, so you won’t have to worry about forgetting some special ability they had. All in all, the units present a threat the players will have to deal with, but generally won’t wind up being an overwhelming one.

Of the three unique options here, this is the one that you’re most likely to want to use in missions that aren’t in this book. Thankfully, there are rules for “Random Adversaries,” which offer a way to have daemons show up and spoil the party anywhere they damn well please. They’re not as flavorful as the bespoke options written into some of the missions in this book, but if you find yourself wanting to throw some very angry NPCs into one of your Crusade missions, these are a fine way to do that.

Agendas

The Agendas here aren’t really anything we haven’t seen before. First off, Assassinate has you kill characters for 2XP, with a bonus 2XP if you kill your opponent’s Warlord, an Epic Hero, or an Unbound Adversaries Character. Plus, if you kill the Warlord you’ll take home a strategic point to push your faction ahead in the campaign to boot. This one’s pretty easy to rack up a bunch of XP on since there’s no cap to it and you only really need to get two characters to get a solid return.

Next is Lines of Defence, which is written out to be much more complicated than it really is. At the end of battle, you need to have a unit in your deployment zone, your opponent’s deployment zone, and, if you can manage to pull off the previous two, one wholly within 12” of the center of the battlefield. Each of the units you chose will gain 2XP, and if you get all three locations you also get a strategic point. With the right army and some careful planning this isn’t too hard to achieve, but you probably won’t score hard on this one if you aren’t winning.

Warp Rites is your classic “stand on circles and do actions” Agenda. It’s a one turn action that scores you 2XP every time you do it and gives the unit a Warp Counter, which allows for some nice interplay with the mission rules. If you do three markers you also get a strategic point. This is an easy one for most armies to do so long as there’s a normal number of objectives. Just keep in mind that, while Warp Counters are almost always funny, they often aren’t a good thing to be carrying around.

Cleanse and Purge appropriately asks you to kill Unbound Adversaries and units with Warp Counters. Every time a unit does so, it’ll gain 1XP to a max of 2XP. And if five or more units get XP from this agenda, you’ll get a strategic point. Five units can be a bit of a tall order in some circumstances depending on how your list is built out, so be careful picking this one.

Last up is Sacrificial Defiance which has your opponent select two of their favorite objective markers. If you hold at least one of them at the end of the battle, then every unit in range of each gets 2XP (to a max of 3 units per objective). If you control both you also get a strategic point. You probably won’t get the strategic point unless you won handily if your opponent has a home objective, so keep that in mind when you’re selecting Agendas.

Tactical Agendas

Tactical Agendas are how you introduce the tactical secondary system from matched play into Crusade. Instead of cards, there are a series of tables you randomly generate your Agenda from each round if you don’t have an active Tactical Agenda. Just like matched play, you can discard a Tactical Agenda at the end of your turn and once per game you can spend a CP to reroll your Agenda. We won’t go through all of them here since there are 18 of these guys, but stuff like Storm Hostile Objective (called Storm Site here) and Bring it Down (called Trophy Hunter) are all present here. Each of these scores either one or two XP and are relatively simple. This is a great addition to the Agenda system, and my only complaint here is you can only use this in place of one of your Agendas. (Condit: Though if you and your opponent agree, I guess there’s nothing stopping you?) A system for going full random would’ve been great. There’s also no way to gain a strategic point here, so it’ll help you gain some XP but not much more in the way of campaign or codex bonuses.

Crusade Blessings

The system for choosing Crusade Blessings is the same as it’s ever been in this edition, with the underdog picking up a handful of nifty tricks depending on how many more Crusade Points their opponent has than them. Many of these are similar to what we’ve seen in prior supplements–things like “start the battle with 2 free CP,” or “pick an extra agenda from this book.” Most of the options here won’t be surprising to you, and they provide a broad enough selection of bonuses that you’ll find something you like no matter what army you’re playing.

In addition to the ones you’re probably expecting, there are a few more unusual ones that interact with the Armageddon-specific rules to let you do some really weird stuff. Storm-Speaker lets your Warlord re-roll the dice to generate Anomalies once per battle, or twice if they’re a Psyker. Daemon Hunters lets your army re-roll hits against Unbound Adversaries, a solid boost if the mission rules have you concerned about getting overrun. And if you’re playing a Chaos army, you can choose the faction-specific Slaves to Darkness blessing, which lets you choose an Unbound Adversary unit once per battle and force it to treat your army as friendly for a turn.

All in all, the options here are useful, with several of them presenting some really interesting ways to provide a boost to players who might be lagging behind. The breadth of options on display here is a particular highlight: there’s something here for everyone, and whether you’re looking for a particular boost to shore up a known weakness of your force or you just want a cool boost for a game to soothe the sting of repeated defeats, you won’t leave empty-handed.

Battle Traits

Starting out with the foot/hoof/tentacle-sloggers we have a very nice selection of upgrades for the Infantry that are totally not meat shields for the characters running around in our Crusade forces. And the Characters, too, I guess.

• Fortune’s Favoured gives the unit a 6+ invulnerable save, improving it to a tasty 5+ if they happen to have a Warp Counter on them at the time.
• Warp-hardened Veterans get a bonus 2XP everytime they are Marked for Greatness. More importantly, you can add or remove Warp Counters from them once per battle.
• Adaptive Camouflage would be fairly meh if it was just adding the Stealth ability to the unit. But they’ve sweetened the pot by also letting you count the battle round number one higher for the purposes of Strategic Reserves.
• Stalwarts units get to stop being Battle-shocked once per battle. Again: “meh” if it was just that, but the unit can also still perform Actions even if they Fell-back or are in Engagement range of the enemy.
• Footsloggers adds 1” to the Move characteristic… They can’t all be awe-inspiring. Still very nice.
• Warp Hunters get to reroll 1s to wound when targeting the closest eligible target. If you’re playing with Unbound Adversaries and they’re the closest target then you get to re-roll the wound result no matter the number.

Monsters and Vehicles got bundled together again, so the results aren’t skewed towards either Shooting or Melee too much. This may annoy the Tyranid and Tau players somewhat, but there are still some lovely results.

• Warding Inscriptions is a bog-standard 6+ Feel No Pain against Psychic Attacks and mortal wounds, which can be improved to a 5+ with Warp Counters.
• Advanced Suspensors adds Assault to the model’s Ranged Weapons, which is almost always useful.
• Extra Armour increases the model’s Toughness by 1.
• Has your Knight/Tank/Angry Lizard ever looked at a ruined building and wished you could just Kool-Aid man itself through the walls and into the squishy models trying to hide from its wrath? Juggernaut lets you do just that, but at the cost of a 50/50 chance of being Battle-shocked. There’s also some mention of ignoring modifiers to the Move characteristic.
• Endless Rage is an incredibly powerful trait that lets you still be eligible to Shoot and Charge after falling back. It’s a good thing we all decided to roll on these tables right?
• Daemon Hunters falls a little bit flat by just letting the unit re-roll Hit rolls when targeting the Unbound Adversaries. On the bright side, they will also gain +1XP from Dealers in Death, which helps a little bit.

For those running plenty of Mounted units, be it the humble horsies, the cool bikes, or ridiculous go-karts there are 3 fantastic traits up for grabs.

• Tip of the Spear gives the unit Scouts 6”.
• Reactive Redeployment is straight up space-elf nonsense letting you redeploy this unit back into Strategic Reserves once deployment is sorted.
• Skilled Riders is Juggernaut-lite allowing you to also yeet yourself through walls with the 50/50 risk of Battle-shock and a 1-in-6 chance of taking D3 mortal wounds because you got hit by rubble.

Beanith: Beast units are still a thing? Sounds like Daemon or Drukhari nonsense to me. Anyway, they also get a table to roll on.

• War Beasts get to add 1 to Advance and Charge rolls.
• Leaping Frenzy is pretty cool, being a “Tank-shock lite” ability that dishes out a possible mortal wound for each model in the unit within engagement range after a successful charge. You’ll need to roll a 6 on every die but if you have a Warp Counter, that gets bumped up to a 5+.
• Fearsome Predators is a 6” Aura that worsens the Leadership and Objective Control of enemy units.

All of the Non-Pskyer Characters got the short end of the stick on Armageddon as they don’t get a table with cool shiny abilities. Hopefully you will have a codex filled with cool upgrades for them instead…(Condit: Or just use the Infantry table above). Instead Psykers are the real winners of Armageddon so long as you ignore the endless legion of daemons wanting to eat their souls.

• Ritual of Shrouding lets you spend 1RP during deployment to give this unit the Infiltrators ability. Who doesn’t love the idea of Scarab Terminators 9” away from your deployment zone?
• Warp Focus adds 1 to the Strength characteristic of Psychic weapons or 2 if you’re packing Warp Counters. It’s a good day to be a Grey Knight
• Scrier’s Gaze is a 12” bubble of ‘nuh uh’ preventing the enemy being set up from Reserves.
• Warp Alacrity not only lets you re-roll Advance and Charge rolls, you can also remove Warp Counters from the unit to make the Advance roll a 6. It will stop you from charging, though, so swings and roundabouts.
• Are the Thousand Sons and Grey Knight players looking suspiciously happy?
  They must have seen Force Shield, which reduces the Wound roll by 1 on attacks targeting this unit if the Strength is higher than the unit’s Toughness.
• Warp Terrors lets you pick an enemy unit within 18” and force them to take a Battle-shock test subtracting 1 from the result if they have any Warp counters. Best of all it’s a once per turn ability that can be used in any phase.

These tables are, for the most part, pretty solid, if somewhat generic. Which is really exactly what you want from a “core” set of Battle Traits in a Crusade book. 

Crusade Relics

There are a total of 16 relics to earn in an Armageddon campaign, with four on offer from each category. On the Artificer side the standouts are the Periapt of the Righteous and the Tartarine Cuirass. The Periapt gives the character two extra wounds and lets you remove a Warp Counter from its unit to heal D3 wounds. Having access to more Warp Counter manipulation is great, and the healing can be pretty clutch on some missions. Meanwhile, the Cuirass is bonkers for an Artificer Relic: it reduces all incoming damage by 1. While this isn’t cumulative with other similar effects, you can make some incredibly durable characters out of this. (Beanith: If you take this on a Death Guard Daemon Prince, you’re a jerk.)

On the Antiquity side of things, we have bangers like the Riftwalker’s Astrolabe and the Sanguiflamme of Armageddon. The Astrolabe gives the bearer and its unit Deep Strike. This is a clean and simple buff that can open up some killer combos depending on the army. Meanwhile the Sanguiflamme lets you generate an extra CP if you’re near an objective marker you control either by removing a Warp Counter or by passing a Leadership check. Easy CP generation, especially in armies that don’t normally get it, is a massive bonus and being able to manipulate Warp Counters is always a plus.

On the Legendary side of things, most of the relics are focused on working with the rules surrounding Armageddon campaigns. For example, Empyromancer’s Focus gives all Psychic weapons Sustained Hits 2 (brutal on a Grand Master in Nemesis Dreadknight) and also lets you increase or decrease the intensity of Warp Events for the battle by one. Having that level of control over the chaos that is these mission rules is a fantastic bonus. My personal favorite is the Beast-ward Barbute which gives Beasts and Monsters -1 to hit the bearer and -1 to wound on a failed Battle-shock test, but also lets you take control of an Unbound Adversaries unit for a round. Getting to slam a Greater Daemon into an unsuspecting enemy can be devastating under the right circumstances, even if the static effect is a bit situational.

Armageddon Campaign

It wouldn’t be a Crusade supplement without a Campaign system, and this book is no exception. In lieu of Nachmund’s twist on a map-style campaign that had you fighting over specific locations, Armageddon provides a unique version of a tree campaign. As ever, you’ll split up into three factions: Gatebreakers (the heroes who have shown up to stop the forces of Chaos dead in their tracks), Desecrators (the villains who are working with Angron to transform Armageddon into a Daemon world), and Marauders (the jerks who are just there to steal everything that’s not nailed down). The book recommends Imperials for Gatebreakers, Chaos for Desecrators, and the ever-popular “everybody else” for Marauders, but you can split your own play group up however you like.

Your campaign will consist of 4 phases, each of which will see your faction trying to rack up as many strategic points as they can. Each faction has a simple tree for their campaign that tells its members how they’ll generate strategic points that phase, what reward they’ll get if they succeed, and what consolation prize they’ll get if they fail. Success or failure will then determine which goal they’ll be working toward in the next phase. 

Keep in mind though: there can only be one winner each phase. The faction with the most strategic points succeeds, gaining a campaign point and their success bonus. The rest fail. And if there’s no single faction with the most strategic points? Everyone fails. If you want to avoid failure, you’ll need to rack up as many strategic points for your faction as possible, whether by achieving your campaign objective for the phase or by finishing strong on Armageddon Agendas. And even if you do fail, the “consolation prize” rules you get are still pretty damn good–some of them might even be better for you than the reward for success, depending on your army. In other words, while losing the campaign phase will definitely have an effect on your narrative going forward, it won’t hamstring your chances in future games.

The number of games you’ll have will depend on how quickly you want to play through the campaign. If you’re looking to get it over with, you can play as few as a single game per phase. If you’d like to drag it out, you can schedule as many as four. Most campaigns will probably split the difference though with 2 or 3 games per phase.

As an example, we’ll look at the first two rounds for the Gatebreakers alliance. The first round’s campaign objective, Stabilising the Front, couldn’t be simpler: gain 5 strategic points for winning a battle. The reward for success improves the Increase Supply Limit requisition to 250 points per use instead of 200 during the next phase, while if you fail, you’ll automatically ignore the first failed Battle-shock test in each game that phase. A successful phase will next see your faction attempting to Reclaim the Lost Hives, which grants you 5 strategic points if you have 2 or more non-Aircraft units wholly within your opponent’s deployment zone at the end of each game. Gatebreakers who failed the first phase will instead attempt to Strengthen the Imperator Line, and will gain 5 strategic points if there are no enemy units wholly within their own deployment zone at the end of each game.

You’ll reset strategic points (but not campaign points) after each phase, and the faction with the most strategic points at the end of phase 4 is the ultimate winner. This time, there is a tiebreaker: if two or more factions have the most strategic points, the faction with the most campaign points pulls ahead. If there’s still a tie after that, the verbatim result from the book is as follows: “the campaign results in a bloody draw, and the war for Armageddon rages on.” Whoops.

This campaign system is honestly pretty neat. The campaign objectives function like “super-agendas” that add some asymmetry to the proceedings without getting too complicated, and you won’t feel like you’re being punished by the campaign for failing to achieve your strategic goals. Plus, the need to generate strategic points gives you a solid reason to take the Armageddon agendas, meaning that you’ll have to choose between advancing your army’s narrative through the agendas in your Codex and doing your faction a solid by shooting for more strategic points.

That’s not to say it’s perfect: unless you’re going to stick to a single game per round, this system isn’t really suitable for a weekender event. And the agendas in this book often aren’t as interesting as the ones in the various codexes, so the added pressure to take them may not feel great for some players. But if you’re looking for a simple way to add some narrative structure to your club’s games over the course of a month or two, this is a solid start.

Mighty Champions

Making an unwelcome return from Nachmund is the Mighty Champions section. These are rules for adding and using Epic Heroes in your Crusade missions, in part to represent the historical nature of the campaign. Adding an Epic Hero ups your Crusade Points total by 1 for each one, and after you add one to your roster, the GM is supposed to assign one of seven abilities to them. And while you can have as many Epic Hero units with these traits as you want in your army, if you’ve got one of the weirdo units with more than one Epic Hero models in it (looking at you, Daemonifuge), only one of those models gets a trait.

We’re not really fans of Epic Heroes in Crusade – they tend to defeat the purpose of building your own characters using the upgrades and tools at your disposal, plus it’s just kind of weird if three Marneus Calgars are running around the planet. These rules seemed designed to let named characters get in on a little more of the fun in a campaign, and we suppose that’s fine for like, players who feel stuck taking a character like Angron or Leontus in their army to avoid getting tabled, but we’d just as soon leave them on the shelf, or if they’re used as counts-as, just let them go without upgrades.

The Missions

After all of this, there are 16 missions on offer, two for each Hellscape. And while the mission pages don’t reprint the Hellscape rule that applies, they are helpfully marked with a symbol that corresponds to the appropriate Hellscape, making flipping back and forth through your book as easy as it’s possibly going to be, I guess.

Logistical issues aside, the missions in this book are wild. There are Unbound Adversaries everywhere, many are asymmetric, and the very first mission involves the Attacker trying to push across a narrow bridge over a chasm that is impassable to any unit that can’t Fly. That one, Brazen Bridge, uses the Folded Space Hellscape we mentioned before: your units can perform an action in your deployment zone to instantly teleport over to your opponent’s deployment zone, meaning that effective screening will be critical if the Defender hopes to keep their opponent at bay. But the mission’s Warp Surge Anomaly can really throw a spanner in either player’s works: when it’s triggered, the Attacker’s units have to randomly determine whose deployment zone their units move to every time they perform the action. They could wind up going where they wanted, or they could have to move somewhere else in their own deployment zone.

We won’t go into the details of every mission here, but suffice it to say that each of them is truly one-of-a-kind. Not all of them are going to be for everyone, but if you’re looking for something that’s different from anything you’ve played before, find one that looks interesting and give it a try. The sort of controlled-chaos on offer here tends to be different from a lot of prior efforts by the studio: rather than just handing out mortal wounds and calling it a day, you might find yourself desperately trying to offload your unit’s Warp Counters onto nearby objectives to avoid the risk of them vanishing from the field in a whiff of smoke. Move on to the next mission, and you might instead be navigating pockets of gravitic distortion, changing the speed at which your units move around the field as they try to push the objectives into your territory.

Simply put: these missions are weird. That may not be what you’re looking for on a given day, and that’s fine. But when you want to try something different, check this out.

Final Thoughts

Condit: This one’s a bit of an odd one. The Campaign system is a solid offering if you’re looking for inspiration to get started with a simple tree-style campaign, but even if you use the Campaign from this book, the missions are so bizarre that you might want to look elsewhere for most of your games. But if “bizarre” is the order of the day, these missions certainly deliver.

All in all, this is a book I’ll be glad to have on my shelf. And while I don’t know how often I’ll actually pull it down and use it, I do know that I will use it from time to time. This book contains some of the most experimental stuff that GW has published for 40k in a while, and it’s hard to tell at this stage how much of it will land well and how much of it won’t. I think there are at least a handful of real gems in here, if you’re willing to give them an honest shot. But don’t expect this to be an “every day” set of missions like the GT packs, or even Nachmund.

Beanith: Yeah, it’s going on the shelf too for me. There’s some great interactions. The Tree-style is fantastic. Where it falls short for me is that it’s just waaaaay too many things to keep track of. It’s very reminis of the wildly complicated narrative systems that popped up in old White Dwarf Flashpoint articles. No Battle Traits for characters is a bit rough for those still running Index armies but Games Workshop seems to pumping those out fairly quickly so hopefully you’re not left waiting too long… unless you’re playing Squats. Suck it shorty.

TheChirurgeon: I like the idea of having a tree-based campaign system for 40k, but I feel like it needs to be more generic than what’s being presented here. That’s kind of always where they miss the mark for me with these updates – they try to be a combination of new historical campaign / reenactment and a campaign framework, and don’t really land with either. And it’s not hard to see why – doing historical campaigns means adhering to a very specific set of armies who were at the conflict, something we haven’t really seen them do since seventh edition. When they don’t, the whole thing feels too broad.

Likewise, while I like these rules for doing your own tree campaigns, there needed to be more here for players to do their own thing to really deliver on that promise. What’s here for Armageddon is fun and flavorful, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark for something I’ll want to actually run with my group – Nachmund feels like it has a lot more value in that regard. Though I agree that I’ll still want it on my shelf. 

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