Goonhammer Reviews Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition – Part 5: Crusade

You’ve been waiting for months, and it’s finally here: the tenth Edition of 40k. Promising a simplified (but not necessary simple) rules framework, more clarity than ever, and a complete overhaul of unit rules, this new edition is poised to be the best one yet, taking everything learned over the last three years of 9th edition and giving us the tightest rules yet.

In this multi-part series we’re going to go through the game rules, how 10th edition is played, and offer our thoughts on the good and bad of that plus some tactical insight every step of the way. There’s a ton to cover here so we’re breaking it up into more manageable chunks to make it easier to read and browse. For quick navigation, you can use the links below (links will be added as articles are published):

One of the big innovations of Warhammer 40k’s 9th edition was the addition of Crusade, a Narrative Play game mode which allowed players to slowly build out rosters, earn XP, and level up their units over time as they built out the narrative of their army’s rise to glory. As a game mode, Crusade offered more varied missions than the GT pack and gave players a way to string games together as part of a larger story unique to their army.

Fans of the game mode will be happy to know that Crusade is returning in 10th edition. In this review, we’ll talk about the basic mechanics of 10th edition Crusade, what’s changed, the Leviathan campaign Crusade rules, and what we like and don’t like about the new edition’s approach to Narrative Play. We’ll also talk about the future of the format and what we might expect to see from expansions to these rules.

Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of Warhammer 40,000: Leviathan for review purposes.

If you’re new to 40k or Crusade, start with The Basics. If you’re an old hand with dozens of rosters in Administratum, you can jump to the What’s Changed section, but we recommend checking out the basic stuff since some stuff has changed here and there.

Crusade: The Basics

Black Templars Marshal in Terminator Armor. Credit: SRM

Welcome to Crusade, the Narrative Play mode for Warhammer 40,000: 10th edition. In Crusade you build an Order of Battle, the list of units available to build armies with, and then field those units in games of Warhammer 40k. You can add or remove units from your Order of Battle as you like, and increase the size of your Order of Battle by using Requisition Points (RP), the mode’s primary currency.

As you play games, the units taking part in those battles gain experience points (XP), which causes them to increase in rank. As units increase in rank, they gain upgrades which range from new skills to special relics to wargear upgrades. If they die in battle, they can gain downsides called Battle Scars (these can be removed by spending RP).

And that’s basically it. One of the better parts of Crusade is that it’s a very open system – these rules are designed to help you string together your games and give your army progression from one game to the next, but you aren’t forced to play a particular set of missions or use specific units. In Crusade, the bulk of the narrative comes from the story of your army – who is the warlord leading it, what are their triumphs, and what are their failures? You can add external narratives on top of this and weave your army’s progression throughout a larger narrative, where the rise and fall of your warlord is linked to a campaign such as the Tyrannic Wars or one of your own making.

Supply Limit

When you build an Order of Battle, the Supply Limit is the maximum number of points worth of units you can add. When you first start a Crusade force, that limit is 1,000 points, but can be increased by spending RP.

Requisition Points (RP)

Requisition Points are the currency Crusade uses for building and adjusting a roster. When you start a Crusade force, you start with 5 RP. Every time you play a game, you gain 1 RP. You can’t ever have more than 10 RP. RP are spent on Requisitions, special abilities which affect your roster and units. There are six core Requisitions, though more can appear in future Crusade supplements.

  • Increase Supply Limit (1 RP) is the most basic Requisition. You can buy this at any time to increase your supply limit by 200 points.
  • Renowned Heroes is used when you add a Character unit to your Order of Battle or when they gain a rank. This basically lets you buy an Enhancement for that unit (you cannot buy them otherwise) and replaces the older 9th edition Requisition for buying Warlord Traits and Relics for your characters.
  • Legendary Veterans (3 RP) is a new addition which allows you to “jailbreak” a non-Character unit, letting them gain XP beyond the cap of 30 (and gain more Battle Honours in the process).
  • Rearm and Resupply (1 RP) Is used before a battle to change the wargear on models in a unit in your Order of Battle (when a unit is added to your order of battle you pick its wargear and those become fixed).
  • Repair and Recuperate returns as the Requisition for removing Battle Scars from your injured units.
  • Fresh Recruits also returns as a way to add more models to existing units on your Order of Battle.

XP and Ranks

Leagues of Votann Einhyr Champion and Khal. Credit: Jack Hunter

As your units fight in battles, they’ll earn XP and gain Ranks. As they go up in rank, they gain Battle Honours, special upgrades that make them more powerful and unique. There are several ways to earn XP for your units, though note that summoned and replacement units, swarms, fortifications, and Epic Heroes (Beanith: Named characters, basically) do not gain XP. The upside is that those units also ignore any Out of Action tests and thus never gain Battle Scars.

There are four main ways your units will gain XP after battles:

  • Battle Experience is nice and straight forward, if that unit was part of your Crusade army for that game, it gains 1 XP.
  • Dealers of Death grants 1 XP to your unit for every third enemy unit that it has destroyed. This is an accumulative tally that you will need to keep track of on that unit’s Crusade Card for each game.
  • Marked for Greatness is the gold star sticker that grants 3 XP to be handed out to any of your units that took part in battle.
  • Agendas and their many assorted Combat Tallies which we’ll cover more in depth later in the article, these typically award 2 XP but can go as high as 4 XP.

Starting out at zero XP, your units will be Battle-ready before quickly moving onto becoming Blooded at 6 XP. With some crafty use of Agendas, or constantly mashing the Marked for Greatness button, your unit will rank up to Battle-hardened at 16 XP.

It’s here at this Rank that all non-Character will cap out at unless you use the Legendary Veterans Requisition mentioned earlier. Doing so will allow your unit to reach the Heroic rank at 31 XP. The final rank your unit can reach is of course Legendary at an eye watering 51 XP (though, as any Crusade veteran from 9th will tell you, this can be deceptively easy for some units and factions to hit).

With each Rank achieved, you will be able to upgrade your units with various Battle Honours. Units also have the opportunity of gaining Battle Honours by winning certain missions or completing some Agendas. There is a limit to how many upgrades a unit can have. Characters and Legendary Veteran units can have up to six different Battle Honours while everyone else is capped out at three Battle Honours. Should a unit gain another Battle Honour that would take them over their limit, you can choose to discard an existing Battle Honour and take the new one instead.

There are typically three categories of Battle Honours which include:

  • Battle Traits are various tables to roll on (Beanith: You could also choose a result which ‘you think tells the best narrative’ which is better known as The Cowards Choice) can grant new skills or abilities.
  • Weapon Modifications upgrades a weapon carried by the Unit’s Champion or Character with two out of six possible upgrades. The Cowards Choice is also available here but be prepared to be mocked for your minmax munchin-ery.
  • Crusade Relics which are rare and powerful artifacts to pile onto your Characters to turn them into murderous missiles to yeet into the enemy.

Out of Action, Battle Scars and Devastating Blows

Apothecary Biologis. Credit: Craig “MasterSlowPoke” Sniffen

While your units can become incredibly powerful with the above upgrades, living in a universe of nonstop combat comes with its drawbacks. Just like 9th edition’s Crusade rules, if a unit is destroyed during a Crusade game, at the end of the game they must take an Out of Action Test. All this involves is rolling a D6 for each destroyed unit (Epic Heroes, Fortifications, and Swarms automatically pass these tests) and on one they fail the test and have to choose to get either a Devastating Blow or Battle Scar.

The Devastating Blow mechanic is quite a bit different than it was in 9th. Where before you would simply lose D6 experience, you instead must either take a Devastating Blow which means you remove a Battle Honor from that unit; or you can gain a Battle Scar. Battle Scars are much the same as they were before, giving you a debuff until you heal them with the Repair and Recuperate requisition. However, one new modification to these rules is that if you already have 3 Battle Scars and would receive another, you must instead lose a Battle Honour. If the unit has no Battle Honours remaining? It dies and is removed from your Order of Battle completely.

Norman: This may sound threatening but remember that if its a unit worth its salt with some valuable battle honors, you can instead just remove the honors. If you somehow get 3 scars and lose all your honors, I’d be shocked that you hadn’t already just gotten a new unit to replace that one.

Beanith: You can also choose The Cowards Choice and simply cycle out the unit by removing it from your Order of Battle and replacing the unit with its identical twin with a fake mustache. And I expect that will be the default option for any unlucky unit in its earlier stages of the campaign. Those units with existing upgrades and with a decent amount of XP under their belt will probably want to take the scar instead and remove it with a pricey Repair and Recuperate Requisition.

It seems Games Workshop decided 9th’s Battle Scars didn’t go far enough and have increased the punishment for getting them quite a bit. One of the standouts is  Battle-Weary giving you -1 to Battle Shock, Leadership, Desperate Escape, and Out of Action tests. In the last edition a scar would be at most two of these effects so seeing this is a good indicator of what we’re looking at now. We also have Mark of Shame, which can absolutely ruin your plans for a particular unit, making them unable to form attached units, be affected by aura abilities, or ever be marked for greatness. Lastly with a simple yet elegant hamstringing, we have Deep Scars which makes every hit auto wound against them. If you get this on a big knight or something just throw it in the trash.

What’s Changed

Credit: Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones

The format for Crusade this edition seems to be that every so often there will be a new conflict with a new Crusade ruleset to accompany it. In these rulesets you’ll find Crusade Relics, Battle Traits, Agendas, and Missions as well as some special rules to the warzone. 10th kicks off with the Tyrannic War giving us some very tyranid-y and space marine-y rules to go with it.

Norman: Gotta say not a huge fan of this. It was one thing in 9th where I could largely ignore the Warzone: Charadon rules, but now, there are no generic battle traits you can use in the core rules or Crusade relics. It’s pretty easy to ignore the names of certain relics, upgrades, mission rules, and how exactly my chaos knight became a Tyrannic War veteran while fighting some Necrons, but the removal of generic upgrades makes building my narrative feel just a bit less special and adds an extra step of interpretation which gets in the way of enjoying my army’s story.

Beanith: I’m not as fussed as Norman is with this section. With the exception of Bio-acid Burns, the names of each trait are generic enough you can largely handwave away any narrative concerns when playing in whatever the next Crusade Mission Pack or Warzone will be. My best guess is the next Crusade Mission Pack or Warzones will just expect you to use these Battle Traits/Relics/Weapon Mods and lock any specific Crusade Mission/Warzone shenanigans behind Campaign Requisitions like they have here with the Tyrannic War Veteran Requisition gating access to the Monsters and Those Who Hunt Them section.

Battle Traits

The battle traits are much of what you would expect if you’re a Crusade veteran from the last edition. The honors are split into tables depending on what type of unit is getting them. There are tables for Character, Vehicle (except Walkers which we’ll get to in a bit) Infantry, Mounted, and Striding Behemoths which will be relevant in the Monsters and Those Who Hunt Them section.

One thing that’s really nice about the USRs is that battle traits can leverage them to just tack on extra rules. Characters can get; the Scouts 9” ability, Sustained Hits on their melee weapons, Stealth, or even Feel No Pain 5++ (that’s right they kept Artisan Bionics but removed the part most people forgot about). Vehicles however buck this trend by having all non USR rules, like Blessed Hull which now gives them a 5++ and Archeotech Power Cell which gives them an extra 2” of movement (a toned down version of enhanced engines). Infantry get some basic upgrades like  Obdurate Obedience giving them +1 to their OC and Only the Swift Survive giving them +1 advance and charge. Mounted units have a bunch of speed based upgrades like High-Speed Gunnery giving all the weapons in the unit assault or  Predatory Urge allowing them to reroll their charges. Striding Behemoth units get either double the tallies for destroying units for their Tyrannic War Veteran Tally or a free pick from anywhere on the upgrade tree (we’ll get there I promise).

Weapon Modification

Malioch Soulbinder, Ascended Lord of the Howling Dark. Credit: Swiftblade

Short and sweet section here, there are no longer separate charts for Melee and Ranged weapons. Mostly because those charts in 9th were virtually identical anyway. This will be your go-to Battle Honour for your Monsters and Walkers that you don’t feel like spending the Requisition on to give them the Tyrannic War Veteran keyword to unlock the Striding Behemoth tree.

Each time you select a unit to gain this Battle Honour, you must select one model from that unit (who also must be the Unit’s Champion or Character if one is available) and then select one weapon equipped by that model. Rolling 2D6 (rerolling duplicate results) you will end up two out of six possible upgrades for that weapon.

Results include the very basic Finely Balanced improving the BS/WS characteristic by 1, Master-Worked adding 1 to the Damage characteristic, to the very tasty Precise that grants that weapon Precision. Being able to pick out the character hiding in a unit is pretty sweet, especially if you’ve managed to slap it onto something like an Imperial Knight Rapid-fire Battle Cannon.

Crusade Relics

Crusade relics were some of the strongest upgrades you could get back in 9th and while Battle Honors seem to have gotten a glow up, outside some standouts, these seem to have taken a hit. They follow the old system of Artificer (can be awarded at any level), Antiquity (can only be awarded at Heroic and above) and Legendary (I’ll let you guess when you get this one).

Antiquity is half returning favorites, with Master Crafted Armor (+1 to save) and Artificer Weapon (critical hits do mortals) coming back much the same as they were before. We also have the Crimson Medallion of Bastior which gives you an extra CP on a 4+ once per turn if you’re in range of an objective marker. This relic is likely to be incredibly useful in a world where CP is so limited. We also have the Biosplint Gland which gives something you charge -1 to hit. meh .

The Artificer section is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand you get stuff like the Sigil of Sol which gives you a free strategic ploy once per battle round. This means you can get a free overwatch once per battle round, making this incredibly strong. On the other hand there’s the Lantern of Devastation which lets you pick a non Chaos non Imperium unit and on a 4+ it can’t fall back. There’s a few relics like this that feel just too specific, like the Cranium Obscura which gives -1 to hit from psychic attacks. That said there’s a very interesting relic here, the Shadesplinter Cloak, which gives a character Lone Operative which I can see being a key piece to making some interesting murder characters.

Legendary relics are pretty similar to core 9th. We have the Null Field Disruptor, letting you ignore invulns, and the Vortex Grenade, a once per game ability that lets you deal a ton of mortals, returning. In addition though we have the Gheist Prism Field which lets you move through enemy models as if they weren’t there and deal some mortals when you pass through them (rip displacer belt) and the Vertabax of Vodun which lets you copy an aura the model has and give it to someone else.

Monsters and Those Who Hunt Them

This represents a new mechanic similar to stuff we’ve seen in 9th with things like Awakened Spirit for vehicles in Amidst the Ashes. To represent the huge notorious beasties in the Tyrannic War, you can upgrade a MONSTER or WALKER unit to be a Striding Behemoth. Alternatively, you can also upgrade an INFANTRY or MOUNTED unit to be Monster Hunters. This costs an RP, gives both of them the Tyrannic War Veteran keyword, and gives them access to an upgrade tree of battle honors. Each time they destroy an enemy unit they add one to their Tyrannic War Veteran Tally or add 3-6 if they kill a Striding Behemoth unit depending on if it’s titanic or not. If you hit 10 you get to select a battle honor on the tree connected to any node you’ve unlocked so far.

When you upgrade a unit to be Monster Hunters they automatically gain the first ability in the tree, Giantslayers, giving them rerolls of 1’s on hits and wounds against VEHICLEs and MONSTERs. From there you can go to the left for Painful Lessons, subtracting a point of AP from incoming MONSTER or VEHICLE attacks, or further down Hamstringing Attacks to subtract 2” from move and charge rolls of MONSTER or VEHICLE units you hit. You can also go left for Indomitable Defiance which gives you autopass battleshock while in engagement range of MONSTER or VEHICLE units and Nimble Defense giving you a 5+ Feel No Pain against attacks from, you guessed it, MONSTER or VEHICLE units. Both directions give you access to the skill Titans Bane however, giving the unit’s weapons Anti-Monster 4+ and Anti-Vehicle 4+. There are some really powerful abilities here and the tree structure is a really nifty way of delivering it. I think I’m going for Nimble Defense and Titan’s Bane every time though.

Now if you’re a knights player who’s sweating over all those rules that specifically kill you, don’t worry because the Striding Behemoths tree has you covered. Games Workshop clearly knows who the star of the show is here making the Striding Behemoths tree way more involved than the Monster Hunter tree. You start at Thunderous Blows giving enemies -2 to their Out of Action tests if they destroy a unit. I want to underline just how much this fucking rules, more things should manipulate Out of Action tests. From there you can go Up for Monstrous Presence giving something you’re in engagement range with -1 to their leadership tests and makes them unable to use the Insane Bravery stratagem. From there you can select Unstoppable Advance allowing your monsters to move through terrain and models as if they weren’t there, or Massive Stomp, which gives you the ability to dish out d3 to 3 mortal wounds depending on a dice roll (pick Unstoppable Advance every time). If you went left instead of up, you get Indomitable Stature giving -1 to wound on attacks that are higher strength than your toughness. This gives you access to Predatory Senses giving you rerolls of 1 with ranged attacks, or Sweeping Blow giving you mortals on 6s to wound. Last but far from least, on the right side we have Prey Taker giving you +1 to advance and charge rolls and giving you access to Shocking Celerity, giving you Fights First, or Gargantuan Rage, giving your melee weapons Sustained Hits 1.

While there’s a ton of very powerful rules here, it’s important to remember non characters can only get 3 unless the Legendary Veterans requisition is used on them. That said some of these are game changing especially on the Striding Behemoths side of things. I think Unstoppable Advance  is going to be a very popular pick for the monsters but all the other parts of the tree have merit in their own way. For the hunters however, their stuff is a bit more situational since it only really comes into play against their quarries. The trees themselves are a great system especially with the limit on battle honors being so low at least initially.

Crusade Blessings

Credit: Keewa

This is one area that’s vastly different from the previous iteration of crusade. In 9th, if you were playing against an opponent with more crusade points than you, you would gain cp equal to half the difference. This catch up mechanic’s effect would range from game breaking (transhuman physiology every phase) to close to worthless (you’re playing orks). Now your army can get specific effects based on how far behind you are. Five to nine crusade point difference gets you one effect, ten to nineteen gives you 2 and twenty or more gives you three.

Some of the effects give you additional ways to try and play the battle if you think winning isn’t an option like What Doesn’t Kill You… giving you xp for each surviving unit or Secret Orders giving you access to another agenda. Others are more explicit catch up mechanics like Prepared Positions giving you cover in your deployment zones for the first battle round and Outmanoevre which gives three units to get the Scout 9” ability.

It’s worth noting there’s two effects here that are faction specific. If you play Tyranids you can get Mass Devouring which gives you an extra RP if you finish the game with half your opponent’s army dead or below half strength or three RP if that applies to the whole army. Non-Tyranid armies can take Hellfire Shells which lets one unit reroll wounds against vehicles and monsters. It sucks that these are faction locked when their effects really don’t care about any army specific mechanics.

Overall though these mechanics are much better than the previous iteration of Crusade blessings. Allowing armies to change how they want to play the game and giving them a more fine tuned edge makes the more overwhelming battles feel much more interesting and fun. The faction specific stuff is bad though.

Agendas

Agendas work mostly the same way they did in 9th with a few changes. When playing a Crusade game, you and your opponent pick 2 agendas (always 2 no matter the game size) and those act as extra objectives to your missions that award you with XP. Cutting down on the number of agendas that can be taken in strike force games is a good move. It stops the meteoric rise of XP for players and gives you less to track that isn’t just playing the mission.

As for the Agendas themselves, they open with more faction specific mechanics once again giving two, one for Tyranids one for not Tyranids, Not Tyranids get Battlefield Survivors which has you select three units and if they don’t die they get two XP and if they’re above full strength they get an extra one. Tyranids get Swarm the Planet which tasks you with ending the battle with more units in each table quarter at the the end of the battle than your opponent. For each quarter that meets that criteria, you can select a unit and give them two XP. Both of these agendas are neat with Battlefield Survivors being very strong, that said it still sucks to have these faction locked especially when the tyranid one has very little to do with playing tyranids.

The rest of the agendas are rebalanced agendas that appeared in the core rules for 9th with some exclusions. Many old agendas that were niche have been rolled in with related agendas. For example Assassins (kill characters) and Kingslayer (slay the warlord) have been combined into Headhunters. Same goes with Priority Target and Titanslayer being smashed together to create Monstrous Targets. All the action based Agendas are still here, with the actions being replaced with “select a unit that is eligible to shoot and isn’t battle shocked. This unit cannot shoot or charge…” with Agendas that have you do things on objectives and in your opponent’s deployment zone. The one thing that is missing here from old Crusade are the psychic focused Warpcraft Agendas, all of which are gone except for Witch Hunter, now Malefic Hunter, rewarding you for killing psychers or SYNAPSE units (sure why not).

Tyrannic War Campaigns

The campaign structure here is identical to what we saw with the 9th edition campaign books, minus the cool set piece missions. The campaign is an optional framework for telling the story of the Tyrannic War by organizing players into teams and having them fight it out over the course of 3 phases. The book recommends a GM to manage all the logistics of the campaign and we at the Goonhammer offices fully agree. Some kind of mediator is necessary for these sorts of things to be successful at scale. It also recommends having folks split into 3 teams with the default being Defenders (imperial aligned), Invaders (Tyranids and Chaos) or The Raiders (anyone else not trying to do the two other things). Teams score Strategic Points by winning phases and win phases by winning games to score Campaign Points. The way the default ruleset is written, you can only ever win the campaign by winning phase 3, and if you lost the other two phases you will at least tie. That said you can alter these however you want and ignore them completely if you choose to.

The Missions

The book contains 15 missions to play and, unlike 9th, a lot can be played at different point sizes. The way this breaks down is you roll on a table depending on mission size (from incursion to onslaught, no combat patrol Crusade missions) in order to generate what Crusade mission you’re playing. You can also, obviously, just pick one. An interesting development here is all the incursion missions can be played as strike force missions, meaning there’s 12 options for each. The missions can be split into two categories, general missions and thematic missions

General Missions

  • Rotting Biomass
  • Secure Tunnels
  • Bio-Sample Acquisition
  • Kicking the Nest
  • Empty the Vaults
  • Scattered Supplies
  • The Gathering Shroud
  • Myths and Monsters (Onslaught only)

Thematic Missions

  • Screaming Into the Void
  • Against the Swarm
  • Spawning Ground
  • Insurgency
  • Routed Prey
  • Fire From the Skies (Onslaught only)
  • Planetary Evacuation (Onslaught only)

On the general play side you get much of what you’d expect, hold objectives with some cool narrative twists. These are the missions that folks should aim for if you’re just meeting at the table to roll some dice and tell an impromptu story. Some standouts include Scattered Supplies which has you pick up and carry objective markers back to your deployment zone, and The Gathering Shroud which has increasing effects as the Shadow of the Warp takes hold, starting with the inability to use the Insane Bravery stratagem and culminating with all stratagems costing an additional cp. It’s worth noting with all these missions that you score at the end of the round and not in your command phases, and that there is scoring on the first turn. This gives a massive advantage to going second and to shooting armies. Why they deviated from the matched play scoring structure is beyond us.

On the thematic side, we have missions that are better for telling specific stories, or to play out certain events. We recommend looking at how the missions are played and the armies that will be playing them to see if either would have any obvious advantages or disadvantages. Some notable missions here include the onslaught mission Fire in the Skies which has the attacker trying to triangulate the battlefield for orbital strike by controlling 3 objective markers all over the map and calling their shot, and Against the Storm which has the defender hold out against the attacker trying to defend objective markers that represent defensive hard points.

The quality of the missions here is pretty high, but nothing here is particularly exciting compared to things we’ve already seen in 9th edition expansion books. There is something to be said for the sheer quantity of missions available though since incursion and strike force have been rolled together. There’s lots to play around with here and with this deep of a tool box of missions will help tailor your warhammer campaign’s events.

Final Thoughts

Norman: I have a lot of Big Feelings about this iteration of Crusade. On one hand, I’m happy to see it return. A standardized rules format to facilitate thematic narrative games is cool and I know many communities (and websites called Goonhammer.com) who have used the system to create great narrative events and campaigns. Many of the changes they’ve made help the system. Crusade blessings getting an overhaul is probably the best change in the book, and there’s small improvements all over.

All that said though, this book doesn’t go nearly far enough with changes and there are a few missteps with the changes they did make. Bookkeeping, the number one complaint from most Crusade players, is mostly the same and requires the same amount of work. The other glaring issue is that this format still isn’t as scalable as they would like. An ideal narrative framework would work for weekend events, on and off games with a few friends, and large scale months long campaigns. This format does none of those, you can still have a unit hit legendary in 4ish games and for folks who really run up the numbers in long form campaigns, they’re gonna run out of stuff to do quickly especially without faction specific mechanics to spend their time on. The format of basing the Crusade on ongoing events in the galaxy is also a double edged sword. Sure it lets you feel like you’re having an impact on the story, but if your armies aren’t one of the ones on the art of the book, you’re gonna feel a bit vestigial. It’s easy to work around this, but there’s no reason for this stumbling block to be here.

Overall though, do I think this edition of Crusade is better than the last? Absolutely, the balance is more finely tuned and the mechanics are less punishing for when folks of different Crusade point levels match up. Is this edition of Crusade what I wanted? No, it falls short of the things I was hoping would be addressed and adds some new things I’m not a big fan of.

Beanith: The Great Crusade Reset approaches and I for one welcome our new 10th edition Overlord. The changes to Out of Action is by far my favorite thing as previously you would simply take the XP hit and your unit would live to see another day unfettered by anything as bothersome as scars… unless you were playing Necron or Custodes and actually wanted them to have battle scars.

I’ve never had an issue with bookkeeping, partially because I’ve played games like Necromunda where that was pretty much the game broken up by short periods of moving minis around, but mostly because we have tools for that now. We started off with the Automated 40K Crusade Roster made by Charlie B, through to Goonhammer’s very own Administratrum which is a fantastic addition to our hobby. Campaign length I’m fine with, I agree with most of the Goonhammer staff that the current system isn’t ideal for weekend events but even that is fine as it gives Rob ‘TheChirurgeon’ Jones and the Goonhammer Narrative team something to tinker with on The Vadinax Campaign.

I also particularly like the adjustments made to the Crusade Relics as in 9th it was generally very easy to create a cruise missile like character that you could just yeet forward ahead of your main force to carve a large chunk out of the enemy and laugh at any retaliation as they were typically running Artisan Bionics (5+ FNP), Conversion Field (4+ Invun save), Frenzon Injectors (reroll advance/charges), the old Archeotech Nano-med (you thought I was dead?) and the Blackstone Shard Amulet just to annoy any Psykers. But those days are gone as it looks like Games Workshop has locked away Relics with Invuns or Immunity for now. I hope this trend does continue with future Crusade Mission Packs, Warzone Expansions and future Codexs.

Most of the missions are pretty cool, as mentioned they are mostly themed around Ultramarines and Tyranids getting into a slap fight but that can be easily overlooked. I would have loved to see a chart or something that you could use to generate a random reward should you decide to play some Crusade games using the Leviathan Mission Deck but again that’s easily fixed yourself.

Crusade Blessings are a work of genius, nothing too powerful but every little bit will help you by either letting you catch up with some bonus XP or using some shenanigans with redeployments and bonus CP.

Finally and most importantly of all, THEY’RE RELEASING THE CRUSADE RULES AS SEPARATE BOOK… eventually? Who cares, there was a picture on Warhammer Community and everything. I’ll be so very happy to have one less thing to complain about when they release the next Crusade Mission Pack or Warzone expansion.

Super excited to get stuck into 10th Edition Crusade soon!