Tucked down a hallway on the North side of the Baird Center—Adepticon’s new Milwaukee home—was a conference room given over entirely to the welcoming community of the Basement of Death. They’re best known for the massive game of Space Hulk they run every year, though this year they added a Marvel Crisis Protocol narrative event we covered, Zombicide, and an RPG. There was also a secret event unlisted in the Adepticon event roster: a custom Trench Crusade campaign.
I got to know the BoD guys through their podcast Playin’ and Slayin’ which you can find right here on the Goonhammer Media Network, and have been squatting in their Discord channel for quite some time. Like many folks, Trench Crusade chatter recently took over and dominated the gaming conversation and plans were put into play to run a small custom Trench Crusade campaign at Adepticon.
While I jumped at the chance, I did so with reservations. There has been a lot of ink spilled and video recorded about how cool Trench Crusade is, how awesome it looks, how sick the the world seems but there has been far less discussion on how it plays. We’ve got an article here but there isn’t as much as I’d have thought. Granted the game is still technically in public Playtest but given the hype I would have expected a bit more. And so I went into the crusade with a few gameplay related concerns. Chief among them was the fear that games would be won simply by out-activating your opponent as is common in skirmish games with alternating activations, but I was also curious to see how the Blood Marker system would play out in practice and if my fears of too much rock-paper-scissors built into abilities would manifest. So how’d it feel?
In short, for the last 3 weeks I have been madly printing nearly 5 kilograms of Trench Crusade campaign and got a local Home Depot employee to check the game out after cutting me some 3’x3′ mdf squares.
My warband in the campaign would be a vanilla New Antioch squad; no sub-faction special abilities just some Trench Moles and a Sniper Priest. My main draw was the Fireteam special rule. If you’re running with New Antioch you can create two fireteams by designating a two pairs of units that have the option (but not requirement) to activate together. At the cost of an Activation (note my concern above) you can activate two models back to back with the special benefit of being able to trigger Bloodlust with only 3 Blood Markers instead of 6. You can also activate back and forth between the models so long as neither fails a RISKY ACTION.
Two Shocktroopers were an obvious pairing, with the hope to run both them into melee and use them as a blender against a critical enemy, but the real dream centered around a Sniper Priest and Trench Mole. Trench Moles can Infiltrate, allowing them to deploy deep in enemy territory and Sniper Priests can shoot clear across the map. The dream here was a successful shot and melee attack with the Trench Mole (two Blood Markers!) into the Sniper Priests long range shot (3rd Blood Marker!) triggering Bloodlust and hopefully removing a model. It never worked that way, but I never stopped trying and the double team action was worth it anyway.
Our campaign pack was custom written by a fellow Basement denizen and featured three unlinked missions. The first involved a long deployment and involved capturing supply caches for points and campaign currency. The next involved the capture and use of the Khinzir Allah, an artillery cannon so powerful it could shoot onto the other Trench Crusade table and even through space and time into the Space Hulk on the other side of the room when used! Finally, the third featured an instant-win condition should you manage to climb a church and ring the bell at the top for men and gods to hear.
At the end of a Campaign game you’re given various opportunities to collect loot, currency, and experience to modify your warband. Individual models can also pick up skills and abilities. It all works fine, there isn’t anything particularly novel if you’re a fan of narrative campaigns. Your menu of items and upgrades to buy with Glory can feel a little anemic (again, Playtest rules) but what you do have is fun as hell.
I spent the whole campaign throwing everything I could into my Sniper Priest. While I never pulled off the magical one-shot Fireteam activation of my dreams, by the end of the Campaign he was rolling 7 dice with no penalty at the full distance of the board and granting his bullets Blast and Shrapnel. In other words, he was a holy terror launching fucking grenades out of his 1914 Enfield while backing up an otherworldly terror with a Rail Gun.
What really shown through the campaign was not necessarily the campaign rules themselves but the way Trench Crusade’s core rules create a foundational narrative the campaign builds on. Greg recently wrote a great article on campaigns and how Warhammer 40k’s Crusade system falls down on storytelling and that doesn’t happen here, in part because Trench Crusade has narrative mechanics.
The best example is found in Injuries and Blood Markers. Models in Trench Crusade do not have hit points. Weapons do not have damage characteristics. Instead, life and death is decided by the injury roll. When an attack is successful the attacker rolls 2d6. On a 2+ (so always, barring modifiers) the Defender is going to get a Blood Marker. On a 9+ the Defender is dead. Instantly. War is hell, and anything can be taken out with a little luck.
Naturally there are opportunities to mess with this via abilities, armor, and items, but the core is the same. What ends up happening throughout the game is that all your little soldiers and demons will begin to acquire piles of Blood Markers. On their own they do nothing; there is no maximum number of Blood Markers nor is there a threshold where the model dies. What each Marker represents, however, is a little element of narrative story telling.
Blood Markers are a sort of currency. If I shoot a model with a Blood Marker I can choose to burn one or more to add that many dice to my 2d6 Injury roll and pick the best two. If they have 6 and I trigger Bloodbath I instead roll 3d6 and add them all together making it much easier to snag a 9+, especially against armor. This is the more normal and expected use of Blood Markers, but it isn’t the only way they’re used.
If my opponent’s model has Blood Markers and is attempting anything that involves rolling the dice I can also choose to spend them to make that roll less likely to succeed. Everything is fair game: attack rolls, dash rolls, and even special abilities rolls, can all be made harder by spending Blood Markers. In this way they serve as an abstraction of the horrors of war. They are physical wounds, yes, but they are also emotional wounds. They represent exhaustion and fatigue. They are a sprained ankle and they are ennui. They create story.
By putting the true consequences of combat in the hands of the players instead of the rules, Trench Crusade allows us players to tell a story whether we’re in a campaign or a tournament. Layered a top a relatively simple ruleset is this sort of push-your-luck minigame where I decide when to swing for the fences for a kill and when, instead, I aim to limit your flexibility. It has some quirks; it can feel weird to burn a bunch of Blood Markers and fail to get the kill essentially healing the opponent. But even that has story. In a world where demons walk the earth it isn’t hard to interpret coming out of a near-death experience renewed and refreshed as Divine Intervention.
So much story simply falls backwards out of this system. Shrapnel spreading Blood Markers around makes sense. It’s not just wounds but ringing ears and dazed stumbling. Killing a Demon with a Fire weapon that stacked extra Markers turns a ho hum roll into “You firebombed a church!” without any effort or contrivance. By the time you get to the rolling exercise that is the post-game sequence, you’ve immersed yourself in narrative that skills and scars feel like story not abilities.
Trench Crusade is great, my friend. It doesn’t just play good, it feels good. For months I heard its promises of worldbuilding and narratives and vibes and after experiencing it I can say it delivers with aplomb. There is true emergent narrative spilling out onto the table (along with guts, blood, and pestilence) and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for the ruleset. As for the Basement of Death, you should seek it out next year if you find yourself at Adepticon. There just might be some more, expanded, Trench Crusade gaming.
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