“We should do a campaign.”

There is, for a lot of narrative players, an understandable impulse to do a narrative campaign. For a lot of us, they feel like the brass ring of narrative gaming — linked stories, epic tales of our heroes, the kind of things we saw in White Dwarf or the original General’s Compendium.

But how do you actually run one?

In addition to and in support of all the valuable advice from Eric below, an easy way to organize your campaign and narrative play in 40K or a variety of other systems is through our Administratrum app.

Who Am I to Talk About This?

“Why should I listen to you?”

A valid question to ask. I’m not a Games Workshop employee. There’s definitely no certification for running wargaming campaigns.

So I’m just going to lay it out. Hi, I’m Eric. Besides writing the odd article for Goonhammer Historicals, I’m also the “Narrative Events Coordinator” for Wheat Belt Wargaming, a little club drawing players from two college towns in Moscow, Idaho. As part of that I run our campaigns, from small little two-person, five game Old World campaigns to what inspired writing this article: A Warhammer 40K Crusade campaign that started in 9th edition when our club opened back up to in-person gaming and lasted three-and-a-half years with somewhere around fifteen players at its peak.

We’ve been on hiatus for awhile, working on campaigns for other systems and having players explore an active and growing competitive scene locally, but we’re starting the campaign season up this fall, so it seems a good time to write all this down.

Choosing Your Scale and Scope

One of the first things to decide is how big you want to go – both logistically and narratively. My suggestion if this is your first campaign? Start small, in both respects. Cut your teeth on a campaign with a couple selected players, fighting over something small but significant. An orbital lance battery. A spaceport. Something that could be the turning point of a planetary-scale campaign – and that you can turn into the beginning of one.

But more generally, establishing the scope of your campaign is critically important for planning.

Logistical Questions to Ask

• How many players are you planning for? If you can, build a rough notion of who is in-in, and who may or may not commit, and plan for the ability to accommodate both numbers.
• Where are those players? Is this for a club – and does that club have a clubhouse? Is this being run at a store, or multiple stores? Or is this a group of garage hammer gamers? That changes the assumptions you can make about things like joint meetings, the availability of certain pieces of terrain, etc. Along those lines: Are you running the campaign, or are you hosting?
• How long do you want this to run for? Campaigns do best, in my experience, when there is a set end-date. Often, it’s good to synchronize this with the cadence of your local group – for example, we draw a lot of college kids to the club, so campaigns tend to be most active when the students are in town, with winter and summer breaks a good time to stop. Importantly, this doesn’t have to be the end of the campaign itself – think of it like a save point, a place to stop, take stock, and ask if people want to keep going, if the campaign needs to pivot, adjust for new people, etc.
• Do you have new players? Campaigns can be intimidating, and a lot of experienced players want to run headlong into big battles, Apocalypse-scale games, etc. This can be really daunting for new narrative players who just bought their first Combat Patrol box. If you have a lot of new players, expressly designing things to be welcoming to them can be critically important.
• Who are the helpers? Is there anyone in your group you can rely on as a co-conspirator? These people can be critical for pulling off unexpected campaign events, or just making sure new players have a good time.

Narrative Questions to Define

If you’re GMing a campaign, these are mostly questions that you can ask yourself, though input from players can be handy — though then that has to be filtered to avoid trying to be all things to all people, which you cannot be.

• Where do you want this to be set? The Warhammer universe is a big place – do you want to be set in private little corner of the setting, where you can make all the changes you want? Or do you want your players participating in the narrative focal points of the setting that GW is laying out – most recently, returning to Armageddon?
• Do you want this to pull in other game systems? Do you have an active Horus Heresy, or Kill Team, community that you can pull in? Or alternative modes for playing 40K, like trying to work in Boarding Actions?
• What scale of story do you want to tell? Some people like big, sweeping tales of whole sectors falling to the Necrons. Other folks like a smaller scale. Some of this will depend on the players involved. If you’ve got a Genestealer Cult player and a Leagues of Votann player, maybe it’s a vicious little war over a single mining town. On the other hand, a lot of Guard, Space Marine, and Knight players invite a larger scope. This also ties into logistics – do you have the terrain for multiple different environments?

There’s also a larger, looming question: What vibe do you want, and what sort of house rules do you need to support that? There’s a deep temptation to add lots of rules – the people who like narrative campaigns have a large overlap with the people who are tempted to add rules for weather and running out of ammunition.

Don’t.

My suggestion, especially if you’re already adding Crusade rules, is to subtract, not add. And to, Captain Barbossa-style, talk to your players in terms of guidelines, rather than rules. Because that allows for more nuance.

For example, if you’re aiming for a small scale conflict – a war for control of a wayward little planet – then having one of the High Lords of Terra show up, in the form of Morvenn Vahl or Guilliman is a touch immersion breaking, but other special characters might make more sense. Negotiating that is something where it’s often useful to talk to players – especially new players, or ones coming from the purely competitive side. What do you – and they – want to see out of your campaign? What sort of story are you telling?

Trust No One

Does that sound a little harsh, after just talking about talking to your players and trying to meet them halfway? Probably.

What this actually means is don’t have load-bearing players who the story hinges on. At least not in games larger than three or four people (obviously you have to do this for two). Life happens. People get their dream jobs, or buy houses, or break up and move away, or have kids or a thousand other things that can pull them away from a campaign, and this doesn’t just happen to the people who were only half-heartedly in it to begin with.

There’s a concept in business of the “Bus Factor” – how many people in an organization can be hit by a bus before some critical process or knowledge is lost. That same idea can apply to a campaign: How many players can drop out before things become untenable? That shouldn’t be a low number.

Choosing Sides

“What are the sides” is one of the hardest things for a narrative campaign to define, and the one where Games Workshop gives some of the poorest guidance in the form of examples (in my opinion).

If you’re very lucky, or running for a small enough group, you might be able to get away with just two defined sides – Eldar vs. Tyranids, Imperium vs. Chaos, etc. If you are, consider yourself blessed.

The situation I have most found myself facing when organizing campaigns is a complete grab bag of factions, with just enough players of any given faction that event “X vs. Everyone Else” would cause problems for matching. And that’s one of the things I prioritize – that players don’t have to work particularly hard to find a match.

The typical Games Workshop approach, which is often boiled down to “Imperium vs. Chaos vs. Everyone Else” is, I find, often demotivating for the “Everyone Else” players – what cause do the Necrons, Eldar and Tyranids have that unites them?

In the past, relatively successfully, I’ve organized players into ideologically motivated groups. My last campaign was the “Preservationists”, who wanted to keep an Imperial-controlled system the way it was, “Reformationist” who wanted to see it upturned, and the “Annihilationists” who…well, it’s in the name. That let the Imperial players split up in ways that enabled them to fight each other, Xenos factions to be able to advance agendas that weren’t just “kill everything” but also, if they wanted, to kill everything. This worked a little better for writing campaign updates and fluff than a full on faction free-for-all, while minimizing the number of people who couldn’t come up with a reason to fight (even within factions, people want to reform the sector their way).

The key is to make sure everyone has the means to articulate why they’re fighting and what they hope to get out of it. And, if you can find a couple people who might be willing to switch sides halfway through (Eldar players are especially good for this), keep that in your back pocket.

Go Your Own Way(?)

One of the best parts of 9th and 10th Edition 40K has been that the potential for narrative play has been at the forefront – somewhat less so in 10th, admittedly. Older players will remember when narrative campaign books usually just heralded the end of an edition, and anyone really interested in campaign play had to build their own.

Right now, we’ve got multiple viable campaign books just for 10th Edition, with different flavors, ranging from fighting Daemon invasions in the latest Armageddon book to securing strategic sites in the Nachtmund Gauntlet.

Should you use them? It depends.

If they fit what you’re looking for, I think the answer is absolutely. If you’ve got a Chaos player or two, and some Imperial players – and a small collection of Daemon models – the Armageddon campaign book looks like a blast.

But they don’t do a great job at being generalist books, in my experience. And they definitely violate the idea of not layering on more rules – they are nothing if not rules dense. My suggestion is to pillage them for good ideas, artifacts, etc., and if you have a small group who aligns well with the book’s theme, consider just using it. What I would absolutely do though is consider that book to be the beginning and end of a campaign – one of the conceits of Crusade forces, and the whole campaign badge system is you can carry them from campaign to campaign. Beyond the awkwardness of explaining how this army just happened to be at every pivotal battlefield in the galaxy one after another from a narrative perspective, I cannot see a way that that just doesn’t end with wildly overwrought units carrying around tons of special rules that may or may not still be relevant, probably aren’t balanced at all in combination, etc.

Let the victors enjoy their victory, and move on to another story.

Short Campaigns Can Be Best Campaigns

A campaign is better finished than dead. While there’s definitely a temptation for grand, long-running campaigns, there’s a lot to be said for something short and sweet. Tell a story, have it be done. Several campaign or crusade mission books from 9th edition had small, compressed campaigns in them, and they can easily be adapted for 10th.

It also lets you go all out. I recently GM’d a small, two-person, five mission Old World campaign, and it was a joy. I could go all out on custom missions, props and special terrain, etc. It’s possible to keep that up for five games. It’s a much taller order to do that on any sort of recurring basis over a year and a half.

Keeping Score

Most campaigns involve a winner and a loser, or phases with winners and losers, that culminate in some sort of dramatic conclusion. In an especially small campaign you might get away with sort of keeping a gestalt impression, but beyond that, score keeping is probably necessary.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t decisions to make.

There’s a persistent sort of notion about narrative events that they’re tournaments for people who aren’t good at 40K. I think that does them a tremendous disservice, but if we extend that assertion, there’s a risk with narrative campaigns that they turn into escalation leagues with more work. As one side of a campaign starts to gain ground, it becomes harder for everyone else to feel like they’re involved in something that’s still worth doing. Players start to drop in favor of other games, things where they still feel like they have a chance, etc.

But there are solutions to this.

The first one is social: Don’t tell them. Nothing says you have to keep a running score for your players. Over the years I ran a campaign, I didn’t. Biweekly game reports would talk about the Perservationists being hard pressed defending the airfield where the planet’s population was trying to evacuate from, while the Annihilationists and Reformationists struggled to capitalize on their momentum because they kept tearing into each others flanks.

Nowhere did I say it was 7 to 12 to 11. Honestly, this worked pretty well.

There’s also a mathematical solution. I’ve written about it more extensively here but in brief, rather than addition, you use multiplication. So instead of a victory adding five points to your score, a victory adds 1.2 times your enemy’s current score. This makes things marginally more complex, but trivial to handle with a spreadsheet. The benefit is that it favors the current underdog – it’s a rubber banding mechanic that keeps campaigns much closer than additive scoring, even when one side is empirically better.

Session Zero

If you’ve gotten to this point, you’ve done a lot of thinking, hopefully a fair amount of discussion with your players, and it’s time to get going. The last step, and one I highly recommend, is a “Session Zero”, ala TTRPGs to go over all of this with players. Alongside this, I’d also put together a document detailing the campaign, any special rules, the vibe you’re looking for (i.e. I actively encourage players to avoid things that feel like they’re going to get fixed in a balance dataslate soon), etc.

This is especially valuable for new players – the intricacies of putting together a Crusade force if you’re using those rules, the difference between Supply and the size of games you’re intending on playing, etc. can be very opaque, and a little hand holding will likely be necessary. And even for experienced players, it’s useful to be able to talk over army concepts, etc.

So now you’re off to the races. The next trick is to keep a campaign going – the topic of a future article.

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