As regular readers of this blog will know my friemesis, Shep and I have been really changing our mindset from a tourney-oriented hyper competitive point of view to a more narrative driven. While this has been happening for the last couple of years, it takes time to change and we haven’t been rushing it. There are a few different reasons for this, and I will be getting into that in a future post, but for right now, let’s just accept that we are competitive players who are really enjoying narrative. With the release of the Indomitus set for 40k, there were a few interesting things, but one of the most was the new narrative play called Crusade. The Goonhammer blog has a pretty comprehensive write up and review of the rules for it for Warhammer 40k.
Trust me, this is an Age of Sigmar post, but before we get there I needed to talk a little bit of 9th Edition Warhammer 40,000 and give you a frame of reference. Now, Shep and I started up our new factions for the year, me with Ossiarch Bonereapers – The Harvesters of Sorrow – and he is growing his Stormcast Eternals collection – The Knights Invictus – with a slight focus on the Warrior and Vanguard chambers.
This is our third themed year of doing this sort of thing. First was my Nighthaunts vs. the proto version of his Knights Invictus, and that was a very fun year which started with a very basic small first game that saw the soul of one of his leaders captured within the magical lock of a Spirit Torment and then had to get it back. It culminated with the Knights charging through a Realmgate to recover him and establishing a foothold within Shyish.
Last year it was a 40k year and after an abortive start trying out Nurgle it eventually ended with the birth of my Harlequins, The Masque of the Sanguine Dawn. Overall, the year ended up being a bit less narrative and kind of fell apart at the end of the year due to a personal tragedy and some overall disappointing outcomes in trying to set up games beyond just the two of us. That being said, I am pretty happy with how they ended up looking.
This year, we decided to do AoS again and had really big plans for 2020 like the rest of the planet and then COVID happened. Despite that, Shep and I have been working away at our armies and the narrative and even managed to get in a couple of games. We started out using the Path to Glory rules as we developed the narrative. Quick aside, we like to not plan too far ahead, or be too restrictive and let the results of the game kind of influence the flow of where we go.
Unfortunately, the Path to Glory wasn’t really working for us. It didn’t even really give you much of an idea of how to play your army, which is something we were really hoping for in order to help us determine how to grow our forces into something that was interesting visually, story wise, and didn’t absolutely suck on the table. We’d already begun talking about maybe just scrapping the Path to Glory and kind of home-brewing something, which isn’t our go-to because we are still evolving as gamers from competitive tourney players and that just seemed a bridge too far.
And then Indomitus happened. There was that initial rush of new game excitement and we even talked about maybe switching the year to a 40k year (dibs on Necrons!). Games Workshop is really leaning into the multiple ways to play angle (narrative, matched, open), and there was a little bit about Crusade. It seemed much more inline with the kind of gamine we wanted to do and we ended up taking the dive into some home-brew work. Having the structure of Crusade really made it feel more proper to us, and seemed to provide the necessary framework we were looking for. Shep is “running” the narrative campaign this year (I did the last AoS one) and he dove into making the necessary tweaks with a bit of feedback and input from me.
I am pleased to say that it is working out really well for us so far. Giving all of your units names, and watching them “level up” is a nice little bit of helping us own the game and our choices in game. Occasionally the question will arise, “What would Kyrush the Unyielding do?” and that has led to some very memorable moments which will be forthcoming posts in this series.
If you are interested in taking a look at the ruleset we are using, go for it! Feel free to adapt it to your own liking or run it straight as is.
We also are just using a simple excel spreadsheet to keep track of our units and their glory, experience, and happenings. Here is a look at mine, again feel free to use as you see fit. (this is after the first game – so you can see some experience, etc).
Next time I will share with you the narrative bit that I started writing at the beginning of our campaign and then following that a narrative writeup of the games we have played so far. Thanks for making it this far and let me know what you think!
Random Thoughts 