How This Campaign Works
Draft — needs agreeing with the group before first battle. Everything marked TBC is a genuine open question, not a decision already made.
Cadence
Roughly one game a month, sometimes less. That shapes everything below.
Practical consequences:
- Nobody will remember what happened. The Battle Log isn’t optional flavour, it’s the campaign’s memory. A game that isn’t written up didn’t happen.
- No structure that needs all four players present. Any two people who can get a table should be able to play a campaign game.
- Arcs of three games, so a chapter completes in a season rather than a decade.
- Book dates a month ahead. With this cadence, “we’ll sort something out” means four months pass.
What a session looks like
Two 1v1 tables running in parallel, not one four-way game.
Everyone plays, we get two story beats per meet-up instead of one, and the campaign accumulates at roughly 24 games a year rather than 12. A four-way game sounds appealing and takes six hours.
Consequence: any two players might only meet three or four times a year, so nothing depends on a running feud between two specific people.
Scenarios
Games 1 and 2 are set (below). After that, players choose.
Who picks: whoever lost the last game picks the next flashpoint — which world, and roughly what’s being fought over. Costs nothing, gives the losing player agency, and self-balances without anyone arbitrating.
How to build one cheaply: published mission + three sentences of narrative + one special rule. Don’t write bespoke missions; they take hours and they’re nearly always unbalanced. One special rule per game maximum — two is where people start forgetting them and arguing.
Game 1 — Meeting engagement
Neither side chose this. Two forces run into each other in the ruins of somewhere on Cerelia or Ashkar, both looking for something neither will admit to.
Straight published mission. No twist. Winner learns the location of the first relic component; loser learns that somebody else is looking.
Its real job is to get two factions into the fiction and establish that games get written up.
Game 2 — First contact with a relic
Now there’s an object on the table. Whoever holds it at the end takes it, and it goes on the tracker in Battle Log.
Open floor from game 3.
What we’re actually fighting over
Relic components, not territory.
Six components, scattered across the Reach. Nobody starts with any. Everyone wants them for different reasons — see The Storm.
This matters: if worlds were the scoring currency, Crosius would start holding ten and everyone else zero, and every game would be three players taking things off one. Components start at zero for everybody and change hands freely, so a losing streak doesn’t compound.
Worlds are the settings where components are found. Not the prize.
When worlds start falling
| Games | What’s at stake |
|---|---|
| 1–2 | Information. Who learns what, who knows where a component is. Nothing changes hands. |
| 3–8 | Components. Worlds get damaged, garrisons lost, but nothing is conquered. |
| 8+ | Worlds start actually falling. |
A world falls when it has been fought over three times. Earned, legible, and it means losing Cerelia is the end of a story rather than an admin note.
Points and rules — TBC
| Proposal | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Points | 1,000 to start, rising to 2,000 | Small enough that everyone can field a force early |
| Ruleset | 11th edition | Narrative rules in 11th are still bedding in — worth checking what the Dominatus campaign deck actually does before committing to it |
| Progression | Light | Full Crusade tracking is a lot of admin for monthly play. Suggest: units earn a name and one trait, and that’s it |
| Codex churn | Whatever’s current on the app | 11th is new and codexes are reissuing. Nobody re-buys books mid-campaign |
Painting — TBC, and this is the one that kills campaigns
Suggested: models should be painted to a basic tabletop standard to earn campaign progression, but unpainted models can still play. Carrot, not stick.
Worth agreeing explicitly and up front, because the alternative is one person quietly resenting three others for eight months.
Counts-as
Assume yes, generously, for everyone. Crosius fields Sisters, Mechanicus and Solar Auxilia as Astra Militarum datasheets; expect the same latitude to be extended in return.
Balance
This is not a tournament. If it’s clear at the bottom of turn one that a game is a blowout, re-rack — change the terrain, the mission, or the list, and play the game that’s worth playing.
What happens on the table is canon
Win or lose. If Crosius loses Cerelia, Cerelia is lost, and it stays lost until somebody takes it back. The fiction follows the dice, not the other way round.
The exception: nobody’s character dies without their agreement. Everything else is fair game.
The four-way problem
Three Chaos-and-xenos forces against one Imperial one is a 3v1 unless we build against it. We’re not doing that.
The relics are the shared objective. Every faction wants them or wants them denied to someone else, and no two factions want the same outcome. That makes this a four-cornered scramble rather than an alliance against James.
Specifically worth leaning on:
- World Eaters and Emperor’s Children are not friends. Khorne and Slaanesh, and two Legions with a long and specific history. There is no reason for Tristan and Michael to be on the same side of any table.
- The Aeldari have their own reason to care what Slaanesh gets, which is the oldest reason in the setting.
- Everyone is short of everything. Isolation is a shared condition, not an Imperial problem.
Tristan’s spare Chaos Marines
Best use: a floating NPC force. Renegades, the human pirates preying on Crosius shipping, or whoever the mission needs. Run by whoever isn’t playing that week, or by both players in a co-op mission. It also means a three-player evening has a fourth force available.
Before first battle — checklist
- Everyone writes their faction page — leader, motive, why they’re in the Reach, what they want the relics for
- Agree points level and progression weight
- Agree the painting expectation, out loud
- Agree what happens to Tristan’s spare army
- Decide whether the Reach is where everyone was, or where everyone arrived
- Confirm two parallel 1v1 tables rather than one four-way
- Draw the first two pairings
- Book the first two dates
Writing up
After each game, whoever won writes three or four sentences. Not a battle report — a story beat. What was fought over, what was lost, what changed. It goes in Battle Log and the relevant world page gets updated.
Three sentences a month is sustainable. A thousand-word report is not, and the campaign that demands one dies in September.