In an attempt to make Warhammer 40,000 more accessible, bite sized and cheaper to get into, Games Workshop in recent years has produced alternate modes of play. The latest is Crusade. With a few models per player forces can engage in short skirmishes that incorporates RPG elements and an ongoing narrative. Win or lose your units still gain XP, your army can recruit more forces, and gain traits/items which expand the armies capabilities and build options. Players are encourage to name their characters/squads and really lean into building their lore. The system is also robust enough to handle armies with mismatched experience. Is it perfect… no, but this is a new iteration of the game, ripe for expansion an improvements.
A particular challenge for our game group is the array of different factions owned by each player. We needed a way to have a continuous conflict with multiple forces in a single setting that made sense in the 40,000 universe. After a little research I discovered the world of Castiel, a magnet all the forces in the universe to get sucked into…
With a setting determined players can then develop their army’s backstories. As an added bonus to experience, the victor of battles shapes the narrative by writing battle epilogues.
So what does a game look like?
In this example, we rolled the Assassinate mission. After reading the mechanics for the scenario the players assembled their forces, which in this case worked out to roughly 10 models each and deployed them. As per the rules of this engagement a roll-off determined which team would be the attacker and who would be the defender. On this ocassion the heroes of the Imperium, Deathwatch Space Marines had 5 turns to assassinate the agents of chaos, Deathguard plague marine’s warlord.
With a small model count rounds go quickly. Armies advance, cast psychic powers, shoot, charge, engage in close combat and lose forces to attrition. Stratagems, unique to each players army throw monkey wrenches into opponents carefully made plans. Early in this battle the heroic space marines make a huge gamble and spend all their resources to call in an orbital bombardment, locking on to the plague marine’s warlord and surrounding elite troops. This does pay off, but the “Disgusting Resilience” ability of the Deathguard ensures that the bombardment would not be enough to win outright.
Battle rounds continue until the Deathwatch finally score enough hits to subdue the Plague Maine warlord. With the victor determined both players calculate XP, award bonus XP to their MVP’s and determine the fate of units lost in battle.
In Conclusion
All told this game took 2 hours from cracking open the mission book to packing up the models, which is extremely quick for a game of Warhammer 40,000. All that remains is for the victor to write their epilogue, furthering their personal story and the grater narrative.
So with the high stakes tournament atmosphere removed and replaced with RPG story elements I would say that personally this is a more fun and rewarding experience. In a hobby where we spend countless hours assembling and painting these armies, it is made all the richer with an ongoing story told in short bursts of excitement.
The Deathwatch space marine army created by me, KinpatsuSamurai.
The amazingly painted Deathguard plague marine is created by Mick Stevens (https://twitchybristles.ca/)
This battle occurred at Noble Miniatures and Collectable Card Games.