Four years have passed since we first created the Eridani Sector setting for our games in the Warhammer 40K setting. It's serving us well, and in that time we've played multiple campaigns and events, but we also identified a problem: with a sandbox this big, you can end up getting pulled in lots of directions, and gaming weekends can become a bit unfocussed. Furthermore, if you have to come up with a reason why you and your opponent's armies are fighting in any given system every time you play, that narrative legwork can feel a bit laborious, particularly when you just want to play a knockabout game of 40K without thinking about it too hard, and still want that feeling of the battle contributing to a wider narrative.
Our answer to this is creating some active warzones in the Eridani Sector, where longer wars are being fought across a system or small group of systems. Players in our group can still fight battles anywhere in the sector, but if their armies fit the sides present in a warzone, they have a ready-made context for their games, and the outcome of the battle will contribute to the eventual outcome of that war.
We've just created the first warzone and have just played two gaming weekends to see how it's working. Now that we've proved the concept, we'll be adding some more warzones to ensure we've got something for everyone's various armies.
What's the first warzone?
The Word Bearers have invaded Lachesis, an Imperial system. They first raided it eighteen months ago, as recorded in the series of posts we produced for Goonhammer. Imperial victory delayed the arrival of their fleet significantly, and gave them time to prepare, but now the Word Bearers' armada is arriving, and with it, all-out war.
How does it work?
The simple answer is that you stick pins in a map when you win battles, and whoever controls the most territory wins the war. That's a glib summary, but not entirely inaccurate.
The full rules scale territorial gains according to game size, allow for raiding factions, and have special secondary objectives that revolve around maintaining or eroding civilian morale, and weakening or reconsecrating the veil that divides realspace and the warp. As campaign systems go, this one is very simple, but so far seems to be giving us just enough of a framework that we're getting some decent narrative out of it.
The campaign is broadly compatible with playing Crusade, although our gaming group has stopped using Crusade in this edition as it's just too many rules to stay on top of, and has one or two other design issues that means it's just not worth it for us. If you're still Crusading and loving in, more power to you! Anyway what this means is that you can play any 40K mission you like in this campaign, and rather than having Crusade agendas or secondary objectives, you instead can use the Lachesis War Agendas around civilian morale and manipulating the warp, so even your secondaries can contribute to the outcome of the campaign.
Google doc: the campaign rules
Where are we recording the narrative happenings?
As with all our adventures in the Eridani Sector, we're tracking the main events in our campaign wiki. The wiki's page on Lachesis has a chronicle of the games played so far, described in a brief in-fiction summary.
Battlefleet Gothic coming in strong
As usual I've had a grand old time facing the Word Bearers. They're such glorious arseholes. They're also proving to be commendably nails in tenth edition, and a number of my victories have been close run things. Jeff and I have also cracked out a spot of Battlefleet Gothic, and we both fell straight back in love with the game. A particular highlight was a battle in which the an Imperial flotilla (1,500 points) finally cornered the Mortis Lux's carrier group (1,000 points), but (this was, masochistically, my idea) Andy could secretly choose one Imperial cruiser and one escort squadron on which his Alpha Legion had agents poised to instigate mutinies at the start of any one Chaos turn, immediately reversing my numerical advantage. He timed it perfectly, and when the Lunar class cruiser Pride of Machadon showed its true colours, its starboard broadside crippled the cruiser Triumph at point-blank range, then with a "lucky" critical hit, its port broadside destroyed the bridge of the Intemperance, my flagship! I tried in vain to rescue the catastrophe in my next turn, but to no avail. Andy and his Alpha Legion had understood the brief perfectly, and killing Battlefleet Achernar's commodore was a serious narrative development that would force my Space Marines to take a more active role in coordinating the naval war in future games.
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| Battlefleet Achernar's flotilla in an earlier, more successful engagement with the Word Bearers |
What next?
Now that the War for Lachesis is firmly underway, we'll continue to play games there until a victor emerges. Meanwhile we'll start thinking about other warzones we might like to set up. The main two on the horizon will be an Ork invasion, probably in the Iudex system, and a colonising land grab in the largely uninhabited Targean Veil, setting up a multi-way conflict between the Tau, the Imperium, and the Eldar.
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