Fantasy Campaign - Turn 1

I just remembered I had said I would explain some more about the Fantasy map campaign I'm in. Whoops, got distracted writing other stuff!

A little bit of background info first. Myself and two mates meet up one evening every two weeks and play games. We started doing this almost a year ago to sort of try and see if we could maintain a regular gaming evening, since we all love games. We started with just playing a board game of one type or another, but pretty soon one of us suggested we try our hands at a GW campaign. Since all three of us have been loyal GW games players for over a decade (including the occasional hiatus), we soon caught the gaming bug again and before we knew it, we were knee deep in our first Necromunda campaign since the early 2000s. What a fun game that is..!

Anyway! We actually played two consecutive Necromunda campaigns which in total lasted until about May or June of this year. Assembling and painting our gangs and then going out and playing games of Necromunda with them was just great fun.

(as an aside, I can wholeheartedly recommend playing a campaign of Necromunda to those who feel they need a break from 40k. It is just great and by far my favourite GW subgame)

After the second campaign, now fully convinced we would be able to keep our biweekly meetings going, we decided to try our hand at something a bit more... Well, just something a bit more!


We had all been (and one of us still was currently) keen Fantasy players back in the day. I had taken a break from Fantasy while it was in it's 7th ed phase, focussing instead on 40k, while my other mate was just focussing on other stuff altogether. With the advent of 8th we were both curious to see how we would like the game currently. Add in the fact that our 3rd member wanted to start a new army, and we had the perfect excuse to start a campaign!

So much for a little background! :p

On to the actual campaign!

We decided on a classic map campaign, with rules suited to our own needs. We actually discussed different formats and eventually decided this one would be best for us. It's always worthwhile setting an evening or two aside to discuss what each player wants out of a Campaign. That way you'll most likely end up with something everyone can enjoy!

We drew a map, roughly triangular, consisting of 60 territories. I will describe the map in more detail when I get an updated version emailed to me by our mapkeeper (hopefully within the next two days). That way all you visually dominant people can see what I mean.

Suffice to say that we marked 5 different territories as Primary Objectives and another 5 as Secondary Objectives on the map. We then made 10 mission cards, each having 2 Primary and 2 Secondary Objectives on it. Each player then drew one of the cards as their mission. To win the campaign a player would need to claim the territories on his card, with bonus points for claiming Primary and Secondary Objectives not on their mission card, by the end of the campaign.

Next up each player had to go make his army. We had decided beforehand we would be working with different Army Banners on the map. Each player would have 6 of these Banners, and these would move across the map and claim territories.

To keep things somewhat simple for our first campaign in ages, we decided on a fixed points value for each Banner.

Each player had the following:
One 2500 pts army
Three 1000 pts armies
Two 500 pts armies, known as Scout Forces

We didn't implement any fancy extra army selection restrictions other than a) no special characters, b) limited amount of magic items, and c) each Army Banner as well as the entire force as a whole had to be a legal army. Obviously this last one is the most important. It meant that for instance our rare choices would be limited to three duplicates, divided over all our Army Banners, and that we could only take one BSB for the entire force. This mostly for simplicity's sake.

We made up a bunch of rules that I won't bore you with unless someone really wants to know.

At the start of every Campaign turn each player secretly wites down the moves for each of his Army Banners. If that leads to Army Banners belonging to different players, a battle will be fought that turn between those Banners. Clever maneuvering and anticipating your opponent's moves can lead you to having bigger or more Army Banners fighting in a territory than your opponent. This, obviously, in entirely intentional and encouraged! We did set a maximum of 2 Army Banners belonging to any one player in any given territory.

Players are only allowed to 'buy back' a very limited amount of points each campaign turn (500), so the campaign will really be a war of attrition (fingers crossed!).

We will play 8 campaign turns in total.

As mentioned before, the armies competing for the win are High Elves, Orcs & Goblins, and me playing Skaven.

So far we have only played one complete turn, which only resulted in a small skirmish between 500 pts each of High Elves and Greenskins, fighting for control of a settlement. Utilizing the benefit of a tower, the High Elf archer force managed to beat off the mounted Greenskins. Neither side suffered any mentionable losses, since each player was allowed to buy back 500 pts per turn, but first blood had been spilled!

With most Army Banners moving into a better position, Turn Two promises to be a far more bloody affair!