Remembering the 13th Crusade: The End of Time

[Prot]

Someone else mentioned it in the FAQ subject, and I didn't want to de-rail that topic too much so I thought it was worthy of its own thread.

 

For me, remembering the 13th Crusade is easily my favorite time of 40K, ever.

 

Personally I was still heavily playing Iron Warriors, and some Death Guard. At the time... man this is going back, I ran an Iron Warriors Email list (which back in the day those lists were nearly as popular as forums!!!).

 

On that Iron Warrior E-list we used to coordinate our attacks for the week. It was phenomenal !!! Every night we conspired and planned our devious plans.

 

I do recall we cross coordinated with Death Guard and they had a smashing victory. At one point we decided to go after a Forgeworld. (What Iron Warrior would not covet such toys?!) And we were victorious. At the time GW was not sure how they would handle such shifts in the history as a result, but it was said that we (Chaos/IW) would experience a potential result of this victory. It never happened... but still it was darn fun.

 

Here's another blast from the past: At the time, probably two of the more active GW Chaos folk were Graham McNeil and Pete Haines? Anyone remember Pete Haines? Great guy. He came down to my city (in Canada) for a tournament once. For those who don't know Pete was part of the main development team and for a time he was involved in some really great events/ideas, including but not limited to the Index Astartes articles that -changed- on a monthly basis the way some original legions could be played. "Chapter Approved". We don't have that dynamism anymore, in the sense of White Dwarf, nor the Campaign itself.... which is a shame.

 

Pete Haines actually belonged to the email list and we would talk not only about the Crusade but he'd also share ideas on going forward with multiple Chaos Codexes. This was shortly before he and GW parted ways.

 

Anyway the 13th crusade was such an AMAZING time for me and us locally. it not only had us painting at an unprecedented rate, but we were playing games at a staggering pace, trying to push our agenda against the might of the Imperium.

 

This resulted in me personally pushing my Iron Warriors over 8K painted points at the time. Locally we ended up having some of the first 'mega battles' that were actually recorded in pictures at GW's website! We played on floor maps spanning thousands of points....

 

All of this came about (in my opinion) from the fevered pitch of 40K brought about by the Crusade.

 

I can only fathom the amount of games I recorded weekly during that campaign. It seemed like such a great idea on so many levels... the fluff, the community the gamesmanship... it ALL benefited from the event.

 

I could go on with some of the highlights but I've babbled enough. I'd like to see how many of you remember, or were involved, and what memories you have of that event. Again, it was easily the best time I ever had with this game.

 

 

[Rayray]

I don't quite recall the exact results, but I want to say our LGS was boasting an average of 3-4 games per day during the campaign. There were 3 of us playing chaos and trouncing a good bit, but the variety of armies that were in attendance was so much better than what we see nowadays.

[Forté]

It was a great idea but was ultimately for absolutely nothing.

 

If they did something like a part of the Eye receded revealing previously lost Worlds and the outcome would be written into the fluff maybe. But a follow-up should have been done really.

[incinerator950]

If you keep a memory loud and long enough, it might change something.

[Lucien Eilam]

Iron Warriors player in big fan of Pete Haines non-shock.

[Sception]

I played more games in that campaign than I've ever played in a similar chunk of time before or since.  Looking back, it almost feels like I played more games during that campaign than I've played in all the rest of my years of playing before or since.  The games just felt like they meant something.  It was like this fantastic roleplay experience.  You'd go online to read the progress of the campaign and look over the current control standings, then head to the forum to look over strategic assessments and get the orders from the triad.  Then you'd head to the store to play the actual games, and come home to log your victories, and the next day you'd get up, go online, and see how those victories, and those of all the other players, had impacted the progress of the campaign, occasionally witnessing major events that felt like they were shaped in some small part by your actions.

 

It didn't hurt that it was my favorite period of the game - the rules were relatively straight forward and clear, allowing games of a reasonably large size to be played in a reasonably short time with relatively little argument.  I used to get two to three games in in a single afternoon, which seems unthinkable now.

 

On top of that, it was during the reign of the 3.5 book in all its messy, broken, but undeniably fun glory, with so many options.  As a black legion player, I could alternate between several completely different types of shooty, assaulty, and balanced lists from game to game.  Specifically, I played infantry gunlines with defiler support, rhino rush, daemon/terminator bomb lists dropping in off of bike-mounted icons and teleport homers, and a much less successful, but still so fun to play, gribbly hoard LatD list.

 

Speaking of the Lost and the Damned, it was such a great list, and for the first time really cemented in my mind that that was what chaos in the 41st millenium should look like - armies of mutants and traitors, summoned daemons, and daemonic war engines, with the rare and powerful chaos legionnaires as the elites and commanders at the top, immortal warrior-kings lording over the misshapen hordes of chaos, driving them into the maelstrom of battle for the glory of the gods and the death of the hated Imperium.  While I have my severe doubts about 7e, if the rumored upcoing vraks renegades revision comes to pass, the possibility of running such lists again with a vraks army, CSM allies, and summoned daemons is very appealing to me.

 

 

And while the end of the 13th was something of a stale mate - as it had to be of course, it still felt like something had been accomplished, like our efforts had meant something.  Cadia, while not fallen, was cut off and isolated.  The chaos navy had been crippled, stalling the crusade and preventing Abaddon from pushing forward, but the damage had been done - chaos controlled the gate and had established a foothold in realspace surrounding it, and now could enter and leave the Eye as it chose.  Eldrad was dead.  The eldar had retaken some of their Crone Worlds.  Abaddon's crusade had provided distraction that allowed an ork invasion to overrun an imperial system and start building resources that could eventually turn into a major Waagh.  There were even events that went directly counter to GWs original inentions - Dark Eldar, for instance, had (stupidly, in direct contrast to their fluff) been assigned as chaos allies to help Ahriman penetrate the webway and gain entry to the Black Library - and the Dark Eldar players outright revolted, posting all their victories against chaos, causing Ahriman's effort to be a complete failure, and creating a dynamic narrative of Dark Eldar playing and then betraying him.

 

 

In short the desires and motivations and individual games of the community mattered, and shaped the status quo of the game going forward....

 

 

Until they didn't.  Until GW retconned it all away.  Until they decided how they wanted us to play the game mattered more than how the game was actually played, and what they wanted the setting to look like mattered more than how it had organically developed based on the participation of their fans.

 

I've never really gotten over that.

[Vesper]

Oh yeah I remember Pete Haines. Of course. And Andy Chambers... the guy behind the global campaign...

Those guys made White Dwarf (and the hobby as a whole) really exciting.

 

For one, I really loved the EoT campaign. My Black Legion rampaged on Vigilatum and a few worlds out of the cadian system. And all that stuff is still in my warband's background. Yet, I agree with AD-B, the end of the campaign was rubbish. Chaos should've crushed everything there (we won the campaign), as it is supposed to (in the fluff). Yet, they changed the victory to "traditional stalemate #752786768", see you next time.

Bad move.

Now, they changed the scale of the 13th Black Crusade, making it the ultimate Chaos event forever. Abaddon doesn't want Cadia anymore, he wants Terra. And the Black Legion was impacted by that change of scale. To make things simple, the Black Legion alone is now more numerous than the entire imperial order of battle for the campaign.

 

But yes, the hobby felt good back then. Really good actually.

Now, just get a copy of WD "vision" and cry manly tears over your pile of ten years old WD that were awesome.

The game was, to me, way better. It was fluid and fun. Not overcomplicated and full of useless and boring junk.

 

Truth is, we don't even get any event of that kind anymore. And GW feels pretty far away from the community.

[Clone]

Jealous of you guys who took part. Sounds absolutely epic.

[Vesper]

Don't envy us too much. Having tasted great stuff makes you bitter once said stuff in gone.

[Clone]

Don't envy us too much. Having tasted great stuff makes you bitter once said stuff in gone.

It crappy what GW did with the results but still, being able to take part of something as huge as that. Priceless.

[Rayray]

The only way to fully compare now to the zazz-filled awesomesauce of then is the feeling you get when you read a book by another author minutes after finishing a book by ADB. Not only was chaos crazy fun, but so was everyone else in the campaign. Catachans popping out of bushes were the bane of my word bearers then. Catachans that loved fire and close combat!

[incinerator950]

I remember being chastised three to four years ago for saying they retconned the Crusade.  Now I'm looking back and I have to laugh at them. 

A sad, I hate being right laugh.  With whatever regards, I didn't participate, but I read the results and have access to the codex, so I remember.  For what it's worth, I jam it into whatever discussion it comes up in so I don't let people forget more of GW's mistakes. 

[RolandTHTG]

I hadn't found the BnC yet, so I was following along on the Campaign web site. I think I was the 3rd or fourth week, about the time they blew up St Josmane's Hope, that I recognized the trends from the main organized chaos forces. I started checking each week, and piling on to wherever I noticed control dropping. A bit of an opportunist strategy and following for the spoils, but what chaos force isn't?

I definitely enjoyed following along the reports, and I still have some of my cultists from that great LatD sprue bag.

[Lucien Eilam]

And Andy Chambers... the guy behind the global campaign...

 

Not really. The global campaigns were mostly driven by Jervis Johnson and the old US Studio (Jeremy Vetock et al).

[Vesper]

Medusa V certainly was as Chambers wasn't there anymore.

Yet I remember, for example, Chambers deciding the destruction of St Josmane's Hope and stuff like that.

[Forté]

Chambers championed Chaos. Had the facial hair too lol. Can't forget Adrian Wood too. Even though he was basically an Ork in human skin. Those guys oozed hobby and played the game the right way. Battle reports were worth reading too.

[Brother Ambroz]

Played Thousand sons back then. I didn't play a whole helluva lot because I still didn't understand the rules, but I do remember how fun it was to see so many different forces fighting together. Your little victories and losses (I lost a fair amount back then) seemed to matter. Everything seemed much simpler and balanced (to me at the time). Wish they'd do something like this again but it'd be damn near impossible with the state of the game as is.

[daboarder]

I'll be honest, I was a loyalist at the time, all young and innocent, but god damned I wish I'd been a servant of the dark gods. Its was grand pure grand regardless of which side of the conflict you were on, it was just such a shame the GW undermined the whole thing at the end. 

 

I always thought GW flubbed medusa v, not because of lack of effort, but more because it felt phoned in, with silly reasons for "every race" to be involved.

 

The Global campaigns were always strongest when the were handled like imperial armour, telling hte story of specific events.

 

Ichar 4

Armageddon 3

13th Black crusade

 

These events are testamount to the success such campaigns can have.

 

I'd have like to have seen GW maintain the summer events on a two yearly rotation (obviously the other years would be fantasy).

 

They wouldnt even have to be enitrely galaxy shaking events to be successful.

 

They could do one campaign about a necron tomb world being awakened, Or about a series of eldar raids within a sector (DE included).

 

Protagonists would likely always be the imperium, but that could work.

[Scribe]

Nothing but Berzerkers and Rhinos! A tide of blood would follow, and a howling Daemon Weapon in my hands.

[Sception]

Just a bit frustrating when those berzerkers would randomly decide to disembark their rhino without cause and start hoofing it, though.  I remember the days when you could deploy a khorne army, hand your list and rules to the opponent, head out to get some lunch, and then ask them how the game went when you got back.  :p

[Scribe]

Hey and thats ok, because back then the folks I ran with didnt do anything crazy, i was totally ok to just drop a ton of berzerkers down and go nuts with a Daemon prince.

 

The chasing after things kind of sucked though for sure. :p

[DoomulusPrime]

I remember my buddy (who played Eldar) and myself (like Prot, I was also an Iron Warrior at the time), kept fighting for controll of Belial IV, since we had both just read Farseer, and liked the idea of both armies fighting over a powerful artifact on a Crone World.

 

I can't remember which side ended up carrying the sector, but I bet I still have the mini-White Dwarf where they published the campaign results somewhere in my basement...

[daboarder]

Eldar.

 

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/392010.page?userfilterid=47893

[DoomulusPrime]

Eldar.

 

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/392010.page?userfilterid=47893

...so yeah, that says that the Belial war zone was only available to Thousand Sons, my high-school self would be so disappointed lol.

 

Now, years later, I just need to figure out: if my Iron Warriors couldn't make it to Belial, what poor world did they accidentally invade?

[Slayer le Boucher]

Found a few weeks ago a site, with nearly all the old Chapter Approved and other 3rd/4th Ed materials.

 

And there is a retranscription of the week by week Newsletters of the EoT campaign( only the last two missing unfortunatly).

 

Its an interessting read, also love the last one where Chambers explained how weird it felt for him to order the destruction of a fictional world in a fictional game an evening(St Josman Hope).

 

http://games-workshop.com/w40k/w40k_eyeofterror.html

 

Sigh..., i really miss the days whre the GW team was made out of real Hobbyists, and they where in charge, not the Lobby or any other stupid Stock market related stuff.

 

i miss Ol' Andy, Pete, and Adrian.

 

Also on the Zerkers note; you could easely use your Rhinos to obscure stuff you din't want your Zerkers to charge and direct them the best you could.

 

their might be have restrictions back in the day, nut i choosed them, and i loved the way my army played.

 

Now restrictions are forced down your throat and you get no fun out of it...