Campaign ideas

[Frostglaive]

A little while ago I was working on a Kill Team campaign for my group of friends. The project got scrapped shortly after due to time constraints on my part and the upcoming holidays. However with various changes happening in life, the stars aligning, blah blah blah, I'm going to restart my work on this campaign. And I'd like some input from you guys on it.

 

So here's what I know at the moment:

 

- I have a general idea for the story. Still fleshing it out.

- The campaign will 90% focus on Kill Team, and maybe towards the end of it all lead into some regular games of 40k. That is still up for debate though.

- I do not own Commander at the moment, but I will be picking up a copy later today.

- I want this to be a long-term campaign. Not something that'll last ten games at most and call it a day. I want this to run for a while and actually go in-depth.

- During the previous project, I had 4 players ready to commit. Once I bring it up to the group again, I'm certain I'll have that number up to around 10 people instead.

--- Going off that for a moment, ideally I want this to be Imperium (and maybe some xenos) against the enemy faction (myself). However, I'm already expecting at least one or two people to want to play Chaos, which for obvious reasons is not a good match with Imperium and most xenos. So right now my plan is for Imperium to all at least start on the same team, most xenos (such as Aeldari and Tau) will be 'allies of convenience,' Tyranids and Genestealer Cult will not be allowed (for fluff purposes), and Chaos will immediately be put on the enemy faction (they'll work with the GM, aka me). I am going to allow players to betray each other if they so choose. It'll definitely derail the story later down the road, but it'll be something fun to add.

 

- Something I want to do that's inspired from Dark Heresy is a subtlety counter. For every mission completed, that counter may go up or down depending on the outcome. The higher it goes, the more aware the enemy faction becomes of their presence, and later missions could become more difficult because of it.

- Something else I'm planning on doing is essentially creating my own units (more or less). The enemy faction is primarily going to be my AdMech forces, as well as some Drukhari and any Chaos players that choose to join. But I want to have more variety than that. For instance, one thing I want to add in are things like the FW Tech-thralls, Skitarii leaders, space marines augmented by haemonculi and turned into a variation of a Wrack, etc.

 

- The biggest thing for this campaign is that I'm not playing fair. I'm playing fluff. Example: a 5-man DW kill team breaks into a forge to destroy it, and it's filled with close to 50 tech-thralls and a couple enginseers leading them. Rules are not set in stone, they are now more of a guideline. Missions will get adjusted. Players will more often than not be outnumbered and outgunned. I want this campaign to be brutal (welcome to Kill Team: Dark Souls edition). HOWEVER... I'm going to give them a lot of saving graces and perks. Examples:

--- Models taken out of action may not necessarily be dead. Roll a D10, on a 9 or 10 they are dead. Anything else they're simply out of the fight for a game or something along those lines

--- Take a secondary objective for one mission, and a later one the enemy forces are now cut in half and you have Initiative that entire battle.

--- A Guard KT just found a weapons cache. The 5 regular guardsmen on that team are now all armed with hot-shot lasguns for the rest of the campaign.

 

What do you guys think so far? Any ideas of your own you're willing to share?

[FlamingDeth]

That sounds like way too much work for me to run, but'll probably be fun if you have players who aren't thing skinned about losing occasionally! Good luck, and please provide battle reports.

[Kinstryfe]

The first thing I may caution against is that you're setting it up as you versus them. That can be really tricky to pull off, especially since you've said you also will be using the rules as guidelines. It'll be all too easy to come off as just being kind of unfair, even if that's not the intent. It also means that you're committing to, what, ten games per round? That'll be tough to pull off. I may recommend trying to keep the GM role more minimal. Do boss fights or play as random dropped in kill teams, but don't make the whole thing you versus everyone else. Actually, reading your post a few times, it seems like you're out to brutalize your players more than you are to run a campaign, and I'm not sure how long players will go along with your 5vs50 scenarios. You may want to plan things and test them out in advance if you can to keep them fun and winnable, as nobody likes being told that they're *going* to lose. A lot. Last campaign I run I had someone to play thru scenarios with before I rolled them out, so we could catch some bad ideas and rework them for the group.

 

If you really want to break the mold, I'd try to do it both ways. Give the players over the top characters as well. 5 Deathwatch versus 50 grunts, you just don't have enough bullets per turn to do anything. 5 Fluffy Deathwatch Marines ™ with Lieutenant stats and rapid fire:3 Bolters may suddenly be a fair fight. If not, make sure you have the scenario winnable. "You win if you get one of your Deathwatch into base contact with this computer terminal, whether or not you survive" is a perfectly acceptable victory condition, and can go a long way to making sure that brutality and optimism are both high.

 

With ten players, don't be afraid to have them fighting against each other to make your job easier. Put Xenos on their own team with their own goals. Or, if you want them all as allies of convenience, give everyone secret goals for their faction. Maybe the Imperium win if they drive back the chaos hordes, but the Aeldari win if chaos is defeated and the Imperium loses their infrastructure in the process. Maybe instead of just tracking subtlety, track in secret how each faction is going to make things even more sneaky.

 

Lastly and most importantly, try to stay planned out at least a couple weeks ahead so you are making things up as you go, and don't be afraid to change things if they aren't working. And make sure to keep us updated, I'm already spinning my wheels to try something like this with my group in the new year.

[Antarius]

Just FYI a 2 in 10 chance of dying is actually worse odds than the regular campaign rules.

 

I'm looking at doing a somewhat similar campaign (that is, players are all imperials and they more or less work together against "gm forces", lots of somewhat unbalanced scenarios etc.). Mine is more of a story/narrative campaign, though.

 

Something I think you should be very aware of, is that it'll take a lot of time if you're going to run all the "npc" teams yourself. In our campaign, the players will take turns to play as the npc factions (I'll give them instructions and trust them to do their best). This saves time for me, allows the campaign to chug along faster and, as an added bonus, allows players to feel more involved with each other and see different parts of the story unfold.

 

Another thing I think you should consider, is that people might like a challenge but they don't generally enjoy "auto-losing" - especially not several times. This doesn't mean that you can't make hugely unbalanced forces, but you have to adjust the winning conditions accordingly. If one side is five marines and the other is ten greater daemons, the marines should still have a shot at winning (even if winning just means making a phone call before their souls are wrenched from their bodies to suffer for all eternity).

What I'm trying to say is, it's okay for the story to automatically include huge setbacks for the imperium (maybe the imperial "win condition" for the campaign is actually exterminatus of what was once a productive forge world, for example) and players generally love that stuff. The old "Hive of the Dead" scenario from Necromunda was a huge fan favorite and that was basically just about running from a zombie horde.

 

You don't really have to give the entire story away in advance either, but be sure that you're upfront about it in the sense that the individual svenario shouldn't give the impression that they are actually losing, as players, if the entire scenario revolves around a mecessary, story-dictated loss for the imperium.

[Frostglaive]

Okay, maybe I should've elaborated more on the 5v50 nonsense. That was me not thinking when I wrote that in. My apologies.

 

Here was the full idea. The main NPC force will be AdMech, since that's the main army I own. However, I'm going to be doing some custom stuff. Namely: FW Tech-thralls. The idea is they are essentially going to be slower, less deadly guardsmen with a 5+ to hit and only 1 flesh wound. So they die fast and easy and don't necessarily hit that hard. Not only that, but something I want to implement for those tech-thralls is that they will actually need to see and face the enemy before they even activate. Example: one mission I have planned is that two kill teams crash onto the planet. It'll be using the Ambush mission (get to the other side of the table edge and you escape). There are going to be a ton of Tech-Thralls across the table. However, until a player's characters actually cross their line-of-sight (wherever that thrall is facing), they will not move, fire, or do anything.

 

I don't want the players losing every single mission. I want everything to look difficult, bring in a psychological element to the game and essentially freak everyone out. But I don't want everything to be impossible. There will be some missions that you could potentially win Turn 1 (grab a supply crate, blow up a generator, kill a specific model, etc.) without any real difficulty, so long as the players aren't complete idiots. And I'm going to add in secondary objectives that'll actually help them out in future missions (destroy a comms tower and enemy reinforcements won't show up in the next mission, or find a weapons cache and your weapons are improved the rest of the campaign). That being said, I'm still going to make some things difficult for them. But never impossible.

 

Depending on the amount of players that join, I will have some of them operating on my side (namely any Chaos players) as "NPCs" (I'll still give them their own method to win the campaign of course). I do like the idea of xenos players having their own secret objectives, which I will definitely implement (I'm really hoping I get an Eldar player in this campaign just for that). And players can betray each other at any given time, whether they're both Imperium or not. Yeah, it'll derail the overall story, but I'm adaptable. Plus I want them to do that anyway. More fun.

 

The initial reason I said I was the main NPC is I honestly just have a lot of free time on my hands. I could easily play a game almost every day of the week if I really wanted to, especially since I'm so close to one of my LGS. But I will get one or two other people to help me with that.

 

I'm not building the ENTIRE story right off the bat. I have a general plot and objective for the main Imperium forces, and a few ideas I'm still working on for other potential factions that hop in. I'm not building everything right now. At the moment, everything will be set into different arcs. Right now I'm just making the first one only. Kill Teams lands on the planet, do whatever recon, set up a base if wanted, and begin their mission. That's it for now. Once everything is done with the first arc, then I'll build on the story as needed to move into the next arc.

 

I feel like I'm rambling right now. So if I'm not making sense or anything please let me know. I'm kinda rushing this post since I'm still at work.

[Dr_Ruminahui]

If you can get your hands on them, I would recommend you take a look at the Armageddon: Shadow War rules.  They involve potentially unequal forces (both sides start with the same number of points, but as the game progresses and models die the power the various teams begin to diverge) - as do the rules for Necromunda (both old and new).

 

Killteam, on the other hand, is designed explicitly to avoid that, to the extent that models can be freely replaced (for the most part) when killed and as models get better, they cost more points (whether those points bumps accurately represent the actual increase of value/effectiveness of the model is another issue - but at least GW tried).

 

Another reason to look at Shadow Wars is they have rules for stealth - again, those should also be in the Necromunda rules.

 

One thing to keep in mind is what your players are like and what their preferences are.  Most people aren't "balls to the wall" players that enjoy an extreme challenge, of those that do, they might not like such all the time.  So, your desire to increase the difficulty may be at odds of your desire for a longer campaign - if players get frustrated, they are likely to stop playing.  Myself, I've had a hard time keeping 4 person Necromunda campaigns going as soon as an obvious leading gang emerged.