Thoughts on the Campaign Reboot: A prologue

[ThePenitentOne]

It's been a while since I posted anything new to the St. Katherine's Aegis campaign. I had thought that this would be the year it got played; when I started posting about it in January, it was going to be fast and dirty. But honestly, I've spent all year growing the ideas and gathering the resources. It just keeps getting bigger and more detailed. I believe the technical term is scope creep.

 

The other mistake I made was that I started my posts as if I was ready to go, when really, I had miles to go. So the plan from here on in is t let the old St. Katherine's Aegis threads die and start them all fresh, but only once the gaming part is actually ready to start. So until then, I can brainstorm it up in little posts like this, that aren't part of the gigantic, cross platform, multimedia story.

 

What I realized was that I couldn't tell this story without actually designing the settlements, bad zones and the one Imperial scale city that make up the surface of the largest continental land mass of Orison's Wake. There are eight settlements, all connected to the central metropolis of Aegis City by a network of mag trains. Each settlement is a 5 x 5 matrix of territories. I started thinking about what sorts of territories would exist on a grimdark gothic farm. I started trying to put the relevant information into a spreadsheet, but it ended up being so massive that I had to scroll forever to get to the info I wanted.

 

I picked up Urban Conquest to help me try and organize my ideas a little.What I really needed was that 25 slot sleeve. I knew I was taking a chance that the rules themselves would do the trick, but I knew I'd be able to use SOME of their ideas, and I could add my own ideas and even create my own cards if there wasn't enough material in the box. As predicted, GW's rules don't go far enough; they use a level of abstraction that is likely easy and comforting to many players. Each territory has a resource value and a strategic value; territories are captured not as a direct result of battle at the territory in question- instead, they are captured during the phase between games, with the caveat that if the territory you conquer is controlled by a player, you have to have won a game against that player in the previous battle round.

 

My territories are far more detailed. Each gives the controlling faction access to special equipment, or a special rule, or even access to special units. Some contain clues, which unlock access to the bad zones. Some will have standing detachments of a particular faction. There are two types of NPCs- those that are tied to a specific territory and tend to stay put, and those who hop from territory to territory. Many territories have groups of civilians which can be recruited by either of the Cults that are active on Orison's Wake; there is a system in place that allows these citizens to age, procreate and die between games. This may sound like excessive micromangement, but these behavioural rules had to be built for the genestealer cult in order to recreate the genestealer life cycle, so it only made sense to apply it to their prey.

 

The farms are controlled by Thresher Clans, which are similar to Necromunda Gangs. Most of the actual farming is performed by servitors and machines, leaving the the Thresher Gangs free to explore territory and pursue side careers as mercenaries, thieves or adventurers- activities which naturally bring them into contact with arms dealers, purveyors of combat drugs, mutants and rogue psykers, any or all of whom may already be infected by either of the Cults.

 

Bad zones are  only 3 x 3, and the territories are different, with most being ruins. Several of these territories are connected to Commorragh via long forgotten webway portals; one is an abandonned mine, which leads to a dormant forge for Daemon engines; others are occupied by legendary beasts or contain lost relics. At the beginning of the game, the location of all of the bad zones is unknown; they can only be discovered as clues by claiming objectives in battle or meeting with an NPC.

 

Aegis city is large; it's a 5 x 5 matrix, but it has an additional strip of 5 territories on each of its sides, bringing the total territory count to 45. Additionally, while the territories in the settlements represent an amount of land that could be represented by a single 4 x 8 table, or a pair of 4 x 4's, Aegis city territories would represent an equivalent of three 4 x 8 tables.

 

Last but not least, I've re-imagined the Desdaemona System to be closer to the location of the Blackstone Fortress; obviously "closer" is a relative term- the Fortress is unknown and isolated, far from the boundaries of Imperial space. But by putting it closer, it gives me the capacity to incorporate Taddeus and Vorne. Also, the fractal nature of Commorragh allows seemless webway connection between the Blackstone Fortress into the Dark City and back out through the bad zones back on Orison's Wake.

 

Which means that my one campaign on Orison's Wake now overlaps with a parallel campaign set in Commoragh and the ongoing Saga and the Blackstone Fortress. That's the overview. In the next few posts, I'll start to narrow in and get more specific.