Building a Star System

[ThePenitentOne]

     There are so many different ways to build a campaign that it can be hard to know where to start. Ultimately, you'll want to build something that suits the needs of your players- you want a big enough sandbox for them that there is always room to bring in whatever the story may need as it progresses, but you don't want to put the effort into building something so massive that your players will feel overwhelmed.

 

     If you think about scale, for most 40k battles on the table top, a 25 PL game might represent the seizure of a particular territory, where a 50 PL game might represent control over a city-sector or a collection of territories, while a 100 PL  game might be control of an entire settlement, and a 150 PL game might represent control of a large city. How many cities does it take to control a continent? How many continents are there on the planet?

 

     Will one planet be enough to serve the needs of your players? With enough continents, it could, right? I mean, you get to decide how many territories make up a city-sector, how many sectors there are in a settlement, and then how many settlements there are on each of those continents. 

 

     I would advise thinking bigger than a single planet for many reasons. First of all, a single planet creates a narrow scope for faction participation: it's easier to explain the presence of a diversity of factions when you have seven or eight planets for these forces to hide in. This also leves room for Battlefleet Gothic games to travel between planetary engagements. This sets up some of the Planetfall missions as well. 

 

     Fortunately, three recent codices- T'au, Genestealer Cults and Tyranids- have each provided individual rules for designing star systems and planets. The T'au rules are the most complete- allowing you to generate 4-8 Planets... Of which there are 9 different types. The Genstealer Cult rules provide only 6 types of planets, while the Tyranid rules provide only 3 planet types. 

 

     So if you're running a campaign, you can use any of these rules to help you define your Star System(s), whether you're including the faction that uses those rules in your campaign or not. In fact, if you generate a star system and its planets using the T'au rules, you can pick the closest planet type from both the GSC codex and the Tyranid Codex. and then add the planetary characteristics from those books to the planet in addition to its T'au characteristics.

 

     This achieves two effects: First, every planet in your system will have all the information that it needs to support the Crusade forces of players from any of these factions, and second, these rules give you excellent information which can be used as the basis of your "fluff" for the setting, with impacts on terrain, theatres of war, and even specific missions and territories. 

 

 

     This, for example, is what the first three planets might look like- so that if you roll a Shrine World, you know not only that the T'au need to rack up 5 Diplomacy points to achieve a victory here, but we also know that the GSC would have to infiltrate the Community, Politics and Religion institutions to conquer the same planet, and that Tyranids need to consume 3D3 Biomass and overcome Resistance 2 to complete an Invasion of this planet.

 

      Here are the other two sections of the chart:

 

 

 

     It's worth mentioning that the correspondences between planet types are just one possible interpretation. A Research World, for example, could just as easily be a Hive or Frontier World  as a Forge World, depending upon the needs of your campaign. But which of those three GSC Planet types you link to the Research World helps to further define it. This happens again when we choose a Tyranid planet to link... But of the three, the Tyranid planetary characteristics give us the least amount of story information.

 

     The final issue here goes back to size and scope. We said earlier that most 40k conflicts represent battles whose consequences are smaller than planetary control... Yet the characteristics described in these rules ARE planet wide. So if we change scale, we can apply these characteristics at a micro-level. For example, maybe 5 Diplomacy points would allow a T'au player to assume nominal control of a settlement. Controlling the majority of settlements on a continent would allow nominal control of the continent. Control of the majority of continents would allow for nominal control of the planet.

 

     Nominal Control, incidentally, would be a degree of control where a player could begin to reap the benefits of having the upper hand, even though there are still pockets of resistance which are constantly trying to undermine that advantage.

 

      And that's it for our first ever rules post here in the Chronicles of Saint Katherine's Aegis. I will be using these rules to generate our Star System over in the Saint Katherine's Aegis Campaign forum, but I'd love to hear any feedback about this post. Is it something you might use? Have you done similar things in your own campaigns, but perhaps achieved it in a different way? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 20 by ThePenitentOne
Resizing images, completing the Article