An attempt at adding Commanders/Characters to KT21

[firestorm40k]

Hello, I got hold of Ioldanach's Faction Template for Kill Team, and decided to have a go at custom data cards for two miniatures I painted. I made/painted these before the latest edition, and had planned to use rules from the Commanders supplement, and Obsidius Mallex from the Servants of the Abyss list, respectively. 

 

Then the new edition of the game completely removed Commanders/Characters altogether  Although I realise I won't be able to use these in any 'official' capacity, I thought I'd have a go at making some rules for them.

 

I welcome any feedback on these - where I've struggled most is the number of wounds they should have. For example, the Marine character was originally going to use the rules for a Lieutenant in Phobos Armour - in 40k these have 5 wounds, while a regular Astartes (or Primaris) have 2 wounds. Based on that you could say that the Lieutenant should be 2.5 times the durability of a standard Marine - but in Kill Team that would translate to 30 wounds(!). So I've toned them back, but wanted to keep them a little more durable than typical KT operatives. 

 

Anyway, here are the rules I've come up with:

 

Here's the PDF for easier reading: Campaign Characters.pdf

 

Obviously these are unofficial so I'd only use them in friendly games (they're intended for a narrative-led campaign I'm going to run next year). 

Any thoughts and constructive feedback welcome! 

[Lysimachus]

They look great to me!

 

The only thing I don't 100% like is only having 1 Character and 1 Fire Team, which seems very minimal for some teams?

 

My gut feeling might be, instead of taking away Operatives, to follow a similar idea to KT18 Elites/Commanders and add 1 extra Fire Team to all Factions that could either be a 2 or 3 Veterans (depending on unit type) or a single HQ Character?

 

 

[firestorm40k]

9 hours ago, Lysimachus said:

They look great to me!

 

The only thing I don't 100% like is only having 1 Character and 1 Fire Team, which seems very minimal for some teams?

 

My gut feeling might be, instead of taking away Operatives, to follow a similar idea to KT18 Elites/Commanders and add 1 extra Fire Team to all Factions that could either be a 2 or 3 Veterans (depending on unit type) or a single HQ Character?

 

 

Thank you  and thank you for the feedback  

 

My reasoning for limiting the operatives is to try to balance the 'power' of the characters, while not having potential further imbalance through an opponent taking an additional fire team. I guess there could be a caveat that additional fire teams can't take Gunners or heavy Gunners, but then the non-Compendium Kill Teams get all sorts of other 'specialists' too; although you could restrict them (e.g. you can't take another Trench Sweeper/Butcher etc. if you've already taken one), maxing out some Kill Teams so they can take every operative available to them might be game breaking. 

 

I guess doing something like that would need more play testing to identify how specific Kill Teams should be restricted if they add more operatives. 

 

Also, there's the practicality to consider that most Kill Team players might only have the core 1 or 2 fire teams required to play - they might not simply have the models to make another fire team. Especially true of Teams like Voidscarred, Novitiates, and Blooded, where you can only make the number of models that is required for the fire team(s). 

 

Otherwise, I'm glad you don't think these characters are too OP - part of me does like the sound of a scenario where one character is taking on an entire Kill Team - kind of a 'one man army' type of thing 

[Inquisitor Eisenhorn]

I’m really keen to use this template to write up some factions but I’m on a Mac—is there an app that will open this reliably? Apple  Pages formatting for it is really off, unfortunately.  

[Brother Navaer Solaq]

@firestorm40k

 

Q. Have you been playing with unoffical commanders since your last post?

[firestorm40k]

Not yet  I'm running a narrative campaign soon, I hope to give them a go then 

[firestorm40k]

So I've revisited these characters, and have tweaked these a little, as I'm in the midst of the narrative campaign and would like to use them in a couple of special scenarios  Biggest change is I've moved one of their abilities from an action to Tactical Ploys

 

Here's the new versions:

 

 

I'm considering giving them each another special 'one per game' ability as a tactical ploy, but at this stage I just want to make sure their main rules are ok. Feedback welcome 

Campaign Characters Final.pdf

[Brother Navaer Solaq]

@firestorm40k

 

 With the soon to be release of space marine heroes (primaris ed). Are you going to get one? It has a space marine captain.

[firestorm40k]

3 hours ago, Brother Navaer Solaq said:

@firestorm40k

 

 With the soon to be release of space marine heroes (primaris ed). Are you going to get one? It has a space marine captain.

Yes, I will get that release  I'm interested in seeing how they'll do the rules for the caption