10th Edition 40k Crusade House Rules
By Ian
Models in cover photo by Chaos Zach
Crusade was introduced in 9th edition, over five years ago (at the time of writing), and though it is an exceptionally cool way to play 40k, there are a few prickly points. Today we are publishing two sets of house rules that may be helpful to players who want to play Crusade but have struggled to find traction with the system. The first house rules are for making custom characters for one-off games; the second is for simplifying the Crusade rules for a campaign and attempting to include more balanced.
Custom Characters
Customizing characters for narrative games is in no way a novel concept and rules, official and unofficial, have been around for most of the life of 40k. Crusade, naturally, has a multitude of ways to customize characters. There’s just one problem (okay, there’s more than one, but we’ll get to that): you’ve gotta play a lot of games to unlock all those sweet, sweet upgrades. My gaming time is extremely limited, so playing weekly Crusade games is not in the cards. But Crusade rules are still there, haunting me, Battle Honours and Crusade Relics dancing through my dreams like elves and sugar plums, taunting me…
The core of these rules is picking a number of Battle Traits for your character and playing points for them. That way, I can represent Praetor Gideon Red’s massive eviscerator Retribution with the “Encarmine Warblade” crusade Relic. You build your character by promoting them to various ranks and paying points as appropriate (in this case increasing the points cost as a percentage). This way, Infantry, Monster, and Titanic characters aren’t paying the same points for upgrades that are disproportionately more powerful.
We used these rules in an Apocalypse game and some of the characters were…a problem. To put it lightly. Crusade rules are pretty far from balanced, and when you can pick the upgrades, you can build out some truly despicable units. Even with the best of intentions (seriously, I just wanted to give Red a cool sword, I didn’t know the other upgrades would make him nigh unkillable), you could be looking at some seriously broken combinations. These rules do restrict custom characters from taking Enhancements, which can cut down on some broken combinations…but Crusade can already be broken by someone with the urge to (or someone by accident).
So with all that being said, I would only use these games with friends who are on the same wavelength and probably not for a big public game at your local store where randos can show up and ruin everyone’s day.
Points in Crusade
“Crusade Points” are the currency with which Battle Traits and Battle Scars are balanced: if plan…until you remember that every unit is already (ostensibly) balanced against each other with their usual points cost. Like, Crusade has a balancing system right there.
With that in mind, I’ve written a number of house rules to assign points to Battle Traits, again as a percentage of the unit’s cost. There were a few goals here. First was to simplify Crusade by eliminating a ton of bookkeeping: no tracking XP and only tracking Battle Honours for units that matter. Secondly was to add a much more direct cost to Battle Traits. This makes gaining Battle Traits a choice: if a unit gains a Battle Honour that is mediocre or doesn’t fit its role, you can simply discard it (as opposed to forgetting to use it in a game. Or is that just me?). If the rolled trait isn’t a banger but also not bad, it creates an interesting choice for the player: do they pay points for a situational/okay ability? Finally, if a player has rolled well for Honours and has a tooled up army, then they’ll have to pay a premium for it and have a smaller force compared to a player who has just joined the campaign. Thematically, this can be more interesting: the small group of elite vets vs. a horde of new recruits.
Can this be gamed? Sure: someone could identify the best or most efficient Battle Traits and just fish for them. But that was always a possibility under the base Crusade Rules: this way, they’d have to pay points for them.
Even more toppings
I haven’t included them in the rules linked below, but there’s a few more house rules you could throw in the mix with this system. You could limit the number of ranks a unit could get for certain stages in the campaign (i.e. no unit may be promoted past Blooded until campaign round 2). An additional balancing factor I’ve kicked around is adding a CP bonus to a player by comparing their and their opponent’s W/L rating for the campaign: for example if my W/L ratio is -2 and Jeff’s is +1, I’d start the game with 3 bonus CP. Finally, one rule we’ve used is rolling two dice and picking one when rolling for Battle Honour tables. This cuts down on the feels bad moment when your melee elites roll up +1 BS with their pistols and has worked well in our group’s campaigns (though may not be necessary under this system as accepting a Battle Honour is optional).
Other than the final “rolling two dice” rule I mentioned, these haven’t been playtested. Though I have played in a handful of Crusades, they are enough of a commitment that I haven’t explored the system to its fullest. Still, I really like these rules, they were well received on our group’s discord, and I wanted to share them.
Get Crusadin’
There are so many cool rules that are in Crusade. The various army mechanics and rewards are some of the most flavourful in 40k, but so often people either don’t have the time to play a full Crusade or are worried about balance issues. Hopefully these address those issues.
As with all the house rules this month, feel free to use some parts or all of them for your own games. You’re free to tweak them, change them, reskin them, colour in the margins, and/or use them for an entirely different type of game. If you have suggestions or even just want to share stories of your own crusades, drop us a line at contactus@wrongsideofthemaelstrom.com. And if you are using the rules, let your friends know about the blog!