House Rules Month
By Ian
It’s House-Rule-vember! Why November? Because that’s when it fits into the schedule! Don’t worry about it, we’ll fix it in post.
Anyways, I’ve had a couple of different house rules kicking around in my head and wanted to share all of them. The first will be dropping next Saturday with another every Saturday this month, so tune in each week for some sweet, succulent house rules!
Why you should use house rules
GW creates great rules, but no ruleset will perfectly encapsulate the exact way you or I want to play the game. But you can change the rules. James Workshop won’t come to your house to beat you up. I can speak from experience: I’ve been writing and using house rules for years (even publishing them on this blog) and no sanctioners from Nottingham have shown up on my doorstep.
Of course, you can’t take house rules to public events like tournaments. You may be able to convince your friendly, local narrative events guru to use them, but you might not. But you probably can convince your buddy at your next garage game to try them, and I have this sneaking suspicion that this is how most players are playing anyways.
Playtesting
Playtesting is really important for these sorts of things: I’ve seen firsthand what happens when you don’t playtest missions.
But the reality is playtesting is really time consuming and my free time is extremely limited by work and family commitments, and the rules here are not playtested to a high level. In each post I’ll note how and to what extent (if any) they were tested so you can use your best judgement on whether to use them.
I did think about delaying publication, but at the time of writing we are almost two and a half years into 10th edition, and, assuming GW sticks to a three year cycle, then these rules could be obsolete in less than a year. Therefore, I thought it best to publish them now and tweak when 11th comes along and/or I receive feedback (which you can provide at contactus@wrongsideofthemaelstrom.com).
What’s hot this fall?
Okay, the rules:
First off are house rules for Crusade. These come in two varieties: creating characters for one off games and simplifying advancement in Crusade. Both systems balance typical Crusade advancement using points.
Second are rules for Apocalypse games: i.e. 3k games or larger. Apocalypse was published as a stand-alone rule system in 8th edition and, though I’ve heard great things about it, I’ve written these rules to make an easier transition from regular 40k to Apocalypse.
Third is a Force Organization chart for 10th edition, following a similar format to the old chart of yore. If you’ve got a hankering for an old school army, we’ll have you covered.
Finally are rules for a map campaign. These are generic enough to use with almost any map, and have suggestions for how to tweak them to fit your campaign, plus some optional rules.
To the garage!
The last house rules we published is one of the more popular posts on this blog and we’re excited to share these with you, our reader. Any feedback on these rules will be extremely helpful and they can be tweaked in the future, so feel free to send us feedback at contactus@wrongsideofthemaelstrom.com. If there’s an aspect of the game you’d like us to cover with house rules, you can always e-mail us at the above address and we’ll do our best!