Map Campaign Rules for 40k and other games
By Ian
The Dream
Every 40k player at some point has the urge to participate in a campaign. Being inspired by the lore, the models, the battlefields, these all lead to a desire to have your games mean something, to affect one another. And if you long for campaigns often enough, you’ll eventually want to run a map campaign.
There have been a lot of map campaigns published over the years. I’ve personally run two, one 40k and one AoS, and I really enjoyed them. But they were definitely a lot of work: the 40k campaign required players to submit weekly moves through email and I was the referee compiling them and updating the map. The AoS campaign was even more work intensive, as it had a physical map and required me to be at the game store every weekend to adjudicate campaign moves.
Even from a player’s perspective it can be a big commitment, requiring them to pay attention to the map and partake in the meta game of campaign moves.
But the idea of a map campaign has always been super cool, one of those grand, lofty ideas we as a 40k community strive towards.
Identifying the enemy capital
I’ve already mentioned the first problem with map campaigns: the commitment. Not every player wants to play a meta game, and not every player wants to play games for that many rounds.
There’s a second problem, and this really applies to me personally and a certain generation of gamers: time. I only play about once a month, and a lot of my regular opponents are in the same boat. I can’t resolve weekly campaign moves with games.
If I’m going to participate in a campaign, it needs to be condensed to a weekend.
The perfect game already exists
For a while now, I believed the perfect 40k map campaign had already been written, that there was a board game somewhere that could be adapted with only minor tweaks to be a great 40k campaign. While I still believe this may be the case, through that line of thinking I came up with this set of campaign rules.
In the map campaigns I’ve run and other campaign rules I’ve seen, the map is used as a way to determine matchups as well as victory: if your flag is placed in an opponent’s territory, have a game of 40k to see who removes their flag. For this system, I’ve flipped that paradigm on its head: players play their games and their victories at the end of each round determine how many flags their team can place or remove, representing the overall war effort pushing the bounds of a team’s territory.
It’s not a perfect system—the location of armies is abstracted here, losing some of the narrative goodness—but what it gains is playability. There’s also a certain flexibility with the 40k universe here: armies can deploy to far flung regions via drop pod, teleportation, warp gates, drop ships, tunnelling, stealth, etc. Moving armies slowly around a map isn’t necessarily story-driven when my faction can narratively launch a drop assault from orbit.
Instead, the 40k games represent the various forces meeting and fighting along warfronts or no-man’s land, their victories gaining ground, which is represented by the team captains placing flags or other markers on the map. And though this could be played as a free-for-all, it is designed for teams, specifically with teams that have a grand strategist sicko who wants to plan out how his or her team is conquering the map, leaving other players free to just play games.
Finally, if it seems light on rules, that’s because it allows an organizer to layer on whatever extras they want. Want to use progression mechanics from Crusade? Go ahead. Want to have certain territories restrict movement or be impassable? It works! Have an inkling to add points of interest and control bonuses? Do it!
Did you play test these?
I have not run an event or campaign yet using these rules. Play testing was done by randomizing the number of victories for each team and then playing each Campaign Round accordingly, basically playing it like a board game without 40k games in between.
This ruleset is firmly in “beta” needing more tweaks, but I think the theory behind it is solid and interesting enough that publishing them has merit.
Mapping your way to victory
Aannnddd that wraps up House Rule Month! Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading our house rules and thanks for following along on this journey. With 11th edition 40k on the horizon, we’ll be updating our site’s various house rules and maybe adding a few more next year.
As always, if you have any thoughts, comments, or feedback, please let us know at contactus@wrongsideofthemaelstrom.com.