Playing a 40K Crusade

A few months ago, I participated at a Warhammer 40K crusade organized by the Chicago Dice Dojo Community. The Nachmund Gauntlet crusade rules were used, and I think my experience there can serve as a review of the general principles of a 40K Crusade and the Nachmund Gauntlet ruleset in particular.

This article assumes you have a general idea of how 40K plays, but I’ll make my best to avoid the nitty-gritty details.

What is this Crusade thingie?

Warhammer 40K Crusades add narrative aspects to 40K, to allow a group of players to play a series of interconnected battles. It shares many similarities with a TableTop Role-Playing Game, in the sense that participants play regularly across multiple sessions, and their armies evolve from battle to battle. It requires a Campaign Organizer at the helm, that then sorts participants into Alliances - and each Alliance has a Warmaster.

The Nachmund Gauntlet crusade has a map with different “Strategic Sites” - each Alliance contests these Strategic Sites by assigning players to each (it’s a bit abstract but essentially each player’s results are allocated to a location), and controlling a location benefits the entire Alliance.

  • Campaign Organizer: recruits players, sets schedules, checks that games are played, and generally supports players with their questions.
  • Warmaster: Determines goals for the Alliance (such as which Strategic Sites to contest), and also supports players with their questions. Decides any Alliance-wide resources that need allocation, or which rewards if any.
  • Players: get games in, and do a lot of state tracking! A LOT.

The Campaign I participated in was flexible in the sense that players could join or drop at any time. The Organizer would occasionally rebalance alliance composition so that each had a similar number of participants. Gee, I wonder if there were any turncoats that switched sides to achieve balance.

The main idea is: there are a series of games to be played, players record the consequences of their games and gain some bonuses and penalties based on battle events, then report results to the Warmasters and Organizer.

Players are encouraged to write stories about their armies and opponents, and through the campaign’s progression system you customize your force analogously to an RPG character that levels up. Players start with small-ish armies (1000 points) of rookies, which become scarred and/or grizzled when they survive battles and achieve crusade missions. At set intervals, the point limits would increase - in our league, the rules were modified so that the second phase was played up to 1500 points, and the last phase at up to 2000.

Nachmund Gauntlet

The “Nachmund Gauntlet” is a separate rulebook/expansion to the core rules of 40k. It is pricey like many Games Workshop’s products, but it is nicely produced with lots of grimdark lore and art. The first part of the book is mostly lore to ground the significance of the crusade. For brevity’s sake I’ll skip it - I didn´t find the writing inspired.

The second part of the book is the general crusade system, which I understand to be the same as previous campaign books (Pariah Nexus, Leviathan). It introduces:

  • Crusade forces: you create an army roster of 1000 points, and get a Cerusade resource called “Requisition”.
    • You can use requisition to heal wounded units, acquire special weapons, level units up; or get additional units in your roster, so that you get more options to choose from when fielding a force.
  • You learn what stuff you need to record: wounds, kills, experience gained, casualties and scars. The toal number of upgrades (special abilities, relics, etc) your units earned is called “Crusade Points” - as the crusade progresses, players with different number of Crusade Points are bound to face each other. The Crusade includes some rules to give small bonuses to the underdog.

The third part focuses on the new rules and systems unique to Nachmund Gauntlet, called the -

Sangua Terran War

The most distinct rule of this Crusade is “Reinforcement Waves”. Before each battle begins, you’ll need to split your forces into three waves. e.g., if playing at 1000 points, you send up to 400 points into your primary wave, and keep two or three other waves of up to 300 points in special reserves called “tactical reserves”. When deploying, only forces in the Primary wave are fielded; then in Round 2 and 3, you pick which of your other waves arrive. This means:

  • You get an additional layer of complexity because you have to split your forces in a way that serves a plan to win the battle mission.
  • This has the benefit that game turns play faster than regular 40k matched play: Round 1 has few troops on the map, and you have less options to split your reinforcements in later rounds.
  • Elite armies have trouble fitting their expensive squads into waves.

Another special rule is “Surgical Deep Strike”. Once a turn, a unit with Deep Strike can choose to arrive closer than 9 inches from an enemy. You need to roll 2d6 on a table with difficulty increased by the number of enemy models - if you fail, your units might be fazed, land off target, or (unlikely) take mortal wounds. This effectively incentivized all players that could access a Deep Strike unit to have at least one, since you can get to land closer to enemies and increase your chances of successfully charging.

This crusade has a special resource called “Strategic Asset Points” (SAP). You can earn them though mission objectives, or special agendas. Agendas are additional missions that each player chooses on every battle - they reward you with that your Warmaster can invest in different crusade goals, and the regiments involved typically get experience to further level up. You can choose to use Agendas from your Army rulebook/codex, which are generally more thematic and give you special faction perks; so there’s a balance between SAP and your faction bonuses.

The missions are NOT BALANCED; and most are asymmetrical (e.g. defender and attacker have quite different deployments and victory conditions). They are fun though, and expose the campier side of the 40K setting.

Another ruleset are the level ups that units can get. The crusade has a list of relics, skills and weapons you can choose for your veterans (such as improved surgical deep strikes). Through careful min/maxing you can create quite broken combos that will make some missions a breeze; or actually be prey to rock-paper-scissoring if you end upon the wrong side of the battlezone. Part of the fun is embracing the randomness and the theme of being doomed from time to time.

Based on the difference in total number of level ups (Crusade Points), the underdog can get “Crusade blessings” to even the field a bit; and depending on what Strategic Sites were controlled or Strategic goals achieved, players get additional bonuses.

My experience

I joined the crusade at its inception, playing Thousand Sons just as the code came out. Back then, I was melancholic about the fact that Thousand Sons only had a few months left allowed in official Kill Team settings; so I wanted to see if I could bring my collection to the Bighammer scene for a spin and find them some action.

This helped me prioritize some random hobby projects in varying degrees of progress. I finished some Skhetar robots, additional Rubric Marine squads and a Rhino for the backbone of my first phase 1000 points. I found it motivating that I could play with a fully painted, functional army - and round other projects as the point limits increased; I did some Tzaangors on disc, a second Tzaangor Shaman, and a Daemon prince. I have cranked my total of points to over 2500 points, so that now I have some freedom to choose what to play in 2000 points.

I was assigned to the Despoilers Alliance, which is the Chaos side on the lore. There were some loyalist armies in it since they are the most represented in our community at large, so things got split to even Alliances out. There were some good opportunities for those players to build narratives framing their involvement with us. The social aspect and the army narratives were very interesting - specially those from Emperor Children’s armies. There must be something special about that faction alluring excessively creative individuals.

My army’s narrative was the same as my Warpcoven Kill Team narrative - this time, their goals needed them to amass a large scale army, and their shunning of Thousand Sons politicking left them between a rock and a hard place, caught up in the Sangua Terran War. They were used as sacrificial pawns in the early steps of the campaign by the Despoilers Warlord - so that when several players dropped from the opposing Guardians, and the organizers saw fit to transfer my Thousand Sons to the loyalist side, my defection was entirely justified, even if a bit heterodox, and gave many a loyalist player pause. And a month later, when players dropped from the Despoilers, destiny chose me to walk a path of betrayal once more and switch sides - again, justified because my leader’s nemesis, a Space Wolf leader, was demanding my host’s destruction of the Loyalist leadership.

After having betrayed the Despoilers, and then betraying the guardians, I betrayed the whole crusade because I had to drop. Tzeencth would approve of such fickleness.

I chose many Nachmund Gauntent Agendas to contribute SAP to my faction, and prioritized them over the Thousand Sons Agendas which are quite nifty and often synergize with the Nachmund Gauntlet missions - but I couldn´t always pull both concurrently. Alas - shame. The good thing is I had set myself a mini game - the undercurrent of my army’s story included a B plot about a Tzaangor Shaman ascending to Daemon Princehood, and I managed to accomplish that long plan around the middle of the campaign.

The verdict

My hot take is Crusades are the prime form of Warhammer 40K. Rules pile upon rules, with contradictory wording that should have been the same Rules-as-intended, and the accretion of bonuses and relics allow both to personalize an army around bespoke playstyles while also allowing extremely absurd events in the battle. It cranks up the 40k vibes to 11.

The cost is LOTS OF BOOKKEEPING. I am a nerd, and enjoyed it, planning in advance to see how I could find a path to progress my Tzaangor Shaman through the Thousand Sons campaign rules to make him a Daemon Prince; and strategies that would expose specific units to more experience to get funky progressions. But it was a lot of time and energy in weeks where real life afforded me little time for hobbying. And only mid campaign I realized there was cool stuff I could have been doing but didn´t even know - e.g. I had missed rules about relics so got a few late in the game. Can be a lot of things to take in as a new player. I recommend reading this article and using this google spreadsheet to track things - although writing everything down on a graph notebook might ultimately be better from a point of view of referencing while playing.

My rendering of my stories got patchy. I wrote a few episodes of battles, or the links between them, but didn´t get the time to fully flesh out the Tzaangor Shaman’s ascension. My main regret is not having found the time to get more creative with my self-fan-fiction.

I had fun in all the games, but only because I had spent enough time in advance looking at the missions and how to assemble my waves that I could assess that no victory was assured, and defeat was extremely likely on some of them. Had wonderful opponents, some newcomers and some veterans. As an occasional 40K player, this ended up being an interesting way to get systematic exposure and get to know more people from the Dojo.

Now I’m looking forward to what opportunities arise at the end of the edition, and am interested to see if there would be a functional campaign focusing on Boarding Actions. After all, my Sorcerers were expelled from official Kill Team competitions, but they can’t sit idle and need new grounds to execute their ploys!