AN OBJECTIVE BASED SCENARIO SYSTEM
FOR WARHAMMER 40,000
Bored of playing the Cleanse mission? If you're anything like us the vast majority of your Warhammer 40,000 games revolve around this default mission and after a while it can seem a bit bland. And it's not always possible for players to decide ahead of a game what scenario they'd like to play, especially if you're pitting yourself against new foes at a club or in a Gaming Room. Ryan Powell, Kurt Periolat and Chris Hutchings took this as a challenge and have come up with a set of rules for generating scenarios on the day. Even better than that their objective-based system brings a great new dynamic to your games set in the 41st millennium adding even more atmosphere to battles. Read on as the three of them spill the beans...
In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, countless armies fight pitched battles across a war-torn galaxy. From massive, planet-wide sieges to surgical raids against isolated outposts, the armies of the far future are often called upon to complete difficult missions under terrible conditions. Warfare in this dark time is not for the armchair commander, but for the relentless general who pursues victory at any cost and under any condition.
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Necrons protect a crystal communication node from attack. |
The scope for gaming is huge. Imagine small-scale fighting for a bunker complex, or a desperate attempt to recover lost plans. So why, when we gamers turn up to our local Gaming Room or club, do we always end up playing Cleanse?
As veterans of innumerable Cleanse battles, the three of us decided that the game could benefit greatly from a new, alternate way of generating missions and building army lists. The Rules of Engagement system is intended to create missions that cater to fun, eventful games that are rarely the same. The focus of our system is on pitched battles between desperate forces, requiring your army to engage in strategic movement rather than wholesale slaughter if they are to achieve the objectives set out before them.
Rules of Engagement also brings the opportunity for some atmospheric narratives. The objectives given here can help inspire a story for your games, from the protection of a comms station, attempting the assassination of the enemy commander to surviving a bombardment or retrieving vital documents from behind enemy lines.
The following rules detail how to generate a scenario for Warhammer 40,000, set up and play a game using the Rules of Engagement.
