Sham Pains

This post was supposed to be about the year ahead, rather than the year behind. While there's still time in January, time to set myself some hobby goals!

GW recently released a map-based campaign thing for 40K, the 500 Worlds Vespator Front book. Goonhammer's review of it somehow made me sit up and pay attention. 

40K has sat low down on my hobby list for a while for a few reasons. Partly that it seems low down on the list for the others too, and they're who I'd play against, partly from late edition malaise and partly from being a SkypeHammerer with not much IRL presence. And that's okay! Necromunda has kept me busy, and will continue to do so this year no doubt. 

Map-based campaigns are very much my bag, though (see all the Total War games), and the review had a few things that made me sit up and take note. 

• You don't need to actually play a game of 40K to resolve your team's turn
• Although it's really designed for 40K, it's actually pretty system agnostic. They already have rules for Boarding Actions, a sort of subset of 40K game, and there's no reason why it couldn't be a game of anything, really
• It seems fairly low-key and easy going in terms of time keeping
• The campaign rules don't impose penalties for the loser or bonuses (beyond very small ones) for the victor

Now, all this is with the slight proviso that I've not read the actual rulebook, just a review of it. And I'm unlikely to, you can't buy it separately and I'm not forking out £65 for the whole thing! I'd only be after the map and the stickers, really, and I can busk that myself at home. So I did. 

The systems have mostly featured in previous Woffboot Narrative stuff, either campaigns or fluff. Immense kudos if you know any of them. The asteroid field used to be Sweetwater, the Vulnus Inferni is the site of the Averment Breach. 

I'm really sorry, GW, I'm afraid I used AI to make this (Gemini). If it helps, I genuinely feel dirty for having done so, even if it is quite a decent map. Because it's a decent map, in fact! If I'd sat down and drawn it myself, I could probably have made something equivalent. That would have taken me a whole weekend rather than fifteen minutes, and that's why AI is awful, because it makes us all lazier and less talented as a result.

It does mean I've got the rest of the weekend to pester people to take part, instead. 

Play along at home, folks! I'm looking for three teams to fight over these systems, a Xenos team, an Imperial team and a Chaos team. Consider the comments section below a sign-up sheet. You'd be looking at having to play zero-to-one games of 40K a month until the end of the year, something most of us are probably doing anyway, and you can play them against me or anybody else. 

And it doesn't even have to be 40K - why not 30K? Or a narrative Necromunda game? Or best-of-three skirmishes in Dawn of War? Even (whisper it) Inquisitor! Let's not get all gatekeepery here. 

Let me know who's up for involvement, and I'll thrash out a rules post for those interested in a couple of weeks. 

PS - I can reveal Captain Nampo of the Mantis Warriors will be making a return.