Playing a Campaign
Playing a campaign is the intended way to experience the game. During it, warbands start as small and weak forces with dreams of fame, glory, or whatever else may motivate them. They may succeed, fail into total ruin, or somewhere in between.
A campaign, like a good narrative, should have a distinct start, middle, and end. It should (hopefully!) have finish with a satisfying climax, with all warbands having the potential to achieve at least some small victory up until the last moment.
After creating the campaign, factions, and warbands, it's time to begin the campaign! For any individual player, the general loop of a campaign will be as follows:
- Play a game
- Complete post-game phase
- Play a game against someone else
- Complete post-game phase
And so on until players reach the end of the campaign. There are exceptions, with Special Scenarios occurring periodically at major points through the campaign. The final scenario will always be a Special Scenario for all players, after which any post-campaign results and narratives will be tied off.
The length of the campaign the group decided on determines where these Special Scenarios occur. For example, for a medium-length, six-player campaign, there are 12 games in total. The schedule is as follows:
| Round | Description |
|---|---|
| 1-5 | Play against each other player once |
| 6 | Mid-campaign Special Scenario |
| 7-11 | Play against each other player once |
| 12 | Special Scenario finale |
The Special Scenario may be against a player you played against recently, but will have special rules and more explicit narrative elements involving Factions. Special Scenarios will be described in more detail in the next section.
Handle each game as per the Pre-Game and Game rules. After any game, including the campaign finale, handle post game as per the Post-Game rules.
Deciding opponents
We don't prescribe any specific way to decide on who a player's next opponent should be, but we do have general guidelines that help keep a campaign as enjoyable as possible for all involved.
- Players should play all other players as evenly as possible
- You should space a player's opponents out as much as possible
- A player's next opponent should be as random as possible
- Where practical, players shouldn't know who their next opponent is when completing their post-game
This keeps variety high and the campaign feeling fresh. This generally happens in a 'round robin' format, where every player completes a game against every other player (decided randomly) before repeating the cycle, but could be in other formats too.
Life inevitably gets in the way, with a player unable to make it to a session, or one game running longer than the others during a larger session, requiring the opponent of one of those players to wait. For this reason, we recommend being flexible. Have a general schedule in mind, but we willing to deviate. When deviating, try to avoid the guidelines above where possible. Avoid two players playing consecutive games against each other though, even if that might mean delaying games.
Winning Games
While it may seem obvious that players want to win games during a campaign, it's worth pointing out the ways in which winning games actually aids them, so they can better understand how this changes the trajectory of their warband across a campaign. When winning, a player:
- Gains an extra Treasure at the end of the game
- Generally gains more Treasure during the game
- Generally sustains fewer dead and Scarred units
- Generally gains more Improvements and Promotions
- Is able to better influence the Special Scenario they play and who they play it against
- Gains rewards for Special Scenarios
All of this ultimately improves your chance to win the campaign finale, ultimately winning the campaign itself.
Campaign Finale
If a player wins their campaign finale, they achieve the goal of the scenario, which hopefully was their warband's long-term goal.
If you wish to create a grander finale, those that won their final scenarios could then continue to face off, eliminating losing players until there is only one player remaining. If doing so, the players with the most wins should pick the Special Scenarios as usual.
How exactly you end a campaign is up to the group, but we recommend against playing too many additional games that would exclude part of the group. Even if a player is doing poorly, they should have the opportunity to complete their warband's goal, even if the chance of doing so is small.
Multiple Games in a Day
It's often practical (and more fun!) to have everyone come to a single location and play multiple games in a day, with games amongst all players running concurrently. If you plan on doing this, we recommend doing a few things, assuming they work for your specific group.
Terrain Set Up
Try to make sure the terrain is at the location before the day, so that one or two players can get the tables set up before others arrive. Have players rotate through tables throughout the day as much as possible. There will inevitably be some people that will play on the same board multiple times. If that's the case, their opponents should try and accommodate them by agreeing to re-roll if they end up with the same deployment type, or agree to avoid choices that would have them set up in the same location as a previous game.
Create a Schedule
If this works for your group, create a schedule for the day, stating which players will be playing each other and in what order. Although this gives players foresight when performing post-game steps, this is outweighed by the fact that it reduces everyone's mental load and allows fairer scheduling. As previously mentioned, do be willing to adjust the schedule on the day if something comes up.
Handling Post-Game
Where possible, each player should have a basic plan for their post-game phase, such as Skills they may want heroes to learn, or what shiny new unit or piece of equipment they are thinking of buying. Naturally, these plans will change with the roll of the dice, but it will hopefully save some time during the post-game, which may even allow players to fit an extra game in.
Retiring Warbands
It is possible that, after a string of bad losses, a warband may find itself in a weaker position than when it started the campaign. Should this happen, a player may decide to retire their entire warband.
Should they do so, they create a warband from scratch, following the Warband Creation rules to create a new warband of the same type as the one being retired. They remain aligned with the same Faction and retain any existing Wins or Losses they had. If the player wishes, they can reuse the names and choices they made during their initial warband creation. This is usually simpler.
Warband retirement during the first few games tends to be rare, and is even rarer after the first few games. Even if a warband may fall behind temporarily in terms of units, gaining Improvements on their heroes or gaining extra Hero Slots means it is usually not worth retiring a warband. Warband retirement should be considered a last resort for a warband that has no hope of being able to come back from debilitating losses.