The time is near, we’re planning to finish out dragon heist campaign this weekend. It’s been five years. Love you Mo. There are a lot of reasons its taken that long:

  1. Pando madness
  2. People having kids
  3. New jobs
  4. A whole heap of fart-arsing around on the part of the players. We are to plans what Tolkien was to tree descriptions

What is the premise?

The majority of the group are either fans (one of them is a absolutely stellar mini painter) or at least fan adjacent of Warhammer 40K. So we’re doing some thing in that universe.

The big idea with this campaign is that what you don’t choose to stop will happen, and the happenings are on an escalating ladder. Think stopping Chaos is more important than stopping the Genestealer cult? Sure thing boss. Would you look at that, the Genestealers executed their plans unopposed. I have a basic ladder set-up for each of the Necrons, Genestealers, Orks, and a Nurgle aligned chaos pillar. I also have some very tentative ideas about the Drukhari and Tzeentch that I can flesh out if needed. I also have some ideas for allies (ish) they can potentially call on earn the trust of.

None of this is done in huge amounts of detail - no plan survives contact with the players after all - but I think having that map of what will happen if they stop any given pillar will make it fun and easier to seed information about the others. “You find a data slate detailing worrying patterns of Ork movement on the next forge world over”.

A green monitor style map of a hive planet, the details are not clear but the 80s aesthetic is on point.

What is the system?

We’re going to be playing Wrath and Glory by Cubicle7 W&G. Its a d6 dice pool game, with special effects on specific die (the Wrath Die). Which can add a cost to a success, a stroke of fortune to a failure or super amp up the effects of a good or bad roll for altogether fail-ier fails, and more spectacular successes.

Its got a nice amount of options for the power gamers, plenty of flavour for the story heads. It doesn’t look horrendously complicated to run.

What am I excited for?

There are a few things I am excited for:

  1. We have a tendency to play it safe an over plan, I want to use the living world as a whip to keep them moving.
  2. There is a chance to seed clues between the pillars like easter eggs
  3. In all honesty - being a dm and not playing D&D. Even mars bounties lose their lustre* if it is all you can eat.

* totally theoretical, I have a problem.

What am I worried about?

I have all the standard worries about learning a new system and DMing for the first time. My major worry is that one of the group doesn’t like Warhammer, he doesn’t dislike it either. He was the teenage boy in 90s Britain for whom it did not feature. Since he doesn’t know anything about it he is a bit worried. The way I am getting round it is, he’s going to be an Eldar. And thus uneducated and uninterested in these Mon-keigh. I think that will give him a huge pile of latitude to just act and not worry about saying the wrong thing.

Luckily it will only be for 3 months (ish) initially so if that is the case we can move on.