Narrative gaming, "It Has Begun"

Posted by Ron


The other day, I got an email from fellow FTW Blogger Col. Corbane and he gave me the link to his new blog "Going on Campaign."
Usually I take a cursory look and give a quick reply to things like this, not because I want to but I've got so much other stuff going on, sometimes it's all I can do to steal a glance at something.

But it caught my eye immediately, partly because of the topic (Campaign and Narrative gaming) and party because of the amount of work already invested in the project by the Col.
So I went back later on and took a few minutes to give it a good read.

If you've never tried Narrative or Campaign type gaming, I highly recommend it. There is so much more to it than any pick-up game of 40k. If you're one of those who has and wants some great info on putting a Campaign together, then I suggest you look at what the Col. has put together.

All that being said, I wanted to share my absolute best game of 40k.
It should be no suprise it was a Narrative type game.

Since I don't have a copy of my first report, I'm reproducing it here for the second third time. This game was actually played a long time ago and I'll try my best to remember how it went.

The real part to this game is the story though. Called, "It Has Begun," my opponent and I took turns writing out the story leading up to this battle. Over the course of a few weeks, we took turns writing the story leading up to this battle through the eyes of our respective force commanders.

We took turns posting our portions of the story in one of the fiction section on a bulletin board. When we finally got to the point in the story where we met, we stopped writing and picked up the story line with our minitures and kept going.

NOTE: I should mention that for this game, both of us decided to play with a very "loose interpretation" of the rules. If we wanted something to happen because it would add to the story, we simply did it.
We changed the rules to suit or needs and used/left out rules as we saw fit to do. I highly reccomend this type of gaming if you can find someone else who understands this concept.

If you want to read the story, it can be found here in it's entirety.

Otherwise, onto the battle report...

I deployed my guys in the middle of the table, it was my big squad... the rest were coming in drop pods. The Chaos forces were spread around the compound as they were in the story. Again, nothing set in stone, just how the story left off.

If memory serves me correct, Chaos went first. Since my guys were in cover, the Chaos shooting for the turn only resulted in a casualty for me and zealing right out of said cover towards them.


Turn two saw most of the Chaos reinforcements arrive and some movement to engage my Templar units now out in the open. Some of my reinforcement arrived on my second turn.


Kresh was able to make quick work of my Dreadnought but it was able to score one wound in on him before being uttery destroyed in hand to hand combat.


Turn three saw the Chaos units bracing for impact as the Templars prepared to hit their lines. Some of the Chaos shooting thinned out the Templar ranks but only drove the survivors to charge closer.


The resulting hand to hand combat would be where the game would ultimately be decided. In a mass of humanity and daemons, the fighting raged on in this one spot for the remainder of the game... each side throwing more resources into the fray hoping to sway victory to their side.


Here the Templars look to bolster their brothers in combat before falling to the powers of Chaos.


As my Templar Terminator Assault Squad landed, they were overwhelmed by a quickly summoned pack of Bloodletters... the fighting was fast and furious and unfortunately for me, down to the very last man.




Turn three combat... before.


And Turn three combat... after.


Both sides take heavy casualties in their struggle for control. Each Commander surveys the swirling mass of combatants, pushing their troops forward into the fray.


Turn four... the carnage continues and it looks like the Imperium may be able to cleanse this world once and for all. The battle starts to lean in their favor for this turn. The Emperor's Champ is able to get into contact with Lord Kresh and fights him to the death only doing one more wound to the Lord before falling in battle himself (that's two wounds on the Chaos Lord now, he only has three).


At the end of Turn four, there are decidely fewer soldiers left on the field. The Commanders have entered the fighting and each cuts a swath through the opposing force.


Turn five for each side only saw some positioning of units who weren't able to get into the orginal fight for control. A small squad of Chaos Marines manuever through the crashed drop pods in an attempt to kill any Imperial stragglers.


A smaller Crusader squad attempts to move through the battlefield to reinforce the fighting but ultimately finds themselves under attack by a Chaos Defiler. Every Templar was killed in the blast that landed directly in the middle of the squad.


The combat at the end of Turn five saw the last each side fighting it out to the bitter end.


Turn six... the two commanders come face to face. Lord Kresh strikes Chaplain Rorex three times. Unfortunately, the Chaplain's armour only protected him so much. Rorex fell in battle at the hands of Lord Kresh (I made two of three INVULNERABLE saves).


To this day, this game stands as my single best game of 40k.
And it's not so much the actual game as it was everything else that went into building it. The story, the setup, the background... we really did finish the story we'd been writing for the previous couple weeks with our minitures that evening.

That's what playing with little soldiers is about.

- Ron