More weekly progress

Over the weekend, I didn't get the things done that I had planned.  I did, however make substantial progress on lots of things.  I assembled 8 heavy weapons marines, 2 devastator sergeants, 5 infantry assault marines, an apothecary, a master with a thunder hammer, a furioso dreadnaut, and an interrogator chaplain, with partial builds of another 50 marines.

Yay progress.

Because of a number of life changes and work demands, I've been more or less out of the Warhammer 40k hobby for a while. With the advent of 6th Edition and the new boxed set, I've set myself a challenge that I'm going to document progress towards fully assembling and painting my various armies on here in this blog in addition to the evolution of Killhammer as I get more games under my belt.

This first update is going to be brief:

I opened one of the two Space Marine Megaforce boxes that I got around Christmas last year and began assembly.  I have fully assembled:

The Venerable Dreadnought, Land Raider Redeemer, the Scout Squad (bolters and heavy bolter), and most of the Land Speeder Storm.  There's only three of the riding scouts left to put together to complete the Storm kit.

Next weekend, the goal is to complete the remaining parts of the kit (tactical squads, command squad, captain, and drop pod).  The drop pod is going to be configured as a dedicated dreadnought pod (no harnesses).  Now to see if I can live up to that plan.  :)

Warhammer 40k Campaign - initial planning

My friend Olesh and I have been playing 40k together for a long time, and there's been some desire and (admittedly halfhearted) attempts to do a narrative campaign that have sort of sputtered out and failed.

This post is an attempt to gather my thoughts about how to create a campaign, work through my thought process, and lay the foundations for a campaign ruleset. The goal is to play a wide variety of scenarios and mission types on a variety of battlefields.

The upcoming Battle Missions book has served as inspiration for actually moving forward with this. So here's the plan, some of which relies on the fact that it's just the two of us playing.

• Use Planetary Empires to create a campaign map and use the rules found there to manage capturing territory and adjusting the battle conditions. I'm also considering using the supplemental cards (or creating my own) from Games Workshop's website to further modify the battlescape.
• Each player places 10 total tiles with no more than one hive city, one spaceport, and five tile upgrades, with no more than two upgrades being of the same type. Victory will occur when one player is reduced to three tiles (they abandon the planet), or they lose their hive city and spaceport (unable to be reinforced).
• Prior to the start of each round, players must submit army lists for each of the points values that can be determined randomly, for Kill Team, and for a 3000 point Apocalypse list to a neutral party, or to their opponent in a manner that does not allow one player to tailor their lists to the other's army.
• Each of the submitted army lists should incorporate additional points, mercenary units, or unit upgrades as identified by the Planetary Empires and other campaign rules. For example, if one player is supposed to have 150 bonus points that round, then a 1000 point army list would actually be submitted at 1150 points.
• Points for each battle will be determined randomly: 1 = 1000, 2 = 1250, 3 = 1500, 4 = 1750, 5 = 2000, 6 = 2250.
• At no time is a player obligated to share his army lists with his opponent unless that army list is currently in use. This allows players to keep the same list configurations from week to week.
• The campaign will use a modified "random mission generation" method from the new Battle Missions book: 1 = Special Scenario, 2-3 = Themed Battle, 4-6 = Random battle from the d66 table.
• Special Scenario will be: 1 = Kill Team prior to main battle (with the winner able to choose from a list of benefits in the main battle), 2 = Standard 40k mission, 3 = Cityfight, 4 = Planetstrike, 5 = Apocalypse (3000 points unless otherwise agreed on), 6 = Roll off and winner chooses any mission.
• Defender always sets up terrain based on the Planetary Empires tile type, but needs to go with a 25% general coverage guideline. The battlefield will be set up prior to rolling for mission specifics (standard mission type and deployment, specific themed mission, etc)