Hi All,
One of the best parts about the Crusade rule set is that it is very flexible. While there are some issues with the various rules, there are ways you can get around them. At my current club we are embarking on our second major crusade campaign. After playing the first campaign pretty close the the rules we decided to embark on some ambitious changes to improve (in our opinion) various aspects of the Crusade rules. In the following articles I will be covering some of these changes, and why we made the decisions we did. I would love to hear what you all think and any suggestions your local groups have implemented to solve the same issues.
The Issue:
One of the major issues we ran into during the campaign was that the players felt the current “Out of Action” and battle scars rules were inadequate. Players are heavily incentivized to risk the experience loss rather than taking a battle scar. Since units can never lose a rank, there is no major penalty for losing d6 experience, while the battle scars are more tricky. Additionally, some armies have battle scars that radically improve their unit’s performance, while others do not. This is an issue that has been largely rectified since the Drukhari codex but is still a pressing issue. At the same time we appreciated that GW was trying to walk a fine line with these rules, as if they leaned too heavily into forcing permanent, negative effects it could sour the player-base, and make it hard to recover from some unfortunate rolls.
Our Solution:
Our solution was two fold, for the first part we re-wrote the Out of Action table to the following:
When rolling for out of action, each time a 1 is rolled use the following table instead of the main rule book.
Roll a D6:
| 1 | Grievous Wound: Your opponent chooses a battle scar to be applied to the unit from options available to the unit. |
| 2-5 | Depleted: During its next battle, before deployment, the unit reduces its starting strength by 1 if the unit consists of 4 or less models, D3 if it has 5-10 models, D6 if it has 11-20 models, or 2D6 if it has 20+ models. These models are not counted as destroyed and thus cannot be resurrected, healed or otherwise brought back to the battlefield. If the unit consists of a single model, then it instead starts the game with D3 damage that cannot be healed by any rule. |
| 6 | Injured: Roll randomly for a battle scar to be applied to the unit from options available to the unit. If your army has codex specific battle scars, then roll a further d6; on a 4+ use the battle scar chart in your codex. |
The eagle-eyed readers will see that this is an adaption of the Age of Sigmar Path to Glory rules. We thought this would create a more interesting way for players to experience the campaign. When players roll a “1” they do need to work collaboratively and there is the risk of people trying to find the most devastating options. However this has yet to be an issue, and instead (in my experience) provides a fun experience as players try to figure out which battle scar makes the most sense.
One persistent issue that this change doesn’t address is how to manage the armies that have easy ways of negating battle scars (Ynnari, Tyranids, etc) so that is an issue for a future campaign. In the mean time the change has been met quite positively by players and we will probably roll it forward in the coming events.
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