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40k Roundtable: Balancing Crusade Narrative Campaigns
Here at the Goonhammer offices we’ve run a number of Crusade campaigns for ninth and tenth edition now and we thought this would be a good time to get our GM crew together to talk about where we’re at with rules, how to handle the imbalance, and what your best options are when you’re running a campaign.
The Roundtable:
- Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones
- Beanith “Beanith” Beanith
- Greg “Klobasnek” Narro
- Andrew Nguyen
Q. Let’s start with the biggest question. If you’re running a Crusade, do you let Rules Havers use their rules?
Klobasnek: Absolutely. Games Workshop has designed Crusade in such a way that in theory you can sort of play it in an independent and non-synchronous way, but I think in the real world most people will play it with a structured group. I do not want to be the one to tell someone they cannot use their cool rules or neat toy. I generally allow Legends units for the same reason. If you can't use them in my Crusade, when will you?Also, as a purely pragmatic matter, the biggest challenge in running a crusade group is keeping people active and engaged right up to the end. If your Genestealer Cult is really close to reaching their Day of Ascension and that keeps you playing games after the initial novelty has worn off, that's an absolute win in my book.
TheChirurgeon: Yeah, keeping people engaged over longer periods of time is one of the biggest challenges of any campaign, so anything you can do to keep people in it is a huge help. I see the appeal in creating/forcing better player faction balance but ultimately that’s more likely to turn people off who wanted to play with the cool toys in their Codex. So I let players use the rules because otherwise, what’s even the point of using Crusade? There are plenty of ways to run a campaign without those rules if you’re worried about that level of balance and if you try and wait for everyone to have rules you won’t be running a Crusade campaign until 2026.
Beanith: Absolutely. Half the fun can be seeing what weird stuff you or your opponent can get up to outside battles and what fun combos they can come up with their ROLLED FOR Battle Honours. Our group also welcomes the fun Legend toys because who doesn’t love a chance to field the speedboat Deredeo dreadnought or the pile of scrap that is the Chinork Warkopta.
Andrew: Absolutely, when we run our campaigns we want to be able to allow players to be able to enjoy the fullest extent of their book. Good or bad these crusade rules add a variation to the campaign books or home made narratives we make. Legends models are also acceptable in our crusades, while they may not get the balance look that other models get but we hate to tell players they can’t use models they own. Q. How do you handle the imbalance between index and codex factions among players in your campaign?
Klobasnek: Crusade is a hard thing to balance. The matched play guardrails are off, and like in Necromunda, a moderately determined player who wants to break the system to their advantage is going to be able to. There are a lot of ways things can get out of balance. In my experience roster construction and quantity of games can lead to more imbalance than whether a faction has a codex or not.I try to remind everyone at every turn that no matter how casual or hardened a player you are, a blowout isn't really very rewarding, narratively or competitively. If you're playing a game in my Crusade and at the bottom of 1 it's clear one player is gonna win going away, I want you to to rerack and change the terrain setup, army composition, or mission and try again. This is not a tournament, you can just both agree to stack the deck a bit to make for a better story.
TheChirurgeon: I’m of the mind that Crusade is at its best not when people are limiting themselves but rather when everyone is going as hard as possible to one-up each other and build their own personal armies of Gokus. That’s the true essence of 40k - none of this “reading the room” or “softballing” nonsense to keep things fair, it’s being a 13 year-old buying that unit of flamers and painting them with the explicit purpose of beating your friend’s army after you lose a game. Anyways my point isn’t so much that you shouldn’t read the room and take it easy on softer players, it’s that it’s easier to achieve a tenuous balance when everyone is playing the role of Timmy, Power Gamer rather than trying to keep things at some nebulous “friendly” power level that varies from player to player.Also the rules are just wildly unbalanced and in my estimation, not particularly suited to the kinds of narrative, “this makes sense for what happened to this character” progression you might see in a tabletop RPG. This makes it easier to jettison that notion, but I also insist players roll for upgrades when I run campaigns to at least reduce the amount of D3 sniper Basilisks and impossible-to-kill characters running around.
Klobasnek: Behold Rob, one of my moderately determined players. Sometimes you have to trust that they’ll look at the player across the table from them deploying a bunch of footslogging Guardsmen and go “You know what, I think Aspiring Sorcerer Piccolo can handle this one,” and save Chaos Lord Goku for god’s strongest battles. I organize my crusades into teams, and I try my hardest to make sure that there's always at least one person per team that will be up for a full gloves-off rumble.TheChirurgeon: Hey I’m hardly crushing people in our Crusade leagues, in part because I never have the time to play the games required to build a full Goku. At best I get Chaos Lord Krillin out here eating shit most games to Captain Uriah Heracles and his immortal unit of WS 2+/BS 2+ Aggressors. It goes back to that original challenge - I'm fairly motivated to win the Big Planet War but I'm never able to get in enough games to turn that into anything threatening, plus I tone my armies down a bit and we're blessed with a fairly strong group of players. Beanith: I agree completely with Rob, especially when it comes to rolling for Battle Honours and Battle Scars etc. The slight hint of randomness helps prevent too much power creep. For the most part our group in the lands down under, we tend to go for a more narrative build for our Crusade forces. Of course we still get the occasional broken unit running around but that's also can be fun as people will see it and immediately throw any plan out the window and start gunning for my poor defenseless Sicaran Battle Tank.
Andrew: As everyone else has said above, Crusade is definitely a hard thing to balance, and you kind of have to go with what rules breaking combos come up with the game. Our upcoming campaign we’re working on an “index” add-on for players who are still running index and have some narrative mechanic similar to codex factions. 
The city table at the Houston Narrative Finale
Q. How can non-Rules Havers keep up? Are they at a disadvantage and if so, does it matter?
TheChirurgeon: There’s kind of a disadvantage, but it’s hard to quantify and it doesn’t necessarily matter - the real question is whether the rules in the Codexes outpace those in the campaign books and right now I think it’s relatively even, in that taking Agendas for things like your Oathsworn campaign stops you from doing say, the Blackstone ones in Pariah Nexus. So over relatively short campaigns, or even campaigns which run 2-3 months, Index players can compete by going harder on those rules. And the Pariah Nexus battle traits are pretty good in that regard.That said, it comes down to volume of games - you’ve got to know how many games your players are going to play, and when and how that’ll slow down. In my experience you get the most games early in the campaign, when games tend to be smaller point values and people can easily play 2-3 in a day when they meet up. This is likely to be when some of your problems start and continue if those heavy volume players end up being the most regular. So your problems end up being less between “Codex Havers and Index Players” and more between “People playing 1-2 games per week” and “People playing 1-2 games per month,” where Crusade blessings just are not enough to make up the difference in power levels.
Klobasnek: The Pariah Nexus Agendas and upgrades really helped fill in the gap in our last campaign. In 9th edition, playing Crusade without a Codex was a very bare-bones experience. Not so in 10th, with Pariah Nexus at least. Perhaps by the end of the edition with most codexes out we’ll get frustrated with the added layer of rules from the crusade supplements, but for now it's a very welcome bit of depth.
Beanith: I really don't see too much of an imbalance between Index and Codex Crusade rules. There is still plenty of chicanery for those without as there are plenty of powerful combos still available to everyone with the Leviathan and Pariah Nexus books. For the most part the Battle Traits and Crusade Relics in the 10th Ed Codexs are on par with the ones found in Pariah Nexus and Leviathan crusade rulesets. Admittedly there are a few outliers of course but for the most part the Codex rules havers just tend to have access to a little bit more narrative spice. Andrew: If you’re playing one of the Crusade campaign books, or running your own version of it, Everyone is basically on the same page. Yes, some codex crusade rules have additional content, but unless you’re grinding games, by the time the campaign ends, most players will have a number of games and it might be difficult to get all the content finished (See Tyranid crusade rules) or get all the upgrades they need. 
(Dan's GHO Narrative Army: House Vykir Ruinsworn Host. Credit: Swiftblade)
Q. How do you handle someone getting Crusade rules for their faction midway through a campaign?
Klobasnek: I immediately let them retool their roster to use their new Codex rules. Like I said at the start, this Crusade may be their only opportunity to use this faction in a crusade this edition, and I want them to get to play with their toys. Here how it works in my most recent crusade pack:
| If your codex releases during the campaign, update all of your existing units with their new points costs and rules. Your units retain all of their previously earned XP and battle honors. You may choose to replace any number of your units’ battle honors or battle scars with ones from the Crusade section of the new codex, rolling for them randomly as outlined above. |
Occasionally this leads to some weirdness that the GM will have to issue a ruling for, usually because a unit gets renamed or has their unit size change, but most of the time it just works and I’m pretty happy with it.
TheChirurgeon: This is bound to happen with any campaign longer than a couple of months and if you’re playing with updated point values (and you should be), it’s going to happen from time to time. I generally let players respec to some degree when their new book drops - it’s okay to adjust things for new units and rules and to make some minor changes - but I’m also going to ask them to start from scratch with whatever their faction mechanic is. And if points would put them over their Order of Battle limit, I usually give them a few weeks’ grace period to get them in line.Beanith: We have the pretty much same house rule as Klobasnek and Rob. They are still expected to slog through the start of their cool new Crusade Mechanic to unlock all the cool extra features though.
| When/if your codex drops, you get a free one off re-spec for your entire army allowing you to use the new stuff from the book in question. You keep your current XP for every unit and reroll all Battle Honors, Battle Scars and Crusade Relics etc. Tis only fair for the poor Drukhari and Chaos Daemon players in our midst assuming of course we’re still playing in 2026. |
Andrew: It happens; we tend to wait until a points update and stand alone codex releases to allow the rules to work. It starts to feel bad for both parties when we let the codex points take over, since they’re either overpriced, or criminally undercosted. So we let the army box codex simmer a bit while we look it over and wait for it to release on its own. We’re a bit more restrictive to player’s Orders of Battle, but the above rules are good suggestions for your own campaign.
Goonhammer Open Narrative Round 5: Craig vs Joe Adonis
Q. How do you handle players falling behind in your campaigns? What tools work the best for correcting balance problems?
Klobasnek: In my opinion, the best tool for keeping players from falling too far behind is simply to not let the Crusade go on for too long. People will fall behind. They'll stop playing for a few weeks to go on vacation or prep for a tournament, and it would take a very micromanaging GM to try to artificially smooth that out. Maybe that's viable if you're running a six player Crusade, but mine are typically 25-30 players. The key is to have your crusade last long enough that everyone gets to feel like they contributed to the overall narrative, without letting it get to the point where people feel like their armies have become NPCs getting steamrollered by the players who are doing the best. For the amount my group plays, this is somewhere around 12-15 weeks.TheChirurgeon: Yeah, people are going to fall behind naturally. In addition to Klobasnek’s points, you can also do a bit of matchmaking - it’s not just for competitive play! Every team is going to have lagging players, and you can pair those players up with each other or encourage them to play. That said, they’re also the most likely to not get that game in so be mindful of when this will and won’t work.This is also an area where I think Kill Team and Boarding Actions can come in - let players take on these missions sans upgrades, as they’re not designed for it anyways. It gives you a great way to bring in new players late and let lagging players compete for key campaign goals in ways that won’t put them down 20+ Crusade points for their roster.
Klobasnek: The second thing I do is house rule XP generation to incentivize people to play roughly the same amount of games as each other. In my Crusades you only get full XP the first time you play a given opponent. Subsequent games against the same opponent don't generate any XP from Agendas or from Marked for Greatness. This makes it very hard to just farm your regular opponent for XP for your pet unit. If you want to really juice your Order of Battle, you're going to have to play more people. Most helpfully from my perspective as GM, this means anyone whose participation is kind of wavering will constantly be getting invites to play games and stay involved.Beanith: Our group is a bit smaller with 8-10 players with most of us getting 1 or 2 games in a month. Us lucky few who could play weekly did see our rosters grow a little bit quicker than others but that could be countered largely by the fact while I might have 2000+ points in my Crusade Roster, I’m still not getting to us everything as my opponent this week may only have 1000-1500 points in theirs.Plus you can always tweak things a little with the Crusade Blessings. Even if they don’t qualify for one, if someone is struggling in certain matchups then you can just throw one or two their way.
We also experimented with an Underdog mechanic in 9th edition that worked for the most part:
| For every 5 Crusade points your opponent has over your current points, your units gain an additional xp for taking part in that battle. Example: Dave plays against Terry. Dave’s Crusade points for the army he is fielding is 2, Terry’s is 8. At the end of the game each of Terry’s units each gain 1+1 XP for taking part. |
My much vaunted Underdog Status system. In theory you could have larger gaps of 10-15 Crusade points but those occasions are very rare as games against newer players tend to be played at the Combat Patrol or Incursion level given their smaller Order of Battle. This system not only benefits new people joining our group with new Crusade armies with a leveling boost to help them catch up and gain all the cool toys we have, it also helps those unable to play as often as the rest of us. Myself and Coda are able to play 1 to 2 games a week, my mate Neizche maybe once a month, twice if we’re playing smaller games.
We also toyed with the idea of expanding this system to include a bonus point towards Crusade systems like the Tau Expanding the Empire or Aeldari Paths and Performances etc just so Cool Stuff happens faster for those with less time for Hams but then 10th happened and we’ve dropped the Underdog status from our House rules for now.
Andrew: Through the years, we’ve done simple mechanics like catch up bonuses, our campaign managers usually take an average of games and apply a pool of experience and requisition points. For newer players, or new rosters, we give them a larger pool of experience and requisition points to have them catch up with the average.
We also limit out how much experience you can gain in phases, that way a player can’t run up to Legendary by the end of week 2 because they crammed in 3-4 games on a friday night. We also reduced Battle Honours to non-character units to keep the book keeping down. For games where a player’s Crusade Points exceed the other player’s by a far margin of 21+, not only does the player get crusade blessings, but they “turn off” upgrades until they reach that threshold. Honestly this was more of a problem in 9th edition when crusade blessings weren’t really a thing.
Narrative players fight over the 3D printed BFG made specially for the narrative event. Normal sized human Michael for scale. Credit: James Robertson
Q. Any final thoughts on this topic? Things you want to add about running a Crusade campaign?
Klobasnek: Winning games is its own reward, you don't need or even want to incentivize it as GM. I try hard to find ways for players to affect the shared narrative that aren't a W/L binary. You got absolutely wasted this month, but managed to dig up a lot of Blackstone? Congrats, you found the mcguffin that your team was searching for! We’ve captured an enemy officer, time for the group to vote on whether to hold them for further interrogation or execute them. Your team has been getting their butts kicked for the second half of the crusade? Congrats, you get a special scenario where you make your glorious last stand against endless waves of Orks/Tyranids/whatever. The teams that won got off the planet, but your warlord got to die a cinematic martyr’s death, so who’s the real winner here?If your players trust that you will give the losing players/teams a good experience, it both softens the sting of losing and reduces the incentive to game the (very gameable) system in the first place.
TheChirurgeon: Yeah, that’s a great shout - one of the most important things you can do as a GM is to give your players other incentives beyond winning and losing. We put a lot of work into that for the 2024 GHO Narrative - we had missions where it wasn’t about winning or losing, but your overall goals. So for renegades and raiders, they were always collecting spoils, and it was the total that mattered, not any one game, with opportunities to catch up. Blackstone is a lot like that, but how much you get is really heavily tied to winning and losing in ways that are counterproductive. In another mission we had players attempting to sabotage pillars under a key fortification, and every sabotaged pillar would weaken the structure in the following round, so it wasn’t a binary win/loss condition. We had missions where one side was trying to assassinate a character and the other was trying to destroy a key structure - it was very possible for both sides to “win” in the context of the larger war. Any time you can create opportunities like this, especially if it means tying games together and giving players choices, you can create situations where everyone wins and feels involved.That said, there are also times where team losses can be good - I remember at GHO 2022 where Dan lost a mission defending team supply lines which meant his whole team missed out on the free RP that round. And while it was a stiff penalty, Dan thought that collective groan was really cool. Yeah, he let his team down, but he was happy he was in a position where what he did mattered to the team as a whole generally, and it made them feel like part of a bigger war - so it doesn’t have to be all positive!
Beanith: Crusade isn’t perfect. Sometimes there will be edge cases not handled by the rules. You’ll want a Google Doc or something to keep track of anything that pops up enough to be annoying. Back in 9th edition, ours was mostly giving the Aeldari fusion weapons the Melta weapon rule upgrade from back when GW’s work experience kid did a Ctrl-F for Melta Weapons and missed the Fusion Weapons. (This one was safely ignored now with the 9th Codex so we took this house rule out behind the shed.) What remains these days is mostly giving non-Blood Angel chapters free range to stick their Librarians into Psychic Dreadnoughts. (Something never actually used either but we think it is cool if it was allowed to happen) Have Fun and Break Stuff. It’s Awesome Narrative Play and not Stinky Matched Play so have fun with it. My group is small so we’re happy to experiment, test out things and adjust things where necessary. For example, when I was running a Sisters Crusade roster, I was toying with the idea of taking a Canoness in a Warsuit (I mostly wanted to use the Vahl model without actually bringing Vahl) and we had a good debate on cost and power level. We watched to see how she went in the game and we would adjust as necessary. The other one that cropped up was looking at adjusting the Craftworld Requisition Ghost Warriors Walk to allow us to shove Farseers and Warlocks into a Wraithseer. Again, remember you’re here to have fun and talk rubbish with friends so don’t be afraid to point out issues that crop up and discuss ways of fixing it.
Give Your Army Some Narrative. Our campaign has no real end date or goal, we mostly wanted to play 40k using these cool Crusades rules and have fun doing wacky stuff with characters being shoved into dreadnoughts. we called it “The Campaign that Never Ends” This is a fine, dandy and totally acceptable way to enjoy Crusading. That said we made sure with fresh rosters each time a new Mission Pack or Campaign book dropped just to make sure things didn’t get too out of hand
But that said, you should get yourself a great GM. Ours stepped up and volunteered to write up some excellent background Narrative for the Campaign and has smashed it out of the park. The Crux Stars Campaigns were deliberately made to accommodate just about any force, Imperial, Chaos, Xenos or otherwise. Whenever a new Crusade mission back or Warzone book drops we would move the Narrative to another area in that system. He had a blast writing some cool stuff and all we needed to do was help out by giving our Crusade Rosters a little bit of character by naming our characters and giving him some writing prompts about the background of our chosen force.
Andrew: Crusade has a good backbone for a good narrative campaign. When 10th edition launched and we got Leviathan it left a lot of room for improvement. Pariah Nexus improved on a lot of missing things but by that point our own community started creating our own mission pack and campaign book. Embrace the fun of the game played over trying to rack up wins. We tend to reward players who write up narrative battle reports, or post photos of their games with a backstory. Give players crusade relics for players who finish kitbashed or painted units for the campaign. For those players who only just want to play games to win and have that competitive mindset we direct them to our local ladder league. But that doesn’t mean that someone who plays competitive can’t enjoy a crusade campaign either. As Greg mentioned above, having a player’s narrative progression impact the campaign more than the W/L score, will make a player more invested in the campaign. Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
