The Narrative Forge: Combining Crusade and Boarding Actions

As most people can tell, we’re pretty big fans of both Crusade and Boarding Actions around here. And since the release of the Boarding Actions Compendium last month, we’ve not only been playing games of the small game mode, but we’ve been thinking about different ways to incorporate Boarding Actions into our Crusade campaigns. So in today’s Narrative Forge we’re going to look at different integration approaches for the two, talk about the challenges and upsides for each, and make a few recommendations for how to mash these two systems together.

What’s the Big Problem, Anyways?

The big issue here is balance – uneven levels of Crusade updates can already lead to some unfun games at 1,000 or 2,000 points, and in Boarding Actions they can be incredibly destabilizing. And as much as we like Crusade, it was absolutely not built for the tenth edition approach to Detachments, and so you end up with weird consequences like being able to take any Enhancement from any Detachment, staple it to your character, and put them in another Detachment. Boarding Actions already takes great care to pare down what you can do in that game mode, and suddenly having say, Arcane Vortex Infernal Masters is going to create problems. And on the reverse side, Boarding Actions has some pretty good Enhancements which cost 0 points, and taking those in Crusade can cause problems.

And then there’s the campaign incentives issue – a game of Boarding Actions is always 500 points, which means it will involve a small number of units and less XP for the units involved. If your campaign allows players to play pick up games or multiple games per round, they’ll get less XP and rewards out of a game of Boarding Actions than a larger game, particularly if you don’t allow Agendas in Boarding Actions.

Depending on your outlook, there are a few ways to approach this, and we’ll talk about each here, along with Pros and Cons.

Option 1: No Crusade Upgrades in Boarding Actions

Boarding Actions has some pretty tight restrictions and was clearly meant with an eye for balance. It’s better not to mess things up by adding in a ton of Crusade cruft.

In this option, you let players in your campaign play games of Boarding Actions and have them count toward campaign goals, but units in Boarding Actions cannot use Battle Traits, Crusade Relics, Battle Scars, or Enhancements associated with their roster cards. You may still want to award them XP for participating in the mission and collecting kills, but all of the other stuff just isn’t active for these missions. Likewise, when you build your Boarding Actions force, you can choose a Boarding Actions enhancement for them as usual, and that Enhancement only sticks around for that game. Ignore Out of Action tests at the end of battles and don’t award XP for kills or Marked for Greatness.

If we’re honest, this is also the easiest (and probably best) way to integrate the two systems, but it’s also a bit of a cop-out, since you’re integrating them by just not integrating them. That said, this solves all your problems neatly and you can focus more on creating narrative stakes for the games and rounds of play. In this option, your biggest challenge is creating good incentives for playing Boarding Actions games – if someone is playing a BA game, then they aren’t playing a regular Crusade game, and so they aren’t gaining XP or Blackstone, which can put them behind if other people are.

Pros: Super easy to do; eliminates balance issues; can be done for Kill Team as well

Cons: Devalues Crusade upgrades; makes Boarding Actions feel disconnected; less incentive to play games

GM Notes

If you go this route, you’ll either want to have everyone playing Boarding Actions games in a given round/at the same time, or give the Boarding Actions players powerful rewards for participating. If you’re not doing “Boarding Actions rounds,” then you’ll want those rewards to scale up with the size of games your campaign group are currently playing.

Option 2: All Crusade Upgrades (and Vice Versa)

Look, Crusade isn’t meant to be balanced, so who cares if that extends to Boarding Actions? Anything goes here, and your players should just read the room with regard to power level.

In this option, you just say “fuck it, we ball” and let everyone just do whatever. Bring your Crusade upgrades and enhancements to Boarding Actions, and let players buy Boarding Actions Enhancements for their Rosters. Roll Out of Action tests for destroyed units at the end of the battle, and award XP for killing enemy units and completing the battle, and Mark a unit for Greatness as normal.

In this option your Boarding Actions games are likely to be pretty bonkers, especially with some of the upgrades available, and you’ll want to generally put some limits on what you can bring into Boarding Actions. Likewise, you’ll probably want to limit or at least put some checks on bringing Boarding Actions into Crusade – Enhancements in Boarding Actions are free points-wise, and it would be good to give them some kind of points value in Crusade games, particularly since several of them are pretty damn good – you really don’t want to give Thousand Sons Trademark Weapon for free.

Note that while this gives you all the Crusade goodness everywhere you play, it doesn’t solve the problem of BA games having fewer incentives – missions still don’t provide access to Agendas, and the smaller game size means less XP and fewer unit upgrades per game. As with Option 1, you’ll want to either lock everyone into playing BA games at the same time, or give some extra rewards for playing them if you’re letting players openly choose which games to play.

Pros: Relatively easy to do; keeps Crusade rules available

Cons: Can be a balance nightmare; doesn’t solve problem with asymmetrical rewards; need to figure out a cost for BA enhancements

GM Notes

If you go this option, I’d recommend setting a blanket cost of 15 to 20 points for Boarding Actions Enhancements when they’re brought to Crusade games – and limit them to units which could be in the relevant Boarding Actions detachment. This helps keep them from being overpowered and prevents players from getting free upgrades when they shouldn’t be. Additionally, limit Boarding Actions forces to one Enhancement.

As with Option 1, you’ll want to make sure players who play BA games aren’t losing out on XP or rewards if they opt for those games in rounds where other players can play bigger games.

Option 3: Separate Sub-forces

There’s room to compromise here – why not do a light mix and let Boarding Actions rosters be part of the Order of Battle? Best of both worlds, really.

In this option, you let players build Boarding Actions armies from their Order of Battle and maintain them as a separate sub-force to the army. In this mode you purchase Boarding Actions Enhancements for your characters with RP, but otherwise your Boarding Actions units are only used for Boarding Actions games. They can be designated as such on their roster cards.

From there, you can choose how much Crusade you want in the mode – you can opt to include kill and game XP and Marking units for Greatness as well as Out of Actions tests, or you can jettison it altogether. Keeping XP gives you a fairly slow progression for units, though note that a single upgrade can have a massive impact on a game of Boarding Actions.

Pros: You get to combine Boarding Actions with Crusade, at least a little bit; works well if you’re just doing Boarding Actions games for your campaign

Cons: 500 point games can be unbalanced easily; systems still feel pretty separated

GM Notes

If you opt to use XP for Boarding Actions games, I’d recommend changing the XP award for Marked for Greatness to 1 XP. This will help scale things back and ensure that no one levels up a unit after a single battle. For 500 point games you generally want slower progression, particularly since the composition of BA forces won’t change much. Additionally, allow rewards for being behind by only 1 Crusade point.

Option 4: Custom Integration

There’s got to be a way to mix these two systems together. I think I can figure something out that will work here. Lemme just take a look at those missions…

So you’ve chosen the path of pain. I commend you, really. I wish I had a solution here with a lot of custom rules, but that’s a really big project and we haven’t finished writing it yet. What we can do is provide some guidelines here we’re considering. The big thing that differentiates this approach from options 2 or 3 is that in this option you create your own custom missions or rules for applying Agendas and other XP systems to Boarding Actions, and potentially custom rules for how to handle moving units between regular games and Boarding Actions.

Missions are the big question mark here – you’ll need to either design your own (which involves custom layouts, blech), or modify some existing ones. Between the Compendium and White Dwarf you have a ton of options to work with for missions, but Agendas only come in two flavors: Codex and Campaign Supplement. So whether you make your own base Agendas or use the ones in a campaign book, take a look at those and tweak them as necessary.

After that, figure out whether you want to go whole hog on Crusade rules or separate sub-force and modify accordingly. Note that if your campaign has BA and non-BA games as options you’ll still need to solve the incentive problem. There are a ton of cool things you can do mixing these two systems but at the end of the day Crusade is meant to be the story/progression of an expanding force of units, while Boarding Actions games will remain very rigid in size and army force, so at some point you’re going to hit the limits of what you can do with them.

Pros: When done well, you’ve created a beautiful new system; mixes Crusade and BA rules

Cons: Easy to mess up and it’s a lot of work; and definitely not worth it if you aren’t playing a lot of BA games; doesn’t solve incentive problem

GM Notes

You don’t have to build your own missions, but you need a way to handle Agendas for the existing ones. Our recommendation on these is to use the ones from Pariah Nexus and cap the amount of XP they can give any unit in your Boarding Actions army 1 XP per game. Otherwise most of the Agendas work, though you’ll want to go through each of them and adjust as necessary – for example, Recover Blackstone data needs to work in an opponent’s Entry Point rather than their Deployment Zone.

Final Thoughts

That wraps up our look at integrating Boarding Actions and Crusade but this is less of a definitive method and more of an ongoing discussion – how do you handle mixing the two? What incentives do you give for playing Boarding Actions games over Crusade? And how do you handle units with Battle Traits in Boarding Actions? Let us know what your group did in the comments below.

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.