The 2024 Grand Narrative is behind us. And while it was a total blast, we had some thoughts when it came to the rules – both the missions and how they were used. From wonky deployment rules to upgrades that are just a bit too powerful, it’s clear that there are a few things in the rules that were written with a short event in mind, and more than a few things that need tweaks. That said, there were some really cool ideas in those missions and if you’re looking to use them in your own Crusade campaigns, we have some ideas and notes about how you can make some small adjustments that will help make them a bit better.
Note that these changes aren’t definitive; not only are you free to ignore them but we may present multiple approaches for different missions and rulesets, and we’d encourage you to consider this a jumping off point for your own twists and changes.
Battle Traits
The Kessandras pack for the Grand Narrative came with six Battle Traits. This was an important adjustment – for an event like this you need to create some Battle Traits because if you don’t, your players will need to have copies of Tyrannic War or Pariah Nexus on hand, as there are none in the Core Rules.
Kessandras Battle Traits - Click to Expand
The big challenge with the Kessandras rules is that there is only a single set of Traits, meant to go on any type of unit in the game. That’s flatly bonkers, particularly in the case of Martial Experience, where you can give entire units the [PRECISION] ability. That’s insane, and normally something you can only get on a single weapon in a unit or on a vehicle.
There are a few ways you can take this, and you do need to take this somewhere else because trying to make one set of traits work for all units is crazy. Things that work on characters will often be broken on vehicles and infantry units, and things that work well on mounted units may be trash on Infantry. Or worse, make no sense narratively.
Our primary suggestion is to make this traits list apply only to INFANTRY units (excluding CHARACTER units). Infantry units make up the bulk of the game’s units, and with a little adjustment you can make this work very for that unit type. That said, whether you make this Infantry-only or leave it broad, there’s one change you need to make, and one we’d recommend:
- Remove [PRECISION] from the options on Martial Experience.
- Change Accurate Strikes to read: “Each time a model in this unit makes an attack that targets a unit that is within range of an objective marker, re-roll a Wound roll of 1.”
The rest of the traits are pretty straightforward, and these are just power level adjustments. Flat re-roll wound rolls of 1 is a bit too much for Infantry units, and at the very least it’s above the power level for other Battle Traits. That said, if you left Accurate Strikes intact, that’s pretty okay. Just, for the love of god, get rid of that Precision rule.
Crusade Relics
Kessandras had a whole page of Crusade Relics, and while they were inventive enough, they tended to be really good – better than you’d expect Relics of their class to be. One way they generally went way overboard was by having effects which applied to a full unit – these are typically reserved for Antiquity Relics or higher, where Artificer Relics tend to only apply to the bearer specifically.
Kessandras Crusade Relics - Click to Expand Artificer Relics Antiquity Relics Legendary Relics
This one has a super easy fix: Make all of the listed Artificer Relics available as Antiquity Relics. On top of that, we’d suggest you make Gaol of Malice a Legendary Relic. Reducing incoming damage by 1 is a lot better than giving -1 to wound, in part because there’s no cap on reducing damage. Picture a unit of Deathwing Knights reducing incoming damage by 2, then go ahead and make this change.
The Missions
With that out of the way, we can talk about the missions. There are six in all, and they’re designed to be part of a connected story. There are a few pieces of this you’re definitely going to ignore or jettison because they make no sense out of the gate – the Fragmentary Orders (surprise change of rules) in mission 1 didn’t really work even when it was a surprise and it’s not worth trying to make it work in your campaign. Likewise, you’re not going to have a bunch of big props for people to unlock, but you can still make use of the special relics concept – we’ll come back to that later.
Mission 1: Linebreaker Offensive
This is probably the tightest of the missions, both conceptually and in execution – there’s a clear set of objectives and they make thematic sense in that you’re being rewarded for breaking through the enemy lines. This mission works best when both players are attempting to do that and meeting in the middle of the table, so try to avoid telling one player they should be sitting back and waiting. To that end, this mission does have one big issue, which is that it encourages one player to sit back and obliterate the other player, then press forward in the game’s final turn, with a particularly large advantage for going second, since you can press into an opponent’s territory unimpeded. And while there’s a mission rule preventing you from shooting at targets outside of 18″, the area between the edge of your deployment zone and your opponent’s territory is only 10″ wide.
So how do you create incentives to leave your deployment zone? How do you stop players from just attempting to sit back and destroy the opponent?
Solution 1: Terrain-Based
If you don’t want to adjust the mission, you can solve some issues here with terrain – by putting terrain that blocks line of sight in each table half, so there’s room for units to push into the opponent’s territory but still be out of line of sight, giving them cover from enemy units trying to sit back and pick you off from the opponent’s deployment zone.
Solution 2: Scoring-Based
The other solution is to adjust scoring to incentivize players to be bold: To that end, we’d recommend having three objective markers placed in each Deployment Zone to represent key positions in the player’s lines – these need to be held at all costs, while your objective is to smash through your opponent’s territory and capture theirs, representing breaking through their lines (Our suggestion is to put each objective 8″ from the player’s table edge, with one along the center line of the table and the other two 14″ away from that).
We’d recommend adjusting scoring as follows:
From the second battle round onwards, at the end of each player’s Command phase, the player whose turn it is scores VP as follows:
- For each unit from their army wholly within their opponent’s territory (excluding AIRCRAFT and Battle-shocked units), they score 5 VP, to a maximum of 15 VP.
- For each objective marker in their opponent’s Deployment Zone they control, they score 8 VP.
At the end of the game, each player scores VP as follows:
- If they have more units in their opponent’s territory (excluding AIRCRAFT and Battle-shocked units), than their opponent, they score 10 VP).
- Each player scores 5 VP for each objective marker they control.
We’d actually recommend you use both of these, so it’s reasonable to cross the table without just being obliterated. In addition to this, we’d recommend making the Victor Bonus choosing an additional unit to be Marked for Greatness, but we like slower progression in our campaigns.
Mission 2: Contested Seizure
Contested Seizure is one of two missions that sees players creating objectives, then leaving them on the table for a later mission in which other players will compete. The biggest problem with this mission is that there are not enough restrictions on where objective markers can be made, leading to objectives being placed right next to the table edges and with no incentive to place them near the middle of the table. That kind of works given the following mission’s deployment puts one side in a band along the table’s diagonal line, but it doesn’t create solid play patterns.
Some suggestions:
- A player’s first objective marker has to be placed within 9″ of the table center.
- Objective markers have to be placed more than 6″ from the edge of the battlefield.
- Delete the Reinforcement Dispensation rule.
- Change the Victor bonus, deleting the second and third lines. Getting an Antiquity or Legendary Relic from a mission win is bananas.
- Add the Critical Acquisition: When a unit from your army is set up from Reserves, they can be set up anywhere on the battlefield that is wholly within 6″ of an objective marker you control and not within 6″ of any enemy units.
Mission 3: Lightning Strike/A Grain of Truth
The third mission has a lot of issues, though most of them can be solved with better terrain. The biggest issue however is that the Attacker always goes first. Going first isn’t necessarily always an issue – there are plenty of missions where you want to go second, such as in Linebreaker Offensive – but being able to deploy knowing you’re going to go first creates huge problems, allowing the attacker to basically “sell out” defensively. Even the rules designed to mitigate this in this mission don’t work – the Defender can place a Sighted Distance marker before the game starts, but this happens before the Attacker takes their first turn, allowing them to trivially move around those markers on their first turn.
Suggestions:
- Delete the Opportunistic Attack rule.
- For the Prepared Defences rule, the Defender has to place their Sighted Distance markers within line of sight of one or more units from their army.
- Terrain Placement:Â It’s super important to have area terrain in this mission to represent ruins. To that end, we’d recommend a minimum of five ruin area terrain pieces, measuring at least 10″x5″ in size, one placed in each table quarter outside the attacker’s deployment zone and a fifth placed within 3″ of the center of the table. Ideally you’ll have more or larger ruins to place, giving the Defender the ability to hide and also creating multiple locations for Defender units to pop up with the Evasive Sentinels rule.
- Change the Victor Bonus to give D3+1 XP (instead of D6+1).
Mission 4: Light the Beacons
This mission features the wildest conceptual framework of any at the Grand Narrative. It’s the second mission in which players create (and leave behind) objective markers, and potentially the most hectic. It’s also got the weirdest scoring of any mission. Our goal with this one is to scale back the problems it creates without destroying its insane spirit.
Suggestions:
Let’s start off with the deployment. There are two different approaches we might suggest here; pick the one you like more:
- The Old-School Approach: When placing units, go ahead and use a Scatter die. Have units scatter either D6″ or 2D6″ before they’re placed. Units which cannot be placed at all have to be placed in Strategic Reserves. Resolve mortal wounds as normal. Ignore the restriction around being placed within 6″ of the center of the battlefield.
- Clustered:Â When placing units, players alternate placing D3 units at a time. If a player places a TITANIC unit, that counts as their placement, regardless of the amount they rolled.
Other recommendations:
- Change the scoring for Imperium players to require Beacon Relay markers be wholly within Sector E.
- Any unit that took mortal wounds from deployment begins the game Battle-shocked and remains Battle-shocked through the first battle round.
Mission 5: Frontwide Withdrawal
Let’s start with the biggest issue: This mission places its deployment zones only 6″ apart. This is hilarious for a few reasons. The first is that if you have units with the Infiltrators rule, they can’t be deployed more than 3″ into your Deployment zone, as this would put them within 9″ of the enemy zone. That’s bonkers. Beyond that, you’re only 6″ away from the opponent at the start of the game, giving a massive go-first advantage to melee armies that happen to be sitting at mid table ready to strike. Finally, the beacons have fine stats but inexplicably have whatever your army keywords are, and that opens the game up to all kinds of bonkers stuff, like giving them the ability to rotate ion shields, get -1 to be wounded in a Fellhammer Siege Host, gain a Feel No Pain from Saga of the Bear, etc.
This is the hardest mission to fix for a few reasons. It’s hard to pull the deployment zones apart and still keep the spirit of the mission intact.
Suggestions:Â
- This mission needs a Hammer and Anvil-style deployment. This gives you 50% more table length to work with and allows you to start further apart. To that end, we’d recommend starting with deployment zone 12″ apart instead of 6″. Additionally, widen the deployment zones to 8″. The Staging Zone should be the area 8″ from a player’s battlefield edge.
- Adjust scoring so that each time an objective marker in an opponent’s deployment zone is destroyed, you score an additional 5 VP.
- Reduce scoring for retreating – there’s too much reward for leaving quickly. Reduce scoring for battle round 4 to 10 VP for having 50-74% of starting units, and to 15 VP in round 5 for having 75% of starting units in your staging area.
- On that note, we’d recommend just jettisoning the objective markers from the prior mission and putting two objectives each in a player’s deployment zone and staging area. There’s no guarantee you’ll even have objectives on both sides of the table.
Mission 6: Terminus Offensive
The actual mission here is pretty great, all things considered. There’s some decent mechanics at play, and there’s not much we’d actually change with the scoring and layout – great job, GW. We might suggest changing the Burden of Command rule to let you pick a CHARACTER model instead of defaulting to your Warlord, but that’s a matter of taste. Otherwise, the big change we’d recommend is to the three bafmodad effects:
- Wurrzot Machine:Â The core effect here is fine. This is the baseline we’d work around. If you want to adjust it, then maybe some kind of 4+ invlunerable save aura or an objective marker you can drop to create that would be fine.
- Nightblade:Â This is a bonkers ability and it both just beats the Wurrzot Machine (feels bad) but also is just something you get normally on a number of Chaos Space Marine Characters. We’d suggest that a unit activating the blade gains Sustained hits 2 and improves the AP of their attacks by 2 for the rest of the phase.
- Dimensional Tesseract:Â We’d recommend scaling this back to just be a regular 9″ deep strike. That’s still insanely good without being busted in the way that a 6″ drop with no charge restrictions is.
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot here, and a lot to work with in the Grand Narrative rules. They’re definitely written for a weekend event with regard to the power level of the upgrades and victor bonuses, and the missions are interesting, but need another pass to make them a bit more fun to play. That said, it’s worth playing around with these rules and testing your own adjustments. If you do end up using these or making your own substitutions, let us know how it goes – we’d love to ear about it.
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