Hemera’s End – A 40K Campaign League

Sometime last year, I raised the idea of setting up a regular ‘league’ at my FLGS here in Hong Kong.  There are many regular gamers here, representing the whole spectrum of power levels from the WAACineers to the Fluff Bunnies, and everywhere in between.  To my surprise, there was no interest in a plain old league. Absolutely none.  The main reason for this was that leagues were a bit boring.  What people really wanted was a ‘Campaign League’ – something with a bit of narrative that they could sink their teeth into.

Now narrative campaigns and regular leagues are notoriously hard to mix. In a lot of ways they are like trying to mix oil and water – you can try as hard as you want to meld them into a cohesive mass, but as soon as the initial energy is lost they will separate out into their distinct parts.  Most of the time, it is the mismatch between trying to write a flexible ‘fluff’ that accommodates all the factions in a ‘believable’ manner, while trying to keep the games at a ‘reasonably’ competitive level without going over the top (i.e. protecting the delicate Fluff Bunnies form the circling WAACineers).  It also needs to try and avoid the classic negative feedback loop, where winners keep winning as they generate more bonuses from the campaign system, while losers are put in increasingly harder positions until they get fed up and leave the campaign.

As if that wasn’t hard enough, they also wanted to make it team play, with two players per Alliance. And it had to be flexible enough to allow players to miss games if they couldn’t make it one week.  And  of course, it had to be fun.

Well, I have always enjoyed a challenge, and this is what I came up with.

Hemera’s End Campaign Book

Click the above link to download the booklet

Campaign Map & League Table

Sorry it is a bit of a dense document, but naturally it is quite complex as it needs to meet all the criteria set out by the FLGS players!  If any of you are looking for a ready made campaign league to run at your FLGS, please feel free to go ahead and download the booklet and map and give it a go – just make sure to come back and let me know how it went, and whether there are any suggested improvements to be made.

It also certainly doesn’t have to be as complex as this one is, so if you feel like cherry picking the bits you like (maybe just the campaign an not the league, or individuals rather than teams, or even teams of more than three in each, etc.) I think you will find the format very adaptable to being customized.

Enjoy!