For many war gamers, and I suspect most Heresy’ players, the ideal kind of play is a multi-player campaign. But as most of us know, campaigns are just about the hardest thing to accomplish in all of war gaming! Wrangling schedules alone can be a daunting task and then keeping everyone motivated and involved to see the campaign all the way to the end can take some real effort. The campaigns I’ve run in the past for Heresy have been simple affairs (read more about my winter 2024 campaign here), and even those required a lot of work and planning. So, it should surprise no one when I tell you that my most recent and ongoing Heresy campaign began this past spring of 2024 but only after almost eighteen months of preparation! Campaign planning can be an overwhelming task, and a somewhat mysterious one to new players, so I hope you’ll find this short series of blogs on the subject to be helpful in planning your own campaigns as I break down what went into ours.

I had no plans to start this campaign, it just kinda happened. Back in the late autumn of 2022, my buddy Andrew messaged me. Andrew is a notable Kroot enthusiast, and had already sorted out some trades so he could get his glued-together fingers on as many of the Kroot as he could but didn’t care about the spaceship corridor terrain that would be included. Andrew wanted to know if I’d be interested in some terrain from the upcoming Gallowdark Kill Team set. “How many sets,” I asked. “Uhh…like four?” he replied.

I’m a sucker for terrain so the answer was naturally an enthusiastic, “Yes!” but what on earth would I do with that many space ship walls and doors? Well, I’d already been thinking I might like to have a small loyalist army for Heresy and this seemed like a good excuse. What if I got a few people together for a small Zone Mortalis style campaign set exclusively in space ships and stations? The Zone Mortalis rules seemed like they’d be great fun and I reached out to a few friends with the germ of a plan.

While I waited for the terrain to arrive (it wouldn’t even be released for a few months) I set up a simple Facebook group to organize the players and see who wanted to play which legions. After some discussion we had settled on our choices. Buford would be starting his first Heresy army with Space Wolves, while Max would do the same with Death Guard. Meanwhile, my usual opponent Lars would be swapping his loyalist ways for Night Lords and I’d be taking a break from my Sons of Horus with a small Dark Angels force.

Now that we had our armies of choice imagining a narrative for the event was easy. We’d frame our campaign within the established Thramas Crusade in which the Night Lords and the Dark Angels furiously battled over a massive sector of space, supported by smaller forces, in our case, the Death Guard and Space Wolves. The Horus Heresy Book Nine: Crusade, from the first edition of the game, proved to be an invaluable resource for detailing our forces.

After a little discussion we decided to approach the campaign as a slow-grow starting with 1,000 point lists, and then moving up to 1,500 and finally 2,000 points. We settled on the Onslaught campaign system with a few modifications (more on those in a future blog) to accommodate multiple players, or more specifically, 3 Onslaught campaigns, to be played at each of the 3 points levels. Since the Onsalught system is meant to let gamers play a campaign in a variable but limited number of games it seemed a great fit for us to link 3 small campaigns into one larger one.
It was about then that the terrain arrived and it occurred to me that I’d never be able to build and paint it all alone.

Fortunately, the guys were happy to lend a hand with this tremendous amount of work and I started drawing up a plan of attack for assembly and painting. And then I realized that if we were going to have such an immersive set of terrain and basing, I’d better have a tabletop to match. And that’s when I found a very cool MDF tile solution…

In the next instalment of this series I’ll show off how we worked together to assemble and paint an astonishing amount of terrain while building out our first 1,000 point lists!