a campaign comes to an end

For the last few years, I’ve been running a Rogue Trader campaign. Not the roleplaying game of the same name, but the first edition of Warhammer 40,000, although in fairness the version I use is so heavily house-ruled that I’m not sure it’s even really the same game.

The defenders of Landfall City take their positions.

In fact, although I say that I’ve been running the campaign for the last few years, I didn’t host a game in 2024 at all. The scheduling got to be very challenging and eventually I just lost steam. However, that changed when one of my players announced that he was moving out of the country and asked whether we could get in a farewell game. This spurred me into action to get the finale going.

Heavy weapons teams open fire on enemy vehicles.

Rogue Trader is a game that has a lot of interesting bits to it, and I don’t know of another wargame that gives me the freedom that I want for these types of game, but the actual system is kind of a nuisance. A game with more than a few vehicles requires you to keep track of a lot of special damage effects on different vehicles, for instance, and there’s a lot of keeping track of different pieces of equipment that have very small differences between them. I resolved to deal with this by just not doing it, and that worked out OK, more or less.

Swarms of Chaos cultists and their Traitor Marine allies launch an attack on the walls.

I think I didn’t do a very good job balancing the opposition, but here’s the thing: the players all had a great time anyway, and we got more or less finished on time. I think it worked out overall. As always, the thing that I think appealed to players was really the visual storytelling.

Inquisitor Hammerweir punches a daemon engine right in the eye.

Torgar Half-hand flies in on his powerboard and goes toe-to-toe with an enemy dreadnought.

Arco-flagellants beat up an old lady.

Kablam! A cultist APC gets hit and catches fire.

Cultists attempt to storm the wall.

Accompanied by summoned daemons, a sorcerer attempts to attack the gate, only to be cut down in a hail of fire.

A victory of content over system, maybe. I never have a lot of confidence in my ability to produce engaging narrative results via system, which is why I value systems that do it effectively so much. But in the end, I think I may be second-guessing myself. I just fear that the system will produce an unsatisfying result, which I think is a fair enough concern with Warhammer. But could I do the same thing with, say, Xenos Rampant? I fear not.

Next campaign will be a fantasy one, and might mix elements of Mordheim, WHFB and WHFRP. We shall see how it goes!