It’s become distressingly common now to be listening to a podcast/reading a website review a codex, know they’re getting to the part that interest’s me, and then…just have it skipped over with “That’s just Crusade content.”
There are a number of reasons I think this is a bad idea – narrative players are podcast listeners, Patreon supporters, etc. too, and a number of reasons why this happens (matched play is easier to talk about, inviting “big names” is easier for competitive-focused guests, etc.), but there’s also some more subtle reasons I think this does a disservice to both the reviews and the game as a whole
It’s a Big Chunk of the Codex
Seriously, in terms of rules, Crusade-specific rules take up 15% of the page count for the Sisters of Battle and Drukhari, and 30% of the page count for the new Black Templars supplement (these just happen to be books I have in easy reach). That’s even ignoring the Crusade-related implications of things not normally set aside as specifically Crusade rules (we’ll get to that in a little bit).
If you turn in a test and skip 15% of the questions, the best score you’re getting is a middling B. And that’s assuming you nail everything else.
Narrative Players Want to Get Better
I touched on this in an old article on the role of theory in narrative wargaming – there’s nothing about narrative wargaming that suggests that you’re not interested in getting better, winning, etc. Very few players (my beloved younger brother being a notable exception) derive deep narrative satisfaction from getting their teeth kicked in for several games in a row.
That he plays Death Korps is probably for the best.
But just as ” ‘Winning isn’t a theme’ ” is something people occasionally comment about narrative gaming, neither necessarily is losing. We want our armies to work to tell the stories we want to tell. And that means understanding how they work. It means getting better as players, and understanding the ways the mechanics of the narrative side of the game work. There is a lot of thought and insight that matched play players get from listening to folks talk about, and think deeply about, how to improve their game play. One of the best pieces of advice, one that has shaped the development of my army and it’s narrative (specifically, about a very dangerous Palatine), came from Sean Nayden waxing poetic about an artifact pistol. Given how much Crusade is a whole-hog replacement for some mechanical systems in the game (i.e. Secondaries vs. Agendas), it would be nice to have this sort of focus on those systems as well. Which brings us to the next point.
Crusade Mechanics are Mechanics
In ages past, narrative gaming was most commonly the purview of some strung together missions, or maybe something custom written. At most, a supplement or two, usually written in the twilight of an edition that wasn’t long for this world. Or involved a lot of Apocalypse battles, the assumption being balance was already out the door, so why not?
But with 9th Edition, narrative players have, through the Crusade system, a genuine set of mechanics baked into the game to play with. It’s not “tacked on”.
And where there are mechanics, there’s room to talk about them. Are there good agendas, or bad ones? Are there ones that stack nicely – and do you want to go for those, or try to spread your XP out? Are there agenda you want to make sure to work in early in a Crusade, vs. evergreen favorites?
What about the action economy? There are 24 missions in the Amidst the Ashes mission pack – and only 8 of them mention Actions. What does that mean for how you think about building an army? About the utility of units that are there mostly to sit back and perform actions?
What about the absence of some secondaries? Are there constraints building a competitive list being mindful of secondaries that, in a Crusade list, might not matter as much?
I’ll use a couple specific examples from the codex I’m most familiar with, the Sisters of Battle, highlighting some things I think are important and some things that I may have ended up yelling at the radio when a podcast I listen to glossed over them while missing something important.
Suffering and Sacrifice:
This is a 1 CP stratagem that lets you pick a Warlord, Potentia, or Living Saint, and if a unit can fight them, it must choose to fight them. This is..extremely niche, and a little puzzling in most matched play settings. Sure, there may be some room for it in a Martyred Lady army, with one of your characters running around like Achilles trying to goad the other player’s army into attacking them.
But this ability is absolutely essential in some Crusade scenarios. Why? In the Sisters book, you designate one of your characters as a “Saint Potentia”, essentially a baby Living Saint. She goes through trials, accomplishing certain tasks, and for each trial she succeeds in, she gets a cool bonus ability. Collect all five and she’s a Living Saint (not to mention really quite powered up). One of these trials? The Trial of Suffering. Your Saint Potentia has to gain Battle Scars, take Mortal Wounds, be Destroyed, or be the victim of Malediction psychic powers.
If she passes this trial though? She both loses any Battle Scars she has and ignores them in the future and, once per game, in any phase, she can regain D3 wounds.
A canny opponent can stonewall you here, essentially by not attacking your Saint Potentia whenever possible, or until they absolutely must. This stratagem lets you force the issue.
Blessings of the Faithful:
This is the Sisters version of taking a more expensive, but better, version of a character. In this case, giving them a form of blessing. Some of these are considered the building blocks of certain builds. The problem?
The requisition necessary to give a character one of these only comes in when they are “Battle-hardened” or above, meaning they’ve got 16+ experience points. Depending on your local group, how often you play games, etc., Battle-hardened might be a long time in coming.
Crusade Relics:
There’s also Crusade Relics, which aren’t under the 0-1 restriction of normal relics. All of a sudden you don’t have to choose between an offensive and defensive relic, potentially. Dogmata, for example, get noticably killier and can be protected in a fairly straightforward fashion.
Speaking of relics…
Aestrid Thurga
The new standard bearer and her social media page editor are…strange inclusions in a lot of matched play lists. Her banner’s ability is nice, but it’s not essential, and there’s better ways to get re-rolls in your army. Two of her rules though…
Order Pronatus: Relic requisition costs zero RP. Basically, you could go utterly ham collecting relics without it slowing down the growth of your army, crippling your ability to buy off problematic Battle Scars, etc. This would be nice, and then you get to..
Hagiolatry: If Agathae Dolan is included in the same Crusade Army as a Saint Potentia, and she’s on the battlefield at the end of the battle, the Saint Potentia gains an additional 1 Saint Point.
Reader – this is huge. If there’s such a thing as an “auto-take” in a Crusade List, for Sisters, this is it.
All of these points are mechanical. They are about the game as it is played as a game.
Narrative Norms
The final aspect is the fuzziest, because it talks a lot about group practices and norms, vs. “What it says here in the book” – but I think these are also interesting challenges, and again, food for thought and learning an army deeply. The thing that comes to mind as an example here is special characters. Many groups outright ban them. I’d hazard to say most narrative players avoid them.
Which makes things like discussion of Sisters lists oft revolving around “Are you taking Celestine, Vahl, or Both?” something of a false start. When the core of your army involves the characters that fall under “Also one of those, I suppose, for a particular relic…”, how does that change your tactics?
There is a challenge here, let’s be clear. It’s admittedly harder to find people to talk about this – one can figure out who are trying to get the most out of the codex in Matched Play by looking on various competitive ranking sites, but who is trying to get deep into a slightly different ruleset, with no rankings, and no particular prize for being first? But this is also not particularly deep tech – but for new players getting into the narrative scene, for people considering getting into an army book, or folks just wanting to get better? It would be nice if we wouldn’t skip a sixth of the rules.
It’s a challenge, but one I’d like to see the community rise to.
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