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New rules for Aqshian narrative campaigns are coming to Age of Sigmar battlefields.
Age of Sigmar’s annual General’s Handbook is coming soon, and this year the focus is on the fiery realm of Aqshy. Each year the ‘Handbook is themed around a different Realm, shaping both tournament and campaign play alike. This year, the focus on Aqshy provides a scorched setting for your Crusade campaigns.
Three Crusades
Campaign play is one of the best ways to play a war game but one-size-fits-all campaign formats have some serious limitations. To address that, this year the General’s Handbook offers three distinct formats of Crusade play. Each is aimed at campaigns of differing length franging from one-day events to an ongoing classic style that can take months to play through.
After settling on one of the three options you’ll be able to choose battleplans for the event as you like. The book offers a number of narratively appropriate warpaths and recommends some particularly thematic battleplans. Tournament Organizers can use this information to set battleplans for each day of their event to simplify terrain set up. A new, final battleplan is also here to keep things fun at the end of a long event session.
For example, here are the three warpaths suggested for Ash Road Foray (one day) events. These three battleplans are intended to create a simple but compelling story for all particpants with a meaningful beginning, middle, and end.
If you’re playing the Heartblood Offensive Crusade, you’ll begin with Battleplan 2: the Blood Stained Coast, in which armies are battling over emberstone slivers.
Once you’ve gained some slivers you can use them to create Emerstone-Augmented Weapons as a special ability in any Combat Phase.
Slivers in hand (or claw, or tentacle, or…) your next game will use Battleplan 5 — What’s Yours is Ours. This is a really dynamic scenario in which the values of certain objectives increase on alternate rounds. Control both at the right time and you could jump ahead in victory points.
This all culiminates in the final battle of the Crusade, Battleplan 11 — Escape from the Coast. As combatants struggle to escape the toxic shores with their horde of emberstone the underdog gains a nasty ability. To the Ships! lets the underdog remove certain objectives from the board and gaining a significant tactical advantage.
Battle TacticsThe new General’s Handbook is accompanied by a set of six battle tactics cards to add some additional flavor to your games. Each card offers three tiers of battle tactics; Affray, Strike, and Domination. You must complete these tactics in ascending order, each unlocking the next beginning with Afray and ending with Domination.
From this deck you can choose two cards and can complete a tactic from both during each of your turns.
This is really cool stuff and I am really enjoying the annual thematic Generals Handbooks. Just last year some friends and I had a fantastic time playing the Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast campaign which was also set in Aqshy. I can see returning to that campaign sometime in the future and mixing in all this fun stuff on top of it for a really immersive experience.
Are you playing narratively in the Age of Sigmar?
Simon Berman has been a wargamer since 1993 and has worked in the tabletop games industry since 2008 as a staff writer for the first three editions of WARMACHINE and HORDES. These days he's the General President of the Brush Wielders Union, a worldwide organization of miniatures painters of all skill levels, a freelance games writer who has contributed to a number of roleplaying games like Eclipse Phase, Dune: Adventures in the Imperium, and The Hammer and the Stake. He runs his own small-press publishing company, Strix Publishing, and paints more miniatures than he can keep track of. Simon lives with his wife in Tacoma, Washington along with a number of cats and a pack of savage wiener dogs.
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