Summer 2023 Campaign

Welcome to the Summer 2023 Kill Team Campaign!

We’ll be making some dramatic changes to how this campaign will be run, so I wanted to take a moment, outside of the 40K universe, to describe how things will go.

Let’s start with the biggest change: no more XP tracking.

That’s right—no more XP tracking for your troops. In discussions with other players over the last three campaigns, a clear trend was the feeling that XP tracking, battle honors, and battle scars were interesting mechanics but ultimately ones that only added complexity to the game. Think of all times we’ve all had to go back to our notes or books or the web to double-check the wording on a particular battle honor. Or when you’ve forgotten about a battle scar until halfway through a game. It brings additional confusing steps that we want to streamline away.

What does that mean for your teams? Well, it means we’ll be playing something more akin to Matched Play. Teams will be 20 unit rosters with at least one faction keyword in common. All of the Matched Play roster rules are in effect.

The exception is that we will expand upon the Hero’s Journey idea from the most recent campaign. When creating your team, you will select any one unit from your roster to be your Hero. That Hero’s Journey will have specific goals to achieve, and rewards to gain that will increase their power. Once that Hero’s journey has been completed you may select another operative to take on a Hero’s Journey, but only one Hero can be deployed on a Kill Team at a time. We’ll elaborate on updates to the existing Hero’s Journey archetypes soon.

Now, this is not to say you can’t continue to name your units and craft stories around them. In fact, we strongly encourage you to do so and to share your stories! This change is meant to balance the playing field. We’re an extremely diverse group of players with varying time commitments and goals for the campaign. Moving into this modified Matched Play format prevents a team from overmatching another team based on the number of battle honors achieved via XP or rare equipment earned by completing a Spec Op. This also allows players to drop into and out of the campaign easily. A newcomer won’t have to face down a fully kitted-out team of grizzled and revered operatives.

To recap team building: Matched Play rosters, with one hero unit tied to a Hero’s Journey of your choosing. No battle honors, battle scars, requisition points, strategic assets, or rare equipment.

Part II - The Metagame/Storytelling Layer

Let’s start with a simple disclaimer: THIS IS COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. You can engage in the metagame as much or as little as you wish. It will not affect anything in-game. You will only be required to move your team around the map after a Challenge victory or defeat.

Like the last two campaigns, we’ll have a metagame layer. Like the last section, we’ll talk about the gameplay parts here and leave the in-universe flavor for another post.

As before, we’ll have a territory map. You will move around the map, one square at a time, issuing challenges to players on neighboring squares and skirmishing with more distant players.

Instead of accumulating resources by controlling a square, you’ll be working for Influence. Any given square will have at least 2 possible Influence types that may be acquired. You will list your Influence priority, and Influence will be awarded at the beginning of the week, just like last time. Influence will be tied to Archetypes, however. This will be important in just a few paragraphs!

• Seek and Destroy -> Mayhem

• Recon -> Intelligence

• Infiltration -> Subversion

• Security -> Control

Where things differ is how you’ll be able to use your Influence. With this campaign, we’ll be introducing Narrative Goals. These goals should be inspiration for the story of your team. These should be viewed as starting prompts, and if you want to re-write them, go for it! We’ll have more to say on those prompts later, but for now, let’s focus on how you’ll achieve your Narrative Goals.

Narrative Goals will be organized by your team’s Archetype. That’s Seek and Destroy, Recon, Infiltration, and Security. To complete a Narrative Goal, you’ll need to achieve one of two tasks as listed here:

• Seek and Destroy or Infiltration

  • Achieve 20 total Tac Op VPs in a single archetype

  • 70 APL worth of enemy operatives incapacitated

• Recon or Security

  • Achieve 20 total Tac Op VPs in a single archetype

  • 30 APL worth of friendly operatives surviving at the end of games

These goals will be reviewed at the end of each month. Here’s where it gets fun: you can spend your Influence at the end of the month to add points to any of your two tasks. For instance, if you are on an Infiltrate Narrative Goal and have eliminated 65 APL worth of opposing operatives, you can spend 5 Subversion to increase your number to 70 and complete your goal. Once you’ve achieved your goal, select a new Narrative Goal and work that into your story.

As Influence is earned through player actions, it will feed into a behind-the-scenes meter that will determine the fate of the grand narrative!

We’re sure there will be questions, however, we think it’s not as complicated as it may sound, so please ask away!