After a lot of thinking and wrangling, I’ve finally gotten the 2008 WHFB Campaign together for my wargaming group.

A little backstory: I belong to a wargaming club named “The Piqua Underground Gaming Society” (or PUGS) which meets about once a month of so to play Warhammer.  Several years back the chairperson of the club, my arch-rival and good friend Vince, decided to start doing campaigns, ala the old Mighty Empires rules.  When the General’s Compendium came out, the campaigns really kicked into gear.

Since then, we’ve done map campaigns, territory campaigns, expansion campaigns, and all sorts of things (including siege and naval battles).  Right now we’re finishing up another “territory” campaign where the players exhaust their special territories’ resources as the campaign wears on.  As it stands now, I’m a lock for at least second place with my hardy dwarfs.

As that campaigns wraps up, another must take its place, and I was in charge of putting the camapign together.  We usually vacillate between large army campaigns and small army ones.  The territory campaign was for large (2500+) armies, so I decided to go small, especially with several new players interested in joining.

So I decided to go with Warhammer Warbands, and a simple “points” campaign where each player chooses a side (or sides, in this case) and rack up points towards a grand total.  I set the campaign during the Storm of Chaos, which is in my mind the archtypical “Warhammer World War” event.  Chaos is the uber-villain of the Warhammer world (sorry, Vampire Counts and Dark Elves, but you know it to be true) and the Empire, for all its gothic pathos, the group I think we’re supposed to identify with the most.  The current campaign depicts of the off-shoot threads of the invasion, a push into Kislev by one of Archaon’s lieutenants.

One innovation (for us, at least) in this campaign is that players can field more than one army.  One difficulty we’ve had with two-sided campaigns is when a player of team A and another player of team A are the only ones who show up for a game day.  This way, the more common players can field multiple warbands or either one side or the other, or the amorphous gray area in between.  This also helps a big problem of mine, namely my inability to decide between what armies to use for six months up to a year.  I’ve been dithering between Chaos and Orcs, but now I can do both (Orcs being one of the “shadow” armies of the campaign). 

The really small size also means that the new players can field their own armies, and I might actually get them painted as well.  For the fans of the big battles, I’m throwing in three mega-battles at regular intervals during the season.

I’ve put in a new page where info about the campaign, including a download of the rules, can be found.  I’ll also be adding pics of the warbands, mine and others, as they are taken.  Hopefully I’ll get a battle report or two posted here as well.

By the way, before anyone comments, I have spotted at least one typo in the handout I made.  Sigh.