N18 First time running a Campaign

Boyda22

New Member
Jun 6, 2016
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Doncaster
Hello Hiver’s

Has anybody who has run a campaign previously provide any hints or tips for me please?
I am running our first campaign in Doncaster Uk, we have been able to assemble and wrangle a few BB and 40k players together and have a dominion campaign planned out. Gang wise it’s looking like the house gangs been used.

Any advice would be helpful, both what didn’t work and what worked well.
Thanks
 
Get an income tax for the gangs based on numbers to stop People just hoard building and make an underdog bonus, we use +1xp per 100 difference in rating for survival and +1 to the income roll per 100 (eg 378 difference= +3xp and +3 to d6x* income) makes it worth trying to go at the big boys ;)
 
Unless your guys are all seasoned vets, I'd suggest that you add a grudge phase before starting the campaign proper.

The grudge phase is just a short campaign phase where everyone plays each other once, no territory is exchanged or won and each gang is just earning from their settlement and the game winnings. Keep things simple, so no house favours/ agents, sub-plots, allies etc and I found it useful to restrict the scenarios to smaller nos of fighters. (In my current campaign I restricted it to small Tunnel Skirmish, Border Dispute and the Marauders.

At the end of the phase you have downtime and 250 creds for recruitment and then start the campaign proper.

It's a good opportunity for players to get the rules straight in their heads without being overloaded, earn a bit of xp and see their gang grow and get invested. It also seems to alleviate some of the snow balling that can happen where the more successful gangs early on, start to run away with things. It can be a useful story telling/ building device because you're essentially playing a prequel phase to the actual campaign.

I've also found that letting the 2 lowest rated gangs (You can also go off wealth if people are hoarding creds to try and take advantage) a roll on the house favours table at the start of each campaign week works quite well to keep everyone in with a fighting chance.
 
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Get an income tax for the gangs based on numbers to stop People just hoard building and make an underdog bonus, we use +1xp per 100 difference in rating for survival and +1 to the income roll per 100 (eg 378 difference= +3xp and +3 to d6x* income) makes it worth trying to go at the big boys ;)
That's a good idea.

I may well steal this (With some tweaks perhaps).
 
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The grudge phase would also allow for the inevitable death of multiple gang leaders in the first game that seem to happen in every campaign to be reset, as I had to do with 3 gangs in our most recent campaign....
 
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I lost my Stimmer in game 2 of the grudge phase. 1/5 of my entire gang rating turned into super heated steam by a Van-Saar melta gun. 😆

I managed to catch up and now we're coming to the close of phase 2, have the second highest ranking and the most territories.

The narrative my gang has been on, this campaign, has been great, clawing their way back up the rankings and seeking revenge.


I don't think that would have been possible, if we played a straight Dominion Campaign.
 
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General advice, for Arbitrating, I'd say:

Look after your weaker players and try to boost them up, rather than pull down the stronger.

You can do that with good scenario tables and arbitrated narratives.

In our current campaign I've borrowed the goonhammer scenario table with some tweaks.

Each player rolls a d6 to get a 2d6 result, which will take them to a choice of 3 or 4 missions. They then roll off again and the lowest rated gang gets to add +1 to their roll for each 100 creds of difference and the highest roll gets to choose from those 3 or 4.

I also recently suggested to the lowest two rated gangs that instead of rolling on the table they could play each other at forgotten riches or escape the badzone - both quite profitable scenarios, and it brought them both back up to relative parity with everyone else and was a really exciting game. Both gangs really wanted those loot crates!

So, yeah, don't be scared to intercede a little bit on behalf of your weaker gangs (Unless it's you of course, the Arbiter has to be whiter than white and can't be seen to be abusing power for personal gain).

The weaker gangs will appreciate it and the stronger gangs generally don't begrudge it.