Sunday 14 December 2014

Continuation on a Narrative; The Horus Heresy

Hey all

Medge back again. This evenings post is a follow up on my last one on narrative gaming.

Shortly after uploading the last one I realised I missed out probably THE largest on-going narrative campaign in table-top gaming; The Horus Heresy.

The Horus Heresy represents every narrative fan-boys dream. Forge World (http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/#&panel1-1) have committed themselves to making the Heresy in it's entirety. Let's put that into perspective; they're talking about putting together a series of source books chronicling eight years of fictional history spanning the galaxy.

We're only 2 years into their release schedule, the narrative is little more than 3 years into the story. and in that time we've seen the release of 99 brand new kits, not including all of the weapons and upgrade options allowing you to customise your models. We've seen three amazing books drop that allow players to run a campaign across the opening three years of War, the Istvaan Campaign, followed by a new fourth book which act's as the campaigns Epilogue, providing further back story and detailed rules for running your own campaign.

So that's models, rules, never-before-seen story, and everything you'll need to run a campaign!

What more could we ask for?

Well . . . we've not yet considered the Black Library's (http://www.blacklibrary.com/) contribution yet.

The popularity of the Forge World Horus Heresy series is nothing compared to the novels. The Damnation of Pythos, the newest one on my shelf, was novel number 30 in a series rumored to be finishing at 50 novels (not including the Audio Dramas, the Limited Editions, the Short-Story compilations and the miniature Christmas releases) . . . yeah right!! This thing will be going till I die!

The novel series has introduction hundreds of characters, and killed off more than a fair few of them, providing Gamers like ourselves with an almost limitless pool of characters to try and model and get onto the tabletop. For those with a knack for detail, it also provides players with the resources for their own scenarios to play out on the tabletop. It will be a while before Forge World catch up with the Black Library (simply because BL have about 8 authors working on the novels, compared to the 2 FW have! Not very fair if you ask me!) and so for a long while a lot of the story elements will remain as Black Library stories only.

That's not to say a brave few haven't pushed against that restriction and made something really special!

I was lucky enough last year to play in the finale of a 3 year campaign hosted by TemplarsCrusade01 (https://www.youtube.com/user/TemplarsCrusade01), a fantastic modeler and a great inspiration. Over the campaign we house-made rules for scenarios, Primarchs, characters and squads for every Legion there was, and had immense fun doing it! Nothing was off limits, and we scoured every page of source material to try and make the campaign as true to the books as we could!

The key for us was to use as much material as we could, and to not be afraid of getting a little silly! What started out as 18 friends from Leamington Spa rapidly because 70+ people from across Europe and the US. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, and I was truly honored to be a part of it.

And it was definitely the best example I could give of a great Narrative campaign!

Right! That's all from me! Please like, share, subscribe and suggest - always looking for new things to ramble about.

Coming up in the next few posts, I'll continue talking about gaming philosophies, focused next time on competitive gaming, and based on a request I'll follow up on some details about how I try to create a good narrative campaign, using my Warzone and Batman campaigns as examples.

As always, happy hobby everybody!

Till next time

Medge

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