I just posted the 4th mission scenario for our Combat Patrol tournament. As always, I’m not completely sure on how this one will work out, but I’m pretty happy with it so I thought I’d talk about it a little.

Structure

I think one neat aspect of the tournament is that it is indeed a tournament, but it also has a fairly strong campaign element, in a loose, fixed narrative sort of way. It’s structured somewhat like Space Hulk, where players aren’t making real campaign choices and the outcomes only affect the story in limited ways, but there is indeed a distinct narrative in play. From the start I’ve had a pretty clear conception of an abstract story I wanted the tournament to follow, and I hope that’s done a lot to tie the missions together, give them a more compelling background context, and make them more interesting via unique objectives and parameters.

How this works out is that each of the 5 rounds/6 scenarios is set within a generic campaign setting. There are no names or anything concrete, but there is an unmistakeable notion of an Attacker invading a settlement, city, or colony in the quest to obtain something, and a Defender hard pressed to stop their onslaught. A little flavor is injected into it by just a little bit of fluff in each writeup. To highlight the generic, inclusive nature of the campaign though, this is always done from the Defender’s perspective, but with different factions involved. So far we’ve had Guardsmen attacked by (Dark) Eldar, Orks escaping Tau, Marines swarmed by Tyranids, Imperials sieging Chaos Marines, and Dark Angels assaulting Imperials. Each mission also has a brief summary of the current plot point, and the Attacker and Defender roles. Most of the missions are asymmetric, with players swapping those two roles, further accentuating the narrative. On the other end, Jason has also been writing up little story blurbs to go with the results on the web, providing little vignettes of the campaign from the perspective of his Blood Angels.

Real campaign choices have or will show up in two places: The 3rd round had two missions that had similar goals (Annihilation), but very different setups. Which one we played was determined by how many games the Attackers and Defenders had respectively won in the first two rounds. Similarly, some parameters of the final mission, and of course the result of the campaign as a whole, will be determined by how the abstract Attackers and Defenders are doing.

Background

It doesn’t affect anything, but we do actually have a campaign map we’re following along, providing some imagery and geometric anchoring to the story:

First the Attacker smashed the outer defenses (Mission 1: Listening Post). Then the Defender tried to escape back to warn the others of the attack (Mission 2: Flight). In our case, they were not successful and the invasion swarmed the inner defenses (Mission 3a: Blood Melee), while in other universes the Defender was warned and the Attacker forced to attempt opening a new breach (Mission 3b: Gunline). Right now (Mission 4: Population), the Attacker has been largely halted, but a small raiding party has slipped into the settlement to pillage for some sort of artifact, knowledge, or person required for the next mission.

Mission 4: Population

In the current round, the Attacker is searching the area for a key required for the next mission and the ultimate conclusion of the campaign. Whether the key is a code, possessed psyker, ancient relic, or whatever, it doesn’t really matter. The Defender, of course, has to stop this. Although the terrain isn’t really specified and doesn’t matter too much, the mission is envisioned to be a battle in a city, village, base, or other developed area, representing the two brawling it out throughout the settlement. Both sides setup on opposite sides and then charge in to claim the objectives:

One note here is that the mission is symmetric. The primary reason for this is that we’re running the last two tournament rounds in one evening and there won’t be enough time to run two games for each one. I do really like the asymmetric missions so I almost kept that going into the last round, but I also really want people to play more than one person that night. Given that the club’s venue time is limited, I setup the mission so that it could work well with the match played as one game or two, the latter for us or other groups using it in the future.

Goals

The objectives are where Mission 4 starts to get interesting; at least, I think so. Each objective represents property or people that the Attacker is searching through, and the Defender trying to keep away from them. How this plays out in game terms is two-fold:

• Either player may shoot or assault the objective, treated as a very weak model, in order to destroy it. This yields 1 Ransack Point.
• Either player may hold an objective for an entire turn to claim it. This yields 2 Protection Points.

This represents the Attacker hacking computers, rifling files, stealing artifacts, torturing people, whatever. It also represents the Defender doing basically the same.
At the end of the game, victory is determined by the higher of a player’s Ransack or Protection Points. In other words, if you have 2 Ransack Points and 4 Protection Points, you would score 4 points to be compared to the other player.

Morality

The beauty of this is that it both fits within the symmetric setup, giving both players the same rules, and enables them to conceptually fill different roles. Further, it brings in an element of role playing. Are you going to kill and destroy all the objectives, or are you going to try and protect or claim them? This is accentuated a bit by one of the Bonus Points being for having Ransack or Protection Points, but not both.

I like this because it plays within the amorality of the 40k universe. Sure, the Attackers are probably bad guys. But maybe not. Maybe they’re just trying to stop something you’re too low down on the chain to know about. Similarly, the Defenders may not be good guys, even if they might have the more traditionally sympathetic role. There are a lot of factions in 40k that could easily decide it’s not worth risking people or material falling into enemy hands, and start preemptively slaughtering and destroying them. With these mission goals, each player has that choice as well, and needs to fit that into their strategic picture.

On top of that, the Bonus Point highlights just a little the harsh, dualistic push of much of 40k—you might not be purely good, or purely bad, but it’ll cost you just a little to compromise.

Tournament Stuff

Another reason for the symmetric setup is that I wanted to keep things very balanced and straightforward in the last rounds to ensure fairness across the board. It’s very easy for slight biases to creep in without notice, and while I think I’ve been vigilant about that in writing these missions, there have definitely been rounds that favored armies with lots of anti-vehicle for bunker busting, others that favored cheap transports for quick mobility, and so on. The previous missions certainly didn’t go over the top, but I wanted to take extra care to keep in-game effects simple in the last rounds. For example, I had originally been planning a set of stratagems for this mission in keeping with the City Fight theme, but in the end decided to keep it simpler. We’ll see how it works out this Sunday!