A Yarn Of Some Gamers - A One Page Rules Slow-Grow Campaign

Recently, while reading White Dwarf I came across “A Tale of Four Warlords” and, like the horse Artax, in the Neverending Story, I got sucked in immediately.

I know there’s been something like fourteen series of these, but I think I could count the number of White Dwafs I've read on the fingers of one hand so the concept is very new to me. Shocking, I know.

I love me a slow grow campaing and having suffered the failure of an Old World slow grow I attempted at the time of its release, I lovingly looked at the boxes of my semi-started armies and thought “it’s time”.

I put the idea out to the One Page Rules group at my local, we tossed a coin deciding between Grimdark Future or Age of Fantasy, and fate decided the time came for my Guardsmen to make the shift from bare plastic grey to Basilicanum Grey instead.

I quickly whipped up a rules pack based on the ATFG rules, adjusting for a few things to make it fit within OPR, and agreed on some house rules with the other guys. The stage was set and actually felt manageable.

The basis is formed of six stages, each two-months long. Each stage will increase the total army point value by 250 points, which is made even more manageable by the fact One Page Rules units are quite pricey, so you will need fewer models to construct an army than you would in 40k.

That’s not a dig at Warhammer - grand armies on the table look great, but I can be lazy as hell and I picked a horde army, so that was a win in my books.

Additional points will be available for games played, games won, leveling up units and being the best sporting player of the campaign. In theory, at the end of those six rounds each of us will have a complete, and painted 2000 point army. That's the plan, anyway…

Over the next few posts, I will publish a series about the campaign’s progess, describing the overarching narrative as well as talking about the armies, their lore and painting methods, starting with...

The Setting

The campaign will be set on the fictional world of Caldaris.

It’s a mining/fabrication world; the raw resources torn out of the ground are processed and exported, or utilised in the production of electronic components for commercial and military systems.

The harsh working conditions enforced by the planetary governor Tal Sterris sparked a labour rebellion, which spread like wildifire. The rebels are now quickly gaining ground taking control of the mines , swelling their numbers with freed workers and loudly proclaiming independence.

This has obviously inconveniently dropped the export quotas, which is unacceptable. All of the various factions within our group will have their own agendas and range from planetary peace keeping forces trying to contain the insurrection, to clandestine operations carried out by hoestile forces to fulfil their own agendas.

In the next post of the series, I'll go over my faction, the ideas behind the paint scheme and how it fits into the overall narrative.

See you all soon x