Crusade: Armageddon Is a Fascinating Dive into Warhammer 40k’s Grimdark Future

I find that the thing that prevents me from really digging into wargames, and especially the biggest scale stuff from Games Workshop, is a lack of personal investment. It is hard to drag me from painting individual models to painting a whole army’s worth on the speculative idea that I might play a random person at the local game store. Instead, I get motivated to assemble, paint, and base by the idea that there is some sort of story to be told that I could only really get to through the gameplay itself—the decisions I make, and the battles I win or lose, create some sort of post-game state that has some sort of stakes. 

Armageddon: Crusade is written as a kind of dossier on the planet Armageddon and the battles that happened there. You can learn about the near-constant war that has engrossed the world for many years and see maps and diagrams of the specifics of the planet. There’s an overview of the warfare involved in the “Assault on the Fire Wastes” as a kind of historical factual event, and there’s quite a bit of in-universe discussion of how that went and what the big maneuvers were. Then, of course, there are the Crusade campaign rules that explain how to build a force for the campaign and how to augment your battles with campaign-specific items and abilities. When your units are destroyed, you make choices about how their losses are felt after the battle. When your important characters survive and do well, they can inherit powerful relics with special campaign abilities. 

Across these mechanical expressions, which are layered onto the rules of standard Warhammer 40,000 play, you also interact with the mission structure of the Armageddon Campaign, which puts players into different alliances (Gatebreakers, Desecrators, or Marauders) and smashes them into each other in battles that, depending on who wins or loses, has an effect on the experience of the Assault on the Fire Wastes campaign. It’s a little like historical wargaming—we know what “happened historically” on Armageddon, but each instance of simulating events in that massive battle can land in different ways. At the end of the campaign, which takes place over four stages, a player alliance is going to win or lose. The Chaos will be repelled, or Chaos will win, or the third-party marauders will have gummed up the works to the point that there’s no clear victor on the planet. This is the complexity of 41st millennium warfare.

I really and truly did not intend to review this book. I picked it up because I am genuinely interested in what it would mean to structure some 40k games around something other than 1v1 fighting an opponent without any stakes. I was very happy to read the book and find that it exists as a kind of gateway into the science fiction arm of Warhammer and that it gave me enough understanding of the setting and a very specific war within the setting to make me, someone who is just reading and not playing, have a real investment in painting up some models and getting them into the storytelling that the book is pitching. I feel relatively certain this is not a thing that every wargamer needs or wants; it is a special flavor for people like me who need something to reel them in. Also, I am not even sure I would want to play a full campaign as written in Crusade: Armageddon. I find an undeniable pull, however, toward fitting some of these ideas and concepts into my next major wargaming foray, and without randomly picking the book up I would not have even known this was a kind of play that Warhammer 40,000 offered or considered. If you’re like me, and this is interesting to you, then it might be the flavor you’re missing.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.