NEOs around the world, get your hands on last month’s White Dwarf 493, as it is the start of everything you need to set up your own local club campaign!
“The Slidecrown Sundering” is a new narrative campaign from White Dwarf’s Bunker, that gives gaming clubs around the world the tools they need to run their own games and campaigns.
It is a narrative campaign for Age of Sigmar and Warcry, with participation in the style of Animosity Campaigns: players can join in by playing games, hobbying, writing short stories, staged dioramas or even artwork! Scoring is earned not by games won, but by amount of participation by players.
The brainchild of Leila Craven, background writer for the Age of Sigmar studio at GW, and an experienced NEO in particular in managing online campaigns, this campaign brings the best practices of managing team multiplayer narrative campaigns to players across the world!
It is truly a privilege to have a dedicated narrative writer like them creating this kind of material for all of us.
To entice players to participate, the campaign rewards players on the winning team with artefacts for AoS Path to Glory or Warcry narrative mode.
The article calls for a campaign organizer to manage the campaign, who can be a player themselves or not. It also shares suggestions for managing player scoring and how long to space out the campaign turns, so that players have time to participate at a comfortable pace.
Campaign organizers/managers are always something we recommend here at the NEON (normally a NEO themselves, even if they are playing in the campaign and are not necessarily running an event). It is crucial for someone to be “the responsible adult” and keeping track of campaign duties, but more seriously, in the experience we have heard from NEOs out there, players do want someone to step forward and take that burden: someone impartial, who has the best interests of the campaign in mind, and whom they can trust to solve disputes.
In the words of a wise NEO, “Players may be difficult, complaining and arguing with you, but if they are not leaving the campaign, that just means they are engaged. That’s how they express themselves. Just keep doing what you are doing.”
THE CAMPAIGN RULES
There will be three stages in the campaign, each suggested to last 1 month: 3 weeks for players to engage in games and hobby, and one week for the campaign organizer to compile results and (as suggested in the article, in good Animosity Campaigns style) explain how player actions and stories made the story evolve, and share the narrative outcome that the scores determined by the players led to.
Each stage of the campaign will be presented in a separate White Dwarf issue for the next months, together with the potential resolutions for the previous campaign turn. The first stage, “Traverse the Forests”, has already been revealed last month.
The three player “teams”, the Preservers, Obliterators and Rogues, were designed to be flexible and not constrained to Grand Alliances. The article explains how factions that normally would not work together can chase a similar goal. A faction rarely of a very protecting-kind could be interested in saving the isle (say, gargants who want to protect their bountiful fishing spot), or an otherwise well-meaning City of Sigmar may need to steal the power of the crown to save their cursed land.
The launching issue for the campaign, White Dwarf 493, comes with a cardboard insert containing the Whithervane, a dial the club can use to indicate the score the campaign is currently at, and the level of destruction happening in the Slidecrown Isle. The score advances more spaces in latter campaign turns, raising the stakes in each campaign stage.
Each stage of the campaign also comes with unique narrative battleplans and special rules player can optionally use, to bring the Slidecrown Isle and the Realm of Ghyran to life in their games.
At each new stage of the campaign, Leila will show how the campaign is playing out with the group in the Games Workshop studio, giving examples of how campaign organizers can run it in their own clubs, with the same rules and information.
For those wanting to join online…
If you don’t have a local club playing Age of Sigmar or Warcry, but would love to participate in this campaign, The Great Weave is running the Slidecrown Sundering as an online worldwide campaign, where players can use the platform’s narrative-page creating system to create posts directly on their campaign page, and the Great Weave discord to participate in secret team chatrooms.
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What do you think about this campaign?
Are you planning on organizing and running this campaign for your local club, or convincing your clubmates to band together to participate?
Leave your comments below!
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