The Great Crusade - Enemies of the Emperor
Hello from beyond the interwebs.
As you may have seen by now the UB4H blog is all about the pre-heresy eras leading up to Horus' assault on Terra. One of those key eras being the Great Crusade, the golden age where mankind took to the stars in order to unite the disparate elements of humanity after the darkness of Old Night had ceased.
In all honesty I've always been a follower of the Great Crusade - more so than the Horus Heresy. I find this era far more evocative and exciting, both in terms of narrative and game play. Back in the time before Forge World provided models or rules for the Horus Heresy (or even the Badab War) myself and 100 other keen modellers were engaged in waging wars in the Horus Heresy era with a custom rule set and codecs for all the major factions written by Tempus Fugitives and play tested by us. It was off the back of playing these events through to the Siege of Terra that I started to thirst for something with a little more variety other than power armour vs boltgun roll offs. I had at that point thrown my hat firmly in to the 30K arena and as such had moved quite far away from Warhammer 40000 game play (I think this was around 4th edition) and the myriad of black primed models I'd accumulated in an attempt to stay 'current'. I loved the idea of crusading forces piercing the dark to rescue lost civilisations whilst battling untold alien menaces and this was the start of a really engaging project.
So I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) and began writing rules for things that inspired me. At the time I was reading Fulgrim and the Laer seemed like such a fantastic concept - especially as they seemed to be sticking it to the Emperor's Children in a succinct way. I poured over the text, taking on board all the descriptions and implied nuances and crafting an army list of units from the novel and then after getting a feel for their culture I made some units that weren't mentioned but were hinted at. My research also took me to Black Library events in order to quiz the authors themselves about their vision for these races, this really started the ball rolling and I found as i was writing, more units, races and illustrations came rolling out of Black Library with the advent of the hardback heresy novels.
Eventually I had the Laer army list, I really enjoyed researching and writing the piece so I decided to continue, pulling out all the instances of xenos and lost human civilisations that were mentioned and crafting them into an emerging format. Eventually I had one volume of the Great Crusade books done with custom wargear, weapons, special rules and around seven units per faction.
The first volume came easily but as more novels were released more opportunity to write further factions presented itself. I hit a bit of a road bump at the start of writing book 2 but happily I completed the second volume this summer just gone - around 3 years after those first few word files depicting the rules for a Laeran Warrior.
I'm currently still reviewing the second volume for mistakes (of which there are a few) but it is out in the wild for anyone interested in fielding the exotic races depicted in a game against an expeditionary force. They can both be found here:
The Great Crusade Book 1: Conquest
As you may have seen by now the UB4H blog is all about the pre-heresy eras leading up to Horus' assault on Terra. One of those key eras being the Great Crusade, the golden age where mankind took to the stars in order to unite the disparate elements of humanity after the darkness of Old Night had ceased.
In all honesty I've always been a follower of the Great Crusade - more so than the Horus Heresy. I find this era far more evocative and exciting, both in terms of narrative and game play. Back in the time before Forge World provided models or rules for the Horus Heresy (or even the Badab War) myself and 100 other keen modellers were engaged in waging wars in the Horus Heresy era with a custom rule set and codecs for all the major factions written by Tempus Fugitives and play tested by us. It was off the back of playing these events through to the Siege of Terra that I started to thirst for something with a little more variety other than power armour vs boltgun roll offs. I had at that point thrown my hat firmly in to the 30K arena and as such had moved quite far away from Warhammer 40000 game play (I think this was around 4th edition) and the myriad of black primed models I'd accumulated in an attempt to stay 'current'. I loved the idea of crusading forces piercing the dark to rescue lost civilisations whilst battling untold alien menaces and this was the start of a really engaging project.
So I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) and began writing rules for things that inspired me. At the time I was reading Fulgrim and the Laer seemed like such a fantastic concept - especially as they seemed to be sticking it to the Emperor's Children in a succinct way. I poured over the text, taking on board all the descriptions and implied nuances and crafting an army list of units from the novel and then after getting a feel for their culture I made some units that weren't mentioned but were hinted at. My research also took me to Black Library events in order to quiz the authors themselves about their vision for these races, this really started the ball rolling and I found as i was writing, more units, races and illustrations came rolling out of Black Library with the advent of the hardback heresy novels.
Eventually I had the Laer army list, I really enjoyed researching and writing the piece so I decided to continue, pulling out all the instances of xenos and lost human civilisations that were mentioned and crafting them into an emerging format. Eventually I had one volume of the Great Crusade books done with custom wargear, weapons, special rules and around seven units per faction.
The first volume came easily but as more novels were released more opportunity to write further factions presented itself. I hit a bit of a road bump at the start of writing book 2 but happily I completed the second volume this summer just gone - around 3 years after those first few word files depicting the rules for a Laeran Warrior.
I'm currently still reviewing the second volume for mistakes (of which there are a few) but it is out in the wild for anyone interested in fielding the exotic races depicted in a game against an expeditionary force. They can both be found here:
The Great Crusade Book 1: Conquest
The Great Crusade Book 2: Conflict
So enamoured by the era I've actually put together a series of events which act as an escalation build along, pitching 1000pts of Xenos against 1000pts of Imperium in random mixed doubles for a weekend of mayhem and fun and then being followed by two further events allowing players to build a xenos army of up to 3000pts for mainline pitched battles using the Age of Darkness rulebook.
The event can be found HERE
If the Great Crusade excites you as much as it does me we'd love to see you there with your hobby projects.
See you soon
KF
So enamoured by the era I've actually put together a series of events which act as an escalation build along, pitching 1000pts of Xenos against 1000pts of Imperium in random mixed doubles for a weekend of mayhem and fun and then being followed by two further events allowing players to build a xenos army of up to 3000pts for mainline pitched battles using the Age of Darkness rulebook.
The event can be found HERE
If the Great Crusade excites you as much as it does me we'd love to see you there with your hobby projects.
See you soon
KF
links are broken
ReplyDeleteWe’ll look into that thanks for letting us know
DeleteHi, links still broken for Books One and Two. Book Three does seem to be available.
ReplyDeleteHey Ted - thanks for the heads-up. I'm hoping I've now fixed these.
DeletePlease stayed tuned as I'm in the process of moving these over to the new version of the Horus Heresy ruleset.
Happy gaming.