Efengie Campaign: The Dawning of a New Age (of Sigmar)

The fifth season of the Efengie Campaign has begun!  In the past, players have told me that they'd like to see a continuation of the Efengie storyline (rather than expand to other mortal realms), so I figured I'd expand by taking a look at the larger world around Eucebium.  In the first Game Day of season 5, Eucebium has been dragged into a long-raging war between the neighboring regions of Kytos and Lamellia!

I've continued with the mechanic of having the scenario objectives impact other battles at the event.  This time, controlling Duardin Relics let players heal units in other battles, while controlling the River of Wrath at Furyford let units move in other battles.  The River of Wrath ability caused some interesting situations at times with units using the free move to retreat from combat and other weirdness.  Because these abilities don't have very clear timing on them, the way I handle it is by saying that if the timing is important, these effects don't actually take place until the end of the current phase.

The "Diplomacy" objective ended up being kind of funny.  In round 1, the Freeguild player was grossly outnumbered by Slaaneshi daemons so much so that his Underdog score was I think 9.  So every time he scored any Laurels of Victory, he got another 9 at the end of turn.  The Slaanesh player started summoning Heralds of Slaanesh who then stood around doing diplomacy on the remaining Freeguild heroes.  Their final score was somewhere in the high 30s high 60s, but Freeguild pulled it out in the end.

We were lucky enough to have players evenly distribute themselves between the three nations.  At the event Eucebium was represented by Nurgle and Freeguild, Kytos was represented by Khorne and Idoneth Deepkin, and Lamellia was represented by Slaanesh and Gutbusters.  Eucebium really put itself on the map at this event with both Nurgle and Freeguild winning both of their battles.

I also am trying something new in terms of "Triumph" abilities.  In the post-mortem assessment of season 4, something players asked for was more continuity and character growth between Game Day events.  So I cooked up a new sort of Triumph effect.  I printed cards that I gave the players the first time one of their Heroes scored points for Diplomacy.  The card gives the Hero a special command ability, has a built in recovery mechanic, and can be held from event to event.  These cards were inspired by Legacy games like Gloomhaven, Warhammer Quest, and Betrayal Legacy (I haven't played much in the way of Legacy games, but I've seen them played enough to get the basic ideas).

My hope is that by giving units special abilities, artefacts, and so forth for their exploits in battle I can give the narrative a little more continuity and give players some amount of narrative to fight for (units fleeing to save themselves, returning to battle at the opportune moment, and of course having names at all).  Next month, I'll be doing a similar thing with the Legendary Artefacts from GHB 2018.