Path to Glory Campaign Part I
‘The Realm of Chaos is not truly a Mortal Realm at all, but a vile and nightmarish reality only tangentially linked to the rest of creation. It is the home of the Dark Gods and the legions of hellspawn that are formed from their power, each cursed daemon—from the most spiteful imp to the fiercest monster—created from dark emotion.’ –Age of Sigmar Core Book
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‘The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even then
that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation.’ –Frankenstein
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‘There is glory to be found even in the darkest depths of despair, and this particular depth is black as pitch. Onward, brothers and sisters, I think I can see a light shining.’ –Witch Hunter Varsyn Greatback before his untimely disappearance.
After
many debates over how we should tackle a collaborative project, Laura and I are embarking on a Path to Glory campaign! Each of us will be
creating a bespoke warband that will grow, evolve and die over a series of
games set in the Realm of Chaos in Age of Sigmar. Alongside these warbands, we
will be creating a board to play on, lots of terrain, NPCs, maps and lore to
help enliven the experience even more so. And in a new series in this blog,
I’ll be cataloguing our progress as our warbands grow and change, which will
include updated maps, battle reports, lore and more!
To
start off, we decided to use the warband creation rules from the original Path
to Glory which Laura luckily has a copy of and translate the stats so we could
play using Age of Sigmar skirmish. The older rules allowed for smaller and
weirder warbands than the newer ones so neither of us ended up with a Greater
Daemon right away. I decided on Khorne for my warband as it was the Chaos god I
had never thought of exploring before, while Laura decided on Tzeentch as she
had some fun conversion ideas up her sleeve.
As per
the rules, we both started with 35 favour points which we could spend on
rolling for recruits to our warbands, upgrading our fighters or selecting new
ones. In addition to this, we each started with a Chaos Lord with a single
additional blessing as we thought that would be fun. I paid an additional four
favour to start with my lord mounted.
The cheaper table |
We had a lot of fun rolling our
sets of 2D6s and putting together our warbands. I kept paying more Favour to
roll on the second (and more expensive) table in hope of getting a Bloodletter,
but kept missing them! We agreed for our starting warband that we’d ignore the
rule that allowed you to pay favour to change the result as it made it a bit
more random and fun, but we might include that in subsequent games.
After a
short while of rolling and deliberating, our warbands ended up looking like
this:
Champion of Khorne, mounted, with Chaos Armour and Hand Weapon. Upgrade rolled: 5 Bloodletters may be summoned for free in the first/ next game.
1 Knight of Chaos
1 Chosen of Chaos with Great Weapon
1 Troll
3 Marauders
2 Beastmen with Great Weapons
And
Laura’s Tzeentch Warband:
Champion of Tzeentch. Upgrade rolled: Bestial Visage
1 Minotaur
2 Knights of Chaos
3 Chaos Warhounds
1 Beastman with shield
Of
course, these warbands will be added and subtracted to/ from as the campaign
progresses—there’s even a chance for permadeath, our characters to turn into
spawn—or even ascend to Daemonhood! With our warbands rolled for (and us
itching to play with more dice) we hunted through our bits and set to work on
creating some models for our warbands.
Bloodletters |
Naturally,
I thought a good place to start would be to create models that weren’t
technically part of my Warband—a pair of Bloodletters. I had this conversion
idea in mind for a while though, so I thought this was the perfect opportunity
to indulge it! I won’t be able to take advantage of the full five free
Bloodletters that I rolled however, but I might be able to recruit this pair
later. They’re converted from Warcry Furies with Unmade heads, as well as parts
from the Gargant, Corpse Grinder Cult, Skull Set and Bladegheist Revenants.
I decided to give them names by
rolling on the Khorne Name Generator in the Realm of Chaos book, ending up with
O’Aeu’Aerff’Aph’Da and Mmks’Qdhbh’Zfolul—try saying those three times fast.
Marauders |
At this time, Laura was overtaking me quickly in terms of models built (see below), so I decided to start on a couple of my Marauders—I went less for a Viking/ barbarian look and leaned further into a murder/ sacrificial cult vibe, differentiating them from Daughters of Khaine with their butcher knives and brass.
My Khorne Warband |
Here are (ex-)handmaids, Vesellia and Khat, adorned with a suitable amount of gore (all-purpose glue). They’re converted from Blissbarb Archers with parts from the Unmade, Skull Set, Cathallar, Repentia and Rogue Trader.
I decided this was a good
starting point to get a grip of my Khorne aesthetic. Colourless as always.
Let’s take a look at Laura’s Tzeentian offerings:
Zosimos |
This is Zosimos the Illuminated
from The Church of the Cosmic Lion, leader of an Alchemical Cult travelling
into the Realm of Chaos. More lore of his coming soon! Laura says: I love the weird crossover art in the
original Realm of Chaos art, so I quite like the idea that my champion might
not be native to the mortal realms at all, but has been trapped in the dominion
of Chaos for eons. In that spirit, Zosimos is converted from a Horus Heresy Gal
Vorbak model, with bits from the Thousand Sons Exalted Sorcerers, and even a
trinket or two from Magnus the Red!
All in all, those are our
offerings so far! Hopefully in the next post, we’ll have some lore and prose to
share with you for our warbands as well as some maps to set the scene of the
campaign. And very soon, when they clash in battle, a series of battle reports
to go with them!
Thank you for reading and stay tuned!
I look forward to following your journey! I had a ton of fun with this iteration of Path to Glory back when it was shiny and new :)
ReplyDeleteThis is a great start! I'm going to enjoy following this project. 🖤💀
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