So as my local Games Workshop is gearing up for its next narrative campaign, a series of story-driven games with special game modes and objectives that we've made and written ourselves, I find myself wondering if anyone else has had one of these big campaigns. For example, the first one we did gets affectionately referred to as the Realm of Mannfred campaign, the story we wrote going that Mannfred, partially driven by the idea that he continued his quest for power in the Mortal Realms after he failed to become an Incarnate and partially due to his fear of Nagash punishing him for fucking up the Old World like he did by backstabbing the Incarnates, managed to harness power from each of the Mortal Realms, binding them into eight artifacts of power that he used to create his own Realm with that he could rule and hide from Nagash. The campaign went along as we all wound up fighting over these eight artifacts so that we might use them for our own purposes, with each game revolving around trying to aquire one from a hidden area on the board or trying to steal one from another army. If you had one, you could give it to one of your heroes to give them buffs, such as the Beasts artifact granting bonuses to the hero's To Wound rolls and Damage stats, or the Light artifact giving bonuses to Movement, Attacks, and To Hit. It all ended when we all clashed in a big team battle to fight over who got to take Mannfred's power, while also fighting a Neutral Mannfred army atop a great floating Ghost Ship that fired cannons at the battlefield every turn. It ended when Nagash, who was being fielded by an Undead player, boarded the ship and killed Mannfred before the game ended where he went on to devour Mannfred's Realm to increase his own godly power, rendering the artifacts inert with Mannfred's death. While I prepare for this upcoming Relics of Karl Franz campaign which sounds like a lot of fun, I wonder if any of you have had big campaigns like this before, and if so what were the initial plots and how were they resolved?
I love narrative campaigns! I've only ever been to small 2 day campaigns which wind up being something like a softcore tournament but I love them nonetheless. My "local" GWs haven't done narrative stuff for a while (or at least none that I'm aware of). It seems people are more competitively focused around here. The last one I went to was a 40k escalation campaign called "the Cando Incident" (which was a long time ago now). The planet had a huge deposit of ancient information and lore that was controlled by the world's ruling Clans. The Clans went to war with one another and started enlisting help from off world. Eventually it became all out war as the Clans lost control of the situation. The fighting intensified and the planet began to collapse in on itself. In the end the Imperium escaped with a hoard of stolen knowledge and the planet was destroyed. I came dead last and won an award for being the only person the whole weekend who never managed to claim an objective. Good times