How to Run a Warhammer 40K Crusade Campaign

A Crusade campaign turns a series of Warhammer 40,000 games into a connected story. Instead of building a fresh army for each match, you grow one force over time: units earn experience, gain Battle Honours, carry the Battle Scars of past defeats, and slowly become characters in their own right. This guide covers everything you need to run a Crusade for yourself or a group, from first setup to the final battle.

The Crusade campaign loop

Every Crusade — solo, duel, or club-wide league — runs on the same five beats. Get these in order once and the rest is repetition:

1. 1

   Agree the campaign format

   Settle how long it runs, who's playing, the starting supply limit (1000 points by default), and any narrative arc — before anyone builds an army.
2. 2

   Build your Crusade force

   Create an Order of Battle within the supply limit, recording each unit's points cost, equipment, and starting Crusade Card.
3. 3

   Create Crusade Cards

   Give every unit its own card to track experience, rank, Battle Honours, Battle Scars, and Crusade points.
4. 4

   Play and record battles

   Fight your games, then log the result for each player and award the experience and honours earned.
5. 5

   Progress through stages

   Group battles into narrative chapters, track tallies and victories, and advance the story to its conclusion.

What is a Crusade campaign?

Crusade is the narrative, campaign-focused way to play Warhammer 40,000. Where matched play builds a balanced army to a fixed points total for a single game, Crusade is about persistence and growth. Your army — your Crusade force — is recorded on an Order of Battle, and it carries forward from one game to the next.

The appeal is threefold. First, narrative progression: your games tell a story, and the army that fights the last battle of a campaign is visibly shaped by everything that came before. Second, army customisation: units gain upgrades, quirks, and wounds that no other player's army will have. Third, community: Crusade is built for groups who want a shared, evolving campaign rather than a string of disconnected pick-up games.

You can run a Crusade solo (tracking a single force across narrative missions), as a duel between two friends, or as a multiplayer campaign for a club or gaming group. The rules scale to all three, and the same core loop — play a battle, record what happened, grow your force — drives every version.

Before you start: setup and preparation

A little planning up front keeps a campaign on the rails. Before the first battle, agree the following with your group:

• Campaign length and pace. Decide roughly how many battles or how many weeks the campaign will run. A common pattern is one battle per player every week or two.
• Number of players and structure. Free-for-all, two rival factions, or a round-robin league all work. This shapes how you schedule games and track standings.
• Supply limit. The starting supply limit is 1000 points by default. Every player's Crusade force must fit within it. Some groups start smaller and raise it as the campaign grows.
• Narrative arc and stages. Optional but recommended: sketch a loose story split into stages (chapters), each with its own theme or objective.
• Materials. Each player needs their faction's rules, the Crusade rules, and a way to record their Order of Battle and Crusade Cards — paper, a spreadsheet, or a tracker like Echelon.

Creating your Crusade force sheet

Your Crusade force sheet (Order of Battle) is the master record of your army. It tracks the units you can field, your remaining supply limit, your Requisition points, and campaign totals such as your battle tally and victories.

To build a legal starting force, add units until their combined points cost reaches — but does not exceed — your supply limit. Each unit you add becomes an entry on your Order of Battle with its own Crusade Card. You spend Requisition points over the campaign to do things like reinforce your force, increase your supply limit, or grant units extra upgrades, so it pays to track them carefully.

Requisitions are the economy that drives a force's growth. You bank Requisition points as the campaign goes on and spend them on options such as recruiting new units, increasing your supply limit so you can field a larger army, repairing Battle Scars, or renaming and customising standout units. Because the pool is shared across everything you might want, deciding what to spend it on — a larger army now, or healed and upgraded veterans later — is one of the genuinely strategic choices Crusade layers on top of a normal game.

Crusade Cards and unit progression

Every unit in your force has a Crusade Card. This is where the campaign's character lives: it records the unit's experience (XP), its current Crusade rank, any Battle Honours it has earned, any Battle Scars it carries, and the Crusade points it contributes.

Units earn XP for taking part in battles and for specific feats during the game, such as surviving the fight or destroying enemy units. Many groups also use Agendas — optional objectives chosen before a game that grant bonus XP to units that achieve them, nudging the way you play toward the narrative. As XP accumulates, units climb the Crusade ranks:

As units rank up they earn Battle Honours — upgrades that broadly fall into categories like Battle Traits (tougher or deadlier profiles), Weapon Modifications (improved guns and blades), and, for Characters, Crusade Relics. Each honour a unit takes also raises its points cost and its Crusade point contribution, so a veteran-heavy force eats into its supply limit faster than a fresh one.

Combat leaves marks too. A unit that is destroyed or badly mauled may pick up a Battle Scar — a lasting penalty that hampers it until it can be healed (often by spending Requisition). The interplay of honours and scars is what gives a Crusade army its scars-and-all personality: the grizzled survivor who's deadlier than ever but fights with a permanent limp.

Playing battles and recording results

Battles are the heart of a Crusade. Each game is played using the normal Warhammer 40,000 rules, with both players drawing on their current Crusade forces. What makes it a campaign is what happens around the game: the result counts, and the consequences stick.

After each battle, record the following:

• The outcome for each participant — win, loss, or draw — which feeds each player's battle tally and victory count.
• Experience earned by units that fought, plus any bonus XP from Agendas or notable deeds.
• Battle Honours and Battle Scars awarded as units cross rank thresholds or emerge from hard fighting.

Many groups also single out one unit for Marked for Greatness after a battle, granting it extra experience for a standout performance — a small ritual that turns an ordinary squad into the campaign's breakout star.

Campaign milestones and stages

Longer campaigns benefit from being split into stages — narrative chapters that group a set of battles together. A stage might represent a planetary invasion, a siege, or a particular front in a wider war. Each stage can have its own objectives, special rules, or rewards.

Stages give a campaign shape and pacing. They create natural checkpoints to take stock of standings, refresh the narrative, and give trailing players a fresh start. When the final stage's battles are done, you tally the results, crown a winner (or simply tell the story of how it ended), and the campaign reaches its conclusion. Some groups then archive the campaign and start a new one; others carry forces forward into a sequel.

Managing a Crusade for multiple players

Running a campaign for a group adds a coordination layer on top of the rules. The challenges are rarely about Warhammer itself — they're about logistics:

• Scheduling. Finding time for everyone to get their games in is the perennial campaign killer. A shared calendar and a relaxed attitude to pace help enormously.
• Shared visibility. Players want to see the standings, who they're due to fight, and how rival forces are growing. A single source of truth beats a scatter of personal spreadsheets.
• Communication. Most groups run their campaign chatter through Discord or a group chat, posting battle reports and trash-talk between games.

This is exactly where a dedicated campaign manager earns its keep. Tools like Echelon keep every force, Crusade Card, and battle result in one shared place, so the whole group sees the same up-to-date picture without anyone having to chase paperwork.

Common rules and edge cases

A few situations come up in almost every campaign. Knowing how to handle them keeps games moving:

• Supply limit enforcement. A force's total points cost must stay within its supply limit. If gaining units would push you over, you adjust your Order of Battle to comply before fielding it.
• Destroyed units. A unit wiped out in battle isn't necessarily gone for good — Crusade rules cover when and how units recover or are rebuilt, often via Requisition. Track destroyed status so you know what's available next game.
• Army updates. When a new codex or points update lands, forces may need re-costing. Agree as a group when you'll adopt changes so nobody is caught out mid-stage.
• Rules queries. When something isn't clear, the official Games Workshop Crusade rules are the tie-breaker. Agree house rules in advance for anything they don't cover.

Download the rules

This guide is a primer — the official Games Workshop documents are the definitive reference for the full mechanics, Requisitions, Battle Honours, and Battle Scars. Grab them here and keep them handy at the table:

Why use a campaign manager tool?

You can absolutely run a Crusade with pen, paper, and a stack of printed cards. Plenty of great campaigns have been tracked that way. But manual tracking has real costs: arithmetic errors creep into supply and XP totals, cards get lost, and it's hard for the group to see the bigger picture without someone collating everything by hand.

A digital tracker removes that friction. It does the maths for you, keeps every force and Crusade Card in one shareable place, and shows progression at a glance — whose units are about to rank up, who's leading the campaign, what battles are scheduled next. Echelon is built specifically for this: a free Warhammer 40K Crusade campaign manager for groups, tracking XP, ranks, Battle Honours, supply limits, and battle history so you can spend your time playing instead of bookkeeping.

This guide summarises the core Crusade mechanics for newcomers. For the definitive rules, Requisitions, Battle Honours, and Battle Scars, consult the official Games Workshop Crusade rules. Echelon is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Games Workshop.