Remote Crusade Campaigns: Playing on Tabletop Simulator and Discord

The Crusade rules do not change when the players are in different towns or different countries. What changes is everything around the game: where it is played, how a time gets agreed, and who keeps the record when nobody can look across the table at anyone else's Crusade Cards.

Three ways remote groups play

• Tabletop Simulator. A digital table with digital models, and the most common choice. Most of this guide is about it.
• Webcam games. One player sets up a real table with both armies and moves the remote player's models on their instructions over a video call. Slower, but the miniatures are real.
• Local pairs, one campaign. Players in two or three places play in person with whoever is nearby, and every result goes into the same campaign. Crusade cares about what happened, not where.

Playing Crusade on Tabletop Simulator

Tabletop Simulator is a sandbox for tabletop games, sold on Steam. It has no Warhammer rules built in. It gives you a table, physics, dice and a measuring tool, and players supply the rest: the Steam Workshop holds 40K boards, terrain and army models, made and shared by the community.

A few habits save a lot of evenings:

• Check everyone owns it. It is a paid game and each player needs their own copy. Find out before you schedule the first battle, not during it.
• Agree one table for the campaign. The same board and terrain every game means nobody spends the first half hour learning a new one.
• Load your army before game night. Finding and setting up the models for a full list takes longer than a turn, and doing it while your opponent waits is the fastest way to lose an evening.
• Talk, do not type. Most groups play with a Discord voice channel open. Typing out every charge declaration is slow.
• Save the table if a game runs long. Tabletop Simulator can save a game in progress, so a battle can finish on a second evening.

What Tabletop Simulator does not do

It does not know what a Crusade is. Every game starts from a fresh table, and nothing about a unit's experience, honours or scars carries from one session to the next.

So the campaign has to live somewhere else, and in a remote group that somewhere has to be readable by everyone. At a club you can glance at your opponent's Crusade Card. Online, if the record is in one player's spreadsheet, it is effectively in nobody's.

Setting up the campaign on Discord

A server of its own, or a category in one your group already uses, stops the campaign drowning in general chat. Four channels cover most of it:

• #campaign-news for the host: new chapters, results and the story so far.
• #scheduling for who is playing whom, and when.
• #battle-reports for a screenshot of the final board and a line about what happened.
• A voice channel to play in.

Pin the campaign's invite link and the current chapter's goal at the top of the news channel, so anyone new has one place to start.

Scheduling across time zones

Remote campaigns stall on scheduling more often than on anything else. Two habits help most:

• Schedule in windows, not nights. Give each chapter two or three weeks and let each pair find a time inside it. The pacing guide covers why a window that closes on time matters.
• Always name the time zone. "Thursday at 8" means three different times in a group spread across the UK, Europe and North America.

Keeping one record everyone trusts

At a table, everyone watches the dice. Remotely, each player is taking the other's word for their own bookkeeping, so make the bookkeeping visible:

• Each player records their own side straight after the game: experience, Out of Action tests, honours and scars.
• A screenshot of the final board goes in the battle reports channel.
• The host settles disputes. Agree that before the first one comes up, not during it.

Finding people to play with

If your local group is too small, or you are the only Crusade player you know, playing remotely is how you find a group rather than just how you run one. Ask in the Echelon Discord. Say which edition you play, your time zone, and whether you are on Tabletop Simulator, so people in the same position can find you.

Running a remote campaign in Echelon

Echelon does not connect to Tabletop Simulator and does not post to Discord. It is the shared record neither of them keeps, built for players who are never in the same room.

• Invite players with Invite players on the campaign, then Get invite link, and paste the link into your Discord server. A link lasts a week, so post a fresh one when someone new turns up.
• Every battle carries a date, a time and a time zone, and each player sees it in their own local time, with a button to add it to their calendar.
• During the game, each player scores their own side on their own device, and the other player's scores appear on theirs within about ten seconds.
• Afterwards, each player files their own post-battle report. Everyone can see who has filed, the host can close the battle without a missing report, and the late player can still file theirs.
• Echelon emails a player when they are invited, when they owe a post-battle report, and when the host adds a stage or gives them a mission. Each player chooses which emails they get.

Frequently Asked Questions

This guide covers running a Warhammer 40,000 Crusade campaign remotely. Tabletop Simulator is a product of Berserk Games, and Discord is a product of Discord Inc. Echelon is not affiliated with either, or with Games Workshop.