A procession of all-new mini campaigns is coming for The Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness, and the first of them, The Battle of Pluto: Hydra’s Devastation is available to download right now.
We’re thrilled to announce that campaigns from the Age of Darkness are now entering cyberspace in a new series of free, downloadable PDFs straight from the studio behind Forge World’s monumental campaign books.
These mini-campaigns will be known as Exemplary Battles of the Age of Darkness – and they represent pivotal conflicts from the Horus Heresy.
The tour de force that is the Siege of Terra is unfolding as we speak in the Horus Heresy Black Library series, but connoisseurs of this galaxy-spanning conflict will know that there’s much more to the Age of Darkness than primarchs duking it out over space ports.
Indeed, the Horus Heresy game allows players to recreate pivotal battles of all kinds and sizes, from small ship-boarding actions to colossal planetstrikes.
This campaign series is a great way to explore such conflicts, which may not otherwise have their own dedicated campaign books. Horus Heresy High Lord Andy Hoare had this to say about the scenarios:
“An Exemplary Battle is a conflict that's been mentioned in one of the many Black Library Horus Heresy novels, or in one of the Horus Heresy or even Adeptus Titanicus publications, but which might not be quite big enough to be given the full campaign book treatment.
“Some of these battles are quite well known and will be familiar to fans of the Horus Heresy – others are much more obscure and may be known to only the most dedicated of readers.”
He also notes that each scenario is lifted from existing Horus Heresy lore and is much more than a throwaway.
“The aim with this series is to give players everything they'd get out of a black book, only condensed down to a handful of pages. You'll find a description of the battle, written by the Horus Heresy team writers after having undertaken extensive research of the source material or talking to the Black Library authors.”
Each Exemplary Battle campaign will contain an army list entry, empowering you to build and play a unit detailed in the battle’s lore, as well as photographs of one or more examples of the new unit, painted by keen hobbyists from around the Forge World studio.
There will also, of course, be a full suite of missions and rules, including deployment maps and objectives, allowing you to play out these battles on your tabletop.
The first of these campaigns, The Battle of Pluto: Hydra’s Devastation, is available to download right now. This 12-page PDF details a series of skirmishes between the Imperial Fists and the Alpha Legion, as the former attempts to stymie efforts by the latter to sow discord within the Sol System.
These campaigns look seriously cool, and we hope you have fun playing them – we know we will! Let us know what you think and show us pics of your Horus Heresy Legion armies on Facebook, and sign up to the Warhammer mailing list to make sure you don’t miss any future Horus Heresy updates.