--- title: "Review of Armageddon chapter 4" subtitle: "Crusade rules" author: "Seth" publish_date: 2026-05-19 00:01 date: 2026-05-19 00:01 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: book_armageddon.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, tools, modules, gm, settings, scifi, wargame ] --- This is my final review of my read-through of the **Armageddon Cruade** book for **Warhammer 40,000**. For me, it's kinda useless to write a "review" of something I've not experienced in a game, but I think the **Armageddon** rules are worth looking at, even if only academically (until I try them, as in my upcoming campaign.) The Crusade rules in **Armageddon: Red Angel's Gate** provide the usual Crusade elements, such as Agendas, Battle Honours, Weapon Upgrades, and so on. Many of these are interchangeable with the same kinds of rules from any other Crusade book, or from the Crusade section in your faction's codex, but it's the added flavour combined with an imporant Armageddon mechanic that makes them feel especially unique. I honestly admire how Games Workshop is able to present the same old mechanical benefits in interesting ways, and I'm not being sarcastic. The story of the Third War for Armageddon involves the Red Angel's Gate, so warp effects figure into many of the rules. It's not just a matter of granting a player +1 Attacks, or a re-roll to Hit, and so on, these rules do a lot of the heavy lifting in help you tell the story of **Armageddon** on your tabletop. ## Strategic Points To give your Crusade the feel of an epic-scale war, with defined strategies that sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, Armageddon uses Strategic Points, which are like Victory Points or Experience Points but at the high level of your faction. In fact, it's more than just your faction, because there are alliances on Armageddon, even when tenuous. Officially, you can join the Gatebreakers, the Desecrators, or the Marauders. These alliances represent the goals of any number of armies involved in the Armageddon campagin on your tabletop. Any Armageddon campaign happens in phases. A phase can be whatever length you want. It could be one game in each phase (for a total of 6 games in the campaign) or you could play several games in each phase. Whatever rate of progression you choose, the results of each phase determines your army's goal during the next phase. This is mapped out in a set of 3 beautifully clear flowcharts, one for each Allegiance. What this means is that you can run any faction within an Armageddon campaign and have a clear purpose and objective. This feels really inclusive compared to **Pariah Nexus**, not that **Pariah Nexus** made it difficult to justify the inclusion of arbitrary armies, but it I felt like the goal of the campaign was muddled even with a canonical faction. I ran Adeptus Mechanicus in **Pariah Nexus**, and they're very much a part of the book's story, but I had no idea what I was playing for, and what I thought I was playing for turned out to not even be a part sy the Crusade rules. That's ressolutely not the case with **Armageddon**. Your faction's goals are spelled out for you, phase by phase. Maybe you're advancing, or holding ground, or reinforcing the line, or destroying the Red Angel's Gate, or opening it so more daemons can cross into reality, or just working to perpetuate the hellscape of war. It's all laid out for you in your Allegiance's chart, phase by phase, and it's super satisfying for me to see and recognise the guidance. I felt really let down after realsing that the story of the missions in **Pariah Nexus** had basically nothing to do with the lore half of the book, so I look forward to playing a Crusade that doesn't permit that to happen. At the end of the narrative, your faction's going to deal with the Red Angel's Gate, for good or ill, and that's just obviously how the Crusade ought to end. ## Anomalies and hellscapes In addition to all that high-level stuff, there are rules to affect dach individual battle. Anomalies happen at a variable rate, depending on some D3 rolls you make before a battle. For example, during a turn you suddenly might find yourself (or worse, your enemy) with free re-rolls of Hit rolls, or with a +1 to Move, and so on. Anomalies happen suddenly (there's a chart to determine how often) and don't last long. They're just random manifestations of warp energy that nobody can anticipate. Hellscapes impose persistent conditions that alter how some rules functions. For example, the **Scattered Coordinates** hellscape redefines Deep Strike restrictions to more than 9" from enemy units and 6" from a battlefield edge. You can perform a special action to help your Deep Strike unit locate its intended target, but if you do you gain a Warp Counter, which in turn makes you more susceptible to the effects of Anomalies. ## Unbound adversaries Finally, **Armageddon** includes rules for a non-player army, and even has somewhat simplified datasheets for daemons (although it notes that you can use any faction as an unbound adversary.) There are rules for the size of the unbound adversary force, and rules for how it behaves on the battlefield. There's an obvious danger of an unbound adversary becoming a blockade to both armies, influencing the battle just by being a potentially-bad-thing that nobody wants, but then again there are Agendas that reward interaction with them, so I think it seems balanced. Either way, I think this is a cool addition, and although it does allow for players to step in to the role of the unbound adversaries as needed, it feels like a pretty strong argument for a Campaign Master. The book strongly encourages you to have a Campaign Master, and it's easy to see why. There are a lot of new rules in **Armageddon**, and while I used to treat them as optional (and they are), my current feeling is that you kind of have to play with them all to get the most out of a campaign. I guess you could just increase XP rewards instead, but that's basically a n exercise in re-design, which maybe isn't what you want to in an effort to make your campaign easier to manage. I think a Campaign Master is a great idea in general, and especially in **Armageddon**. I admire Games Workshop for NOT assuming there is going to be a Campaign Master, but I think a Campaign Master is a great idea in general, and especially for **Armageddon**. ## More rules for more story **Warhammer 40,000**, as with basically any Games Workshop product, needs nothing less than it does more rules. The game is complex enough already, and that's compounded by the fact that there are so many armies and units with bespoke rules of their own. But game rules is Games Workshop's native language. Taking Black Library as a separate entity that not everyone playing Warhammer engages with, rules is how Games Workshop communicates ideas, and even world building, to players. Rules are both a language and a resource for Games Workshop, and the rules in **Armageddon Crusade** tell a compelling story that you want to experience. I'm looking forward to playing an **Armageddon** campaign, and I'm eager to approach it using the phases of war and allegiances and Strategic Points. As a result, I won't play all the Missions in the book, because I'll be rolling for Missions at the start of each phase. But that's the way **Armageddon** has been designed, and I very much look forward to seeing how it plays out on my tabletop.

Photo by Freddy Castro on Unsplash and modified by Seth Kenlon.