Campaign Ideas We Want to Steal from the General’s Compendium
We had one of those very familiar hobby moments recently: someone drops a great resource into chat, everyone says “yeah, we should absolutely look at this,” and then real life immediately rolls a successful distraction test.
A few days later, the topic came back when Michał reminded us about the General’s Compendium he had shared earlier. Stas had already downloaded it… and, in the most relatable way possible, completely forgotten to actually read it.
Still, once we started talking about it again, it immediately sparked our imagination.
Why it caught our attention
What grabbed us most were the campaign ideas. Not just the usual “play linked battles” approach, but systems that make the world feel like it keeps moving even when only two players are at the table.
Michał mentioned one example that really stuck with us: apparently there was a campaign that ran for three years between just two players, but it also included four additional NPC armies moving around the map using scatter/random movement.
That is such a fun idea.
Instead of a campaign being a neat, symmetrical duel where both sides only react to each other, you suddenly get a world with momentum of its own. Armies drift into places nobody planned. Unexpected clashes happen. The map starts telling its own story.
And the best part? When one of those NPC forces got into a fight, the other player would control that army.
Why we like this so much
We love this because it solves a very real campaign problem: how do you make a long-running narrative feel bigger than just “our two armies met again”?
Adding neutral or semi-random forces does a lot of heavy lifting:
- it makes the setting feel alive,
- it creates surprises without needing a full game master,
- it gives both players new tactical problems,
- and it helps generate stories you would never script on purpose.
There is also something wonderfully old-school about letting randomness push the campaign in strange directions. Sometimes the best narrative events are the ones nobody would have chosen deliberately.
The kind of campaign energy we enjoy
This is exactly the sort of thing that gets us excited about campaign play in general. Not necessarily huge, heavily-administered systems with twenty pages of bookkeeping, but frameworks that create emergent stories.
Two players are enough. A map is enough. A few wandering armies are enough. And suddenly a campaign can last far longer than expected because every turn creates a new weird situation to deal with.
We also really like the little social twist here: if an NPC army enters a battle, the other player takes control of it. That keeps both people engaged, avoids one-sided admin work, and probably leads to some gloriously suspicious diplomacy at the table.
“No no, we’re definitely playing this neutral force fairly.”
Sure. Of course.
We’re definitely going to dig into it more
At this point we have not tested any of this ourselves yet, so this is not a battle report or a polished campaign guide. This is more of a hobby note from the “oh, this has serious potential” stage.
But honestly, those are often our favourite moments in the hobby: when a single conversation opens up a whole set of possibilities for future games.
So yes, the plan now is simple:
- actually read the Compendium properly,
- steal the best ideas shamelessly,
- and see whether we can turn some of that campaign chaos into our own table stories.
If nothing else, the idea of a long campaign between two players with several wandering NPC armies already feels like the kind of beautifully messy Warhammer nonsense we can absolutely get behind.
If we do end up building something around this, we’ll definitely come back with more thoughts. For now, we’re just enjoying that very specific hobby feeling of discovering a concept and immediately wanting to start sketching maps.