Greetings brothers,

I have a quick question for those of you who have run campaigns so far. Do you mix and match the war zones or do you focus on a specific war zone? I can't decide whether it would be better to plan a campaign in a specific theatre or to mix things up.

Up to you. My campaign is wide-ranging - more like a TV series, with Standalones and Mytharc. Mytharc is the ongoing plotline for the Campaign, so in my case the unstoppable forces of Hive Fleet Dagon and the interference of a Chaos Warband who appear to have their own strange agenda. Mytharc is where you have the recurring bad guy, or the overarching mission (gather enough Tyranid bio-samples to allow the Deathwatch to find a way to combat them, for example). Standalones are one off missions with a cool hook. This approach suits warzone hopping, but it could work just as well in one.

It really depends on what you want. My campaigns "First Season" (10 missions) was build around three Lines of Operations. One was Baraban on Greyhell Front, second one was Castobel in the route of Hivefleet Dagon and third one was Inquisition investigating some ancient ruins. Then I basically gave the Kill Team more requests of assistance than they could ever handle, forcing them to choose and prioritize which missions they would prosecute based on their characters opinions and morals. This lead to a lot of nice roleplaying as the Kill Team members discussed the merits of each operation. This style works well if you want to throw a lot of different opponents on the players.

Another styles are to focus the campaign around a specific location or a specific enemy. You could, for example, write a whole campaign about saving a single world (single world, 5 marines… sounds okay) or about stopping a specific enemy (like one tendril of Hivefleet Dagon). In this case the campaign would probably have a single world or some other important location as a sort of "metacharacter" around which the campaign would rotate.

Here's a thought for you. Are you planning to have a recurring cast of NPCs? If so, how mobile are they going to be?

It's going to be tricky for a Deathwatch team doing missions across the Reach to form particular connections with specific NPCs. If you want to have someone keep showing up, you're going to be reaching for plausible excuses for him / her to keep being wherever the Deathwatch is.

I do want recurring NPC's so maybe sticking to a single war zone with a couple one off's for difference might be a better idea.