So having done half of the Charadon campaign now, I think there are some issues with the campaign design, but that ultimately it's well suited to the extreme disruption of the Covid era and it's worth continuing into part 2.
Pros
+ The structure of the campaign is hilariously resilient. As long as people are playing 40K universe games at all and I'm loosely playing attention, the campaign can continue regardless of people coming in and out of engaging with it. There's no real way for the campaign to collapse, which given the difficulties people have keeping campaigns under normal circumstances, let alone during a global pandemic, is a real plus.
+ Crusade/KT rewards aren't for everyone but they're fun and essentially harmless to hand out (in 40K at least it boils down to a CP differential in the end)
+ The special missions are a good excuse for some big multiplayer battles and have certainly been memorable
Cons
- The story isn't really connected to the gameplay...like at all? Typhon is continually up to some nonsense but he'll be doing it regardless of who wins or even if our poor Chaos players just plain can't show up to games. The war over Metalica is ridiculously detailed and full of reverses for all sides (it takes me quite some time to parse what's supposed to be happening from the Charadon books to summarise in the thread) but nothing really changes it and it just seems to roll over into Book of Fire with Bel'akor tagging in to cause problems. The warzone rules *do* add a layer of simulating the conditions on the ground for the phase of the conflict but like a lot of 40K narrative rules they're an extra layer of mechanics over the top of everything else, and often players won't bother with them, especially if they're not playing often and have enough on their plate dealing with the core and army rules.
- Scoring is swingy with the low number of games we have during the Covid era. Me allocating my points to the faction that's behind helps but as one of the more active players it injects a lot of points into the system and muddies the result. It's still interesting to track but the team dynamic they're going for never really gets going. The only way I can see to really fixing this is playing a bunch more games on TTS, but while that makes games easier to play it's only a subset of us that are set up for that.
- The missions are hit and miss. Flood Tide on Fathom looked really cool and I was hyped but then as defender my whole goal was to shut down the mission mechanic and not let it happen
The third mission did look like it would convey the chaos of the third narrative phase but would also be a game mostly decided by the roll off for first turn.
The Octarius campaign addresses some of this by going for a traditional tree structure instead, where who wins each mission matters for playing the next. That's a tried and true structure and certainly has some interest (particularly by making missions matter more), but I think it loses the resiliency of the more open Charadon pattern. Better a campaign that bumbles along come many games or few than one that is incoherent because the players participating in the tree flow can't reliably make it to game days.
As a result I think it's best for now to continue into Charadon II (The Book of Fire) while Covid is still a thing and game days are still touch and go. It doesn't take much work and means there's always *something* there if folks want to follow it. I can look at some ways to make the fiction and our results interact more (as long as I'm not doing it by layering yet more mechanics on an already complex game), but at the end of the day if it gets us a few games of the special missions and there's a few campaign rewards for those that want them, in uncertain times that's not a bad result.
When things are a bit more stable we can take another look at Octarius, Nachmund, or houseruled campaigns that are riskier but perhaps more engaging.