A Song of Sprue and Sigmar: Escalation Path to Glory

After a year of collecting miniatures, honing our painting skills, and battling our way through Warcry and Spearhead, our group—Alek, Dan, and myself—decided to take the plunge into a full-blown Age of Sigmar campaign. The prospect of building and painting a 2000-point army can be intimidating, so we sought a more gradual approach. An escalation league using the rich, storytelling framework of Path to Glory was the perfect answer.

Welcome to the Song of Sprue and Sigmar Escalation League! For this campaign, Dan will command the ethereal legions of the Nighthaunt, while Alek leads the chittering, ever-scheming hordes of the Skaven. I'll be taking up the mantle of Sigmar's chosen, the Stormcast Eternals, hoping to bring order to the chaos.

To ensure the campaign remains fun and competitive for everyone, we've put our own spin on the "Ascension" Path to Glory ruleset. Our primary goal was to reduce the snowball effect of early victories and ensure that everyone could build up their forces without the constant fear of falling behind.

Here are some of the key tweaks we've made:

• Fixed Glory Points: Instead of awarding Glory Points based on battle results, each player receives a fixed amount at the end of a cycle. This allows everyone to consistently expand their armies, whether they win or lose.

• Modified Renown: Units still earn Renown Points for their battlefield exploits, but we've adjusted the system. A unit that survives a battle earns 2 points, while a destroyed unit still gets 1. Furthermore, while you can choose a "Favored Unit" for bonus renown, you can only select each unit for this honor once per cycle to prevent one unit from becoming too powerful too quickly. In addition on a win the favored unit gets d3 + 3 and on a loss favored unit gets d3 + 2 renown points.

• End-of-Cycle Progression: All progression happens between game cycles. Renown Points are spent and quest rewards are allocated only at the end of a cycle, ensuring no one gains an advantage simply by playing their games earlier than others.

• The Spearhead Swap: We made a provision for the... ahem, less-than-mighty heroes in certain Spearhead boxes. After the initial Spearhead round, we could sub in different heroes and units but let them keep the renown earned by the units they replaced.

• Escalation Points: Our battles will be set at 1000, 1330, 1670, 2000, 2500, and 3000 points to make it a bit easier to add interesting units during the campaign.

We'll have a series of posts to will chronicle our journey through six cycles of play, from those initial skirmishes all the way to epic 3000-point clashes. Follow along!