Structure of GW's "Eye of Terror" Campaign...

If to be brief: space was divided on zones/sectors (not necessary in imperial sense) where you can/can’t post victories at specific date for specific race. After some time, some fluff changes occur and new zones are open for the battle. Planet won by chaos if its number of wins shifted ‘morale’ marker below predetermined number.

Righty then.

The Eye of Terror was divided up into different bits in which you could post your result. First of all ‘Sectors’, there were 12 sectors including Cadian, Caliban, etc. You could register a result here that would effect how well or badly the imperial fleet was doing.

www.eyeofterror.com/uk/map/default.htm

Clicking on the name of the sector would open up a box that showed all the systems inside it.

www.eyeofterror.com/uk/map/cadian.htm

Then you could choose a system and click on that.

www.eyeofterror.com/uk/map/system_cadian.htm

That would show you a picture of all the planets in that system.

www.eyeofterror.com/uk/map/system_cadian.htm

Then you could assign your result to that planet (not all planets were to be fought over) to show how well the invasion of it was going.

Starting off you were allowed to register 5 votes a day I think, though because of accusations of cheating they lowered this to 3.

The votes for each world were then ‘weighted’, stores and games clubs had their results ‘weigh’ more due to the questionable nature of votes sent in by everyone else. Larger planets would be weighted less that smaller ones, so a vote for Cadia would count less that a vote for a random other planet.

Now here it gets complicated. When a certain planet got below a certain pre-arranged percentage, it would set off a trigger that would knock down planets around it by a pre-determined amount. This is where I was going with talk about dynamic campaigns and the effect wars on planets would have on other planets in the other thread.

There were also some rules about the state a planet was in (faithful to anarchy) but I’m not too sure about them.

Ah yes, certain places would count their votes for the battle that was going on in the webway.

I’ve probably missed something, ah yes; everything was fixed so Chaos would win.

I knew I forgot bits.

There were ‘event cards’ that had effects on parts of the campaign; they would be given out to people who won events like tournaments and general people they liked. The effects were generally different and the effects obscure…

Space Crusade 21/08/2003 07:47:09 IMPERIAL
The Space marines of the Adeptus Astartes are arriving en masse to throw back the forces of the Despoiler, and first to arrive in the Scarus sector is the legendary Black Templars Chapter. High Marshal Helbrecht quickly secures the local space lanes, ensuring Imperial troop movements are safe from the ever-prowling Chaos Wolf Pack squadrons. The Black Templars deploy upon Thracian Primaris when you play this card. Imperial victories will count for more there for the rest of the week.



When I say effects were obscure, one of these was the Planet Killer card which, when played, resulted in the death of Macharia, the Cadian systems Hiveworld (or Forgeworld).

However all the event cards were timed so they could only be played when GW waned them to be. So it was a narrative campaign, though the narrative elements were already thought out.

Battles could be fought at home and registered online, though if you fought them in a store, at the end of the day the results were totaled up and phoned through to who ever was collecting them. This person then increased the value of them somehow, because they were from a trusted source, and put them though the system.

There was a ‘Dark Tempest road show’ that toured the shops in England…

uk.games-workshop.com/news/uk/EOT/Events/tempest.htm

…in which the results dictated what happened to Abbadons Planet killer the results from which will somehow be added into the fluff later.

At the end of one of the weeks they decided to destroy another of the planets just because they could, and the fact that no one was expecting it.


As for what actually happened, I’m not sure. The exact mechanics of the campaign were kept secret. When registering a result online, you chose your army in one of the boxes and the opponent’s army in the other and then chose where you were registering it. If you named another person registered on the site your result would, presumably, be weighted more, however you could have just found the name somewhere and put that down instead, some people found that others had registered victories over them when they weren’t even playing. After you sent off the form the exact process it went through is a mystery.

I couldn’t be clear but if I were to guess what happened during the results process: every day the results were compiled against each other for each planet. Then out of this a number representing how much it had fallen was made, its percentage control was changed, and then it all started again.

So in conclusion, GW knew how much of a hellish task trying to affix meaningful values to results that could have been fixed in so many ways, so they pre-scripted the main parts of the campaign and made sure other parts weren’t fixed by, well, fixing them first.


Here’s a list of the armies involved and their victories:
uk.games-workshop.com/news/uk/EOT/facts/default.htm

I guess different mechanisms should be used, but they have to wait till our SM Chapter (and maybe some IG regiments) are done, so we may try really 'historical' campaign.

And a transcription was forthcoming...?

Kage