So for Xmas my gf got me Horus Heresy volume 3, and I've basically read most of it, and the thing that really stands out to me are the Tactical Strike campaign rules.
Seriously: why is no-one talking about these and why THE FRAK is FW not pushing these hard?
Simply put, they are a campaign system for representing the endgame of the Istvaan Dropsite Massacre. Players are assigned one role: survivors or exterminators. So Loyalists or Traitors basically.
Army lists, however, are where it gets interesting: it's a fluff-based Unbound system. You can use any model you like FROM ANY APPROPRIATE CHAPTER that fought on Istvaan. You can have a Loyalist faction with a 9 man tactical squad made up of seven Iron Hands, and two World Eater Rampagers who stayed Loyal! You can have a Loyal Emperor's Children Palantine Blade leading a squad of Raven Guard assault marines backed up by a Death Guard Apothecary! It's bloody amazing!
And here's where it gets really interesting, and why it's nowhere near as broken as it sounds: because it's a campaign system, you are affected by army-wide rules that apply certain restrictions on you, based on the amount of resources you lack. Because of the sheer levels of attrition, your army may no longer be able to make Sweeping Advances, because their power armour lacks the fuel cells. Your ammunition might run out. Internal politics may affect your leadership levels because your men don't know who to trust.
As you play games, you gain the equivelant of XP, and this affects your resources, meaning holding/achieving in-game Objectives actually has meaning outside the game you play. Say your men are running low on war materiel and you play a game with an ammo dump as an Objective. If you hold it at the end of the game, your weapon stocks are refilled.
In essence, it's Horus Heresy + Necromunda, able to scale from small, Kill-Team skirmishes of 500 points, all the way up to the standard 3000 point battles of 30K. And on top of this, you have to name three Generic miniatures with the Character rule to be the heroes of your story, and if they achieve personal objectives, not only do you gain resources for your army, they level up and gain new abilities.
I swear, it's the best 40K campaign system I've ever seen and it deserves to be an official 40K supplement way more than dross like 'Campaign of Fire' or any of the 'Warzone' supplements.
You could literally buy just the models you like, and make a workable, playable army of them, and because of the inherent balance to the 30K system, it would totally work.
And I have literally heard nothing about this until I read it today. Seriously, if I was Forge World, I'd put the rules online for free, and make little 'bitz kits' of choice Legion parts for people to customise their own rag-tag band of misfits.
So I'm kind of putting the word out there - this is a great, great addition to the Heresy-era game, because it'll let you do proper, fluffy, exciting Heresy-era battles, getting only the models you like, without spending crazy money. It's totally worth checking out.