Kill Team campaigns let you collect operatives and fight battles of Kill Team in a series of connected missions. These form a narrative of covert battles fought alongside a greater war, where the skirmishes you fight have an impact far beyond the battlefields you are contesting.
Kill Team can be played and enjoyed in one-off missions – you do not need to use these extra rules in your games. However, playing through a campaign can be a fun and rewarding alternative, giving you and your friends the opportunity to write the story of your own kill teams, charting their successes and failures as they grow in experience. In the end, one of you will be able to claim the glory of total victory!
In order to take part in a Kill Team campaign, you will need two or more players. All players will need a collection of Citadel Miniatures, which they will organise into kill teams. For more detail about choosing your kill team for a mission, see below.
The players fight missions against each other using the kill teams they create. The combatants in each mission gain experience, and may become more skilled or stronger as the
campaign progresses. In addition, the outcome of each mission will affect the wider war being fought, as described below. The more success a player has in their missions, the more likely it is that they will be crowned victor of the campaign.
The War Effort
The missions that your operatives are fighting are part of a larger war effort, and the mission your kill team undertakes has an impact on this war. If you succeed in your sabotage mission, your opponent’s materiel is severely depleted. If you cannot stop enemy assassination missions, your force’s morale plunges!
The fluctuating fortunes of the different factions in the war, and your impact on these, are represented by four resources: Intelligence, Materiel, Morale and Territory.
- Intelligence: A faction’s spy networks and intelligence gathering assets.
- Materiel: A faction’s military resources, whether it be weaponry, armour, transport or more esoteric items.
- Morale: A faction’s will to keep fighting, whether through nobility, determination, hatred or spite.
- Territory: A measure of the locations and facilities currently controlled by the faction.
If a faction runs out of any one of these resources, their armies will crumble and they will be reduced to guerrillas in this conflict. You will need to guard your resources while striking at your enemies’ weakest points.
Each player begins a campaign with a set number of resource points. We suggest starting the campaign with 8 points in each resource, but you can agree with the other players that you will all start with a different number, or even different numbers in each resource (for example, you might have D6+3 points for each resource, giving each player their own strengths and weaknesses). Note your starting resources on your
command roster.
Each mission tells you what impact the mission has on the resources of the players that take part in it. After the mission, record any changes to each player’s resources on their roster sheet. Once you have done so, any player who has been reduced to 0 or less in any resource is reduced to a
guerrilla faction.
Victory
Unless the players in the campaign agree otherwise at the beginning of the campaign, the last player who hasn’t been reduced to a
guerrilla faction wins the campaign – theirs is the only force with the cohesion and the means to secure victory over all others!
If the only remaining non-guerrilla factions are reduced to guerrilla factions after the same mission, the campaign will be decided by
sudden death. At this point, anyone can win!
You can instead decide at the beginning of the campaign to set your own victory condition – this might be when one player has won a certain numbers of victories, or the player with the highest combined total of
resources after a certain number of games have been played. It’s up to you!
Following the orders of their commanders, kill teams battle in the darkness of a nightmarish and war-torn landscape. The leaders of these teams play games of cat and mouse with their foes amidst monolithic refineries and tangled hab-complexes, leading their squads in daring strikes against their enemies.
Choosing a Mission
You can arrange to fight missions as and when you wish, and can use any Kill Team mission that is available to you. Either choose a mission that you and your opponent(s) want to play, or
roll off, and the winner rolls 2D6 and consults the following table. Where a mission has an attacker and a defender, whichever player has more Territory than the other is the defender. If there is a tie, the players roll off – whoever wins is the attacker:
Choosing a Kill Team
Once you have chosen a mission, the players choose kill teams using the rules for choosing a
Battle-forged kill team subject to the mission you are playing, with the following exception: they must each choose their kill team from their
campaign command roster (see below). Players choose their kill teams in secret – they will be revealed together once the battlefield has been set up. We suggest that each player keeps the
Faction keyword they chose for the length of the campaign.
Campaign Command Roster
Each player in a campaign has a campaign command roster, from which they choose their kill team for each mission. This roster is created in the same way as for a
matched play command roster, with the following difference: it starts with up to twelve models, rather than up to twenty, and can grow beyond twenty models as the campaign progresses.
If a player has already played a mission in the campaign, they can choose their kill team from any of the models on their campaign command roster but they can also choose to add new models with new
datacards to their kill team (though see
Adding Members to a Fire Team), or even use a kill team chosen entirely from new models. Each time a player completes a datacard for a model that they add to their kill team, they should also record that model’s details on their roster. Adding new models to their kill team for a mission in this way is the only way for players in a campaign to increase the number of models on their roster.
The campaign command roster therefore becomes a record of all of the models that you have used in the campaign, and comes to represent the ‘pool’ of Kill Team models available for you to choose kill teams from. A player might, on their command roster, have models from every specialism, and a number of
Leaders. However, they need to
choose a kill team from their campaign command roster (and any new models) that matches the restrictions for each mission. This means that kill teams will often be made up of a mix of experienced and new models, and players will need to balance the flexibility of using their whole collection against the reliability of using certain stalwarts.
Play the Mission
Once you have decided on a mission and the players have chosen their kill teams, play the mission!
Strategic Withdrawal
At the end of the third battle round, and at the end of each subsequent battle round, before any dice roll to determine whether or not the battle ends, a player can make a strategic withdrawal. Players make the decision about whether or not to do so in the order determined in the
Initiative phase. If a player makes a strategic withdrawal, they lose the mission – if there is only one other player remaining, that player wins the mission. When a player makes a strategic withdrawal, all of their models are removed from the battlefield. They must roll a dice for each model with one or more
flesh wounds when they do so to determine whether or not they go
out of action, as described in
Casualties.
As the dust settles after a battle, each side retreats to count the cost. Territory may be won or lost, and morale may suffer a devastating blow. Whatever happens, the fighters in each kill team come away with new experience and scars, gaining in value even as they prepare for their next death-or-glory mission.
After each mission, each player who took part in the mission should play through the following steps.
1. Resources2. Casualties3. ExperienceOnce the players have all completed this sequence, it’s time to start planning the next mission!
Resources
Each player should update the resources listed on their
command roster as described in the mission. Players may find themselves reduced to
guerrillas at this point, as described below, and if there is only one non-guerrilla faction left, that player wins (unless you agreed on a different way to end your campaign).
Casualties
Each player should roll a D6 for each model from their kill team on the battlefield that has one or more
flesh wounds. On a roll of 1-3, that model recovers. On a roll of 4-6, that model goes
out of action.
Each player then makes a Casualty roll for each of their models that is out of action at the end of a mission by rolling a D10 and consulting the following table:
CASUALTY ROLL | D10 | RESULT | 1 | Dead: The model is dead! It can no longer be included in your kill team – discard or erase its datacard and delete it from your command roster. | 2 | Convalescence: The model cannot be used in your next mission. Check the Convalescence box on its datacard. | 3-8 | Full Recovery: The model makes a full recovery and can be used in your next mission. | 9-10 | Hard Knocks: The model makes a full recovery as described above, and if it is a specialist it gains an additional experience point. |
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After making any casualty rolls, each player removes all flesh wounds from their models.
Experience
Then, the members of your kill team progress as described below, becoming even more formidable as they gain experience.
Specialists
Each
specialist in your kill team gains an experience point – check one of the experience boxes on their datacard. They also gain an experience point at the end of the mission if you used at least one Tactic from their specialism. Check the boxes left to right; when you check a box with an orange outline, your specialist has reached the next level – a Level 1 specialist becomes Level 2, and so on. You can then choose a new ability for them as described in
Specialists section, and you may also gain access to new Tactics for that fighter. Once you have checked all the boxes on the model’s datacard, it cannot progress any further – every fighter has their limits!
Fire Teams
The other models in your kill team may not be
specialists, but they are all learning a thing or two during these covert operations, and their bonds of camaraderie are growing!
The non-specialist models in your collection are organised into fire teams, where each fire team consists of all of the non-specialist models chosen from a single datasheet. For example, if you had 6 Rangers on your
command roster (not counting specialists), those 6 Rangers would be a fire team.
As long as two or more models from a single fire team were in your kill team and are not dead as a result of
Casualty rolls, all models in that fire team (even those who did not take part in the mission) gain an
experience point. In addition, all models in a fire team gain an experience point at the end of the mission if at least one enemy model was taken
out of action by an attack made or psychic power
manifested by a member of that fire team. Check these points of experience on your models’
datacards in the same way as described above. When you check a box with an orange outline, all models in that fire team have reached the next level – Level 1 models become Level 2, and so on. At each level, roll a D6 and consult the table below to see what advance your fire team gains. All members of the fire team gain this advance. Each fire team can only gain each advance once – if you roll a result you have already rolled, re-roll until you roll a new result.
D6 | RESULT | 1 | Fleet: Add 1" to this model’s Move characteristic. | 2 | Lucky: You can re-roll save rolls of 1 for this model. | 3 | Courageous: You can re-roll failed Nerve tests for this model. | 4 | Skilled: Choose one: - You can re-roll hit rolls of 1 for this model when it makes shooting attacks. - You can re-roll hit rolls of 1 for this model in the Fight phase. | 5 | Lethal: Choose one: - You can re-roll wound rolls of 1 for this model when it makes shooting attacks. - You can re-roll wound rolls of 1 for this model in the Fight phase. | 6 | Die-hard: You can subtract 1 from Injury rolls for this model. |
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Once you have checked all the boxes on a fire team’s datacards, it cannot progress any further.
Crack Troops
As your
fire teams grow in
experience, so their worth increases. In a
Battle-forged kill team, this greater value is accompanied by an increased cost for each member of that fire team, as shown in this table:
Fire Team | Cost per model | Level 1 | +0 points | Level 2 | +1 points | Level 3 | +2 points | Level 4 | +3 points |
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Adding Members to a Fire Team
Even as your fire teams grow in experience, you can recruit new members to replace losses or to expand their presence in your kill team. However, your green recruits will take some breaking in!
When
choosing your kill team for a mission, you can add a new member to a fire team: take the appropriate model and fill in a datacard for it. You must include it in your kill team in this mission. You can even do this with multiple new members if you like. For each new member you include in your kill team you must include at least one experienced member of the fire team (to ‘show them the ropes’). This means if you only have one member of a fire team remaining, you can only include a single new member alongside them in a mission.
In their first mission, new members of a fire team cannot use the advances that the fire team has earned – check the New Recruit box on their datacard to show this. At the end of the mission, you can erase the check and fill in their experience points so that they have the same number as the other members in their fire team. They also gain the fire team’s advances at this point.
Note that, if all members of a fire team are dead as a result of your
Casualty rolls, their experience is lost! You cannot add new members to a fire team that has been wiped out in this way.
A player can choose to disband a fire team after a mission. When they do so, they discard or erase all datacards for that fire team and delete them from their
command roster. They can then add a new fire team chosen from the same datasheet to their kill team in the next mission.
Guerrilla Factions
When a player has had one or more of their resources reduced to 0 or less, they are reduced to a guerrilla faction. A guerrilla faction has had their strength broken, and fights without central leadership or territory they can call their own. A guerrilla faction cannot normally win a campaign, with the exception of a campaign that is decided by
sudden death.
A guerrilla faction has no resources and cannot gain resources, but otherwise they take part in missions like any other player. In this way they can still take part in the campaign, and have an impact on who wins in the end. If a guerrilla faction is very successful, they may even manage to manipulate events so that they have a shot at victory!
A guerrilla faction cannot add new members to a fire team. They can, however, disband a fire team in the same way as described above.
Sudden Death
If all non-guerrilla players are reduced to guerrillas after the same mission, the campaign enters sudden death! At this point, any player can win, as there is no faction in the lead. Play a game of Kill Team using any mission that allows all players in the campaign to play at once. If you cannot agree on a mission, determine one randomly. Whoever wins the mission wins the campaign! If there is no victor, resolve the steps after the mission as normal, and then play another game as described above. Repeat this until a victor is decided.
Escalation
If all players agree, after a set point in the campaign (it could be after a certain number of battles have been played, or after a certain number of weeks – it’s up to you) you can increase the size of the kill teams to represent the increasing resources being poured into this escalating conflict. If you do so, your
Battle-forged kill teams can cost up to 150 points (though you should still apply any adjustments to this total as described in the mission you are playing).