Carcass Front: The Designers’ Notes

by the Design Team

Excitement is high amongst the Factory Fortress team! From original concept to countless hours of incredible hard work by many talented people, the first narrative campaign box – Carcass Front – is soon releasing around the world! We asked members of the Design team to give their thoughts on the process of bringing this behemoth to life, and they obliged…

This is a long (but worthy) one, so grab yourself a cup of tea and settle in!

Tuomas Pirinen

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
– Frank Herbert, Dune

Game design is, above all, a creative process. When creating a new game supplement like Carcass Front, it is impossible to plan everything beforehand on a spreadsheet. When I originally envisaged writing the Campaign Pack, it was a far smaller affair: 32 pages with a few unique scenarios. It was something I could produce alone as a thanks to our Kickstarter backers.

But as the enthusiasm and the size of the Trench Crusade community grew, so did the ambition and the scope of Carcass Front. More people joined Factory Fortress and brought with them new ideas: new exploration tables, scenarios, victory conditions, story beats and mysterious locations. Artists were given free reign to explore the magnificent and mysterious locations of the Carcass Front, from the Steel Necropolis to the Pillar of Jonah.

Writers then descended upon the project with gusto to create a narrative and deep lore for the project. Two protagonists were selected for the canon story of the Campaign: the dreaded Heretic Naval Raiders would clash with the fanatical Procession of the Sacred Affliction. These subfactions, originally intended as a small addition to the main Warbands, have become extremely popular with the players. We decided to expand them into full Warbands in their own right, with more background lore and new art. We expanded their rules into a full Warband list, with new Battlekit, Glory Items and even new variants of their own, as well as New Patrons for your Warband to follow. This also allowed us to create new art and models to support the newly expanded Warbands with brand new sculpts.

From the viewpoint of game mechanics, I set two high-level design goals at the start of the Carcass Front Project. 

First, we wanted to present a map-based campaign that was either playable by two players as a narrative-driven campaign, or enjoyed by a group of players (such as a gaming club) together. There is something about maps that make campaigns more tangible and sets the stakes higher, and it allows us to show more of the world of Trench Crusade in intricate detail, and present new locations and lore for players to explore. There is something highly immersive when you are pouring over the map of the area you are fighting over rather than a more abstract means of tracking the campaign progress.

The other aim was to create campaign mechanics that would heavily encourage replayability and ability to try out radically different tactics and strategies with a reasonable chance of victory. To this end, the Carcass Front features a Campaign Tracker: through decisions made during exploration, camp building and combat, the players can choose different goals and angles in order to gain an overall victory over the Carcass Front. This system can also be brought over to your own campaign games so you can fight for dominance over a different theatre of war.

Finally, we decided that the games you play at the Carcass Front will influence how the story of the Great War moves forward as we cover its continuing history. In terms of the overall narrative of Trench Crusade, we have always wanted to take the story and timeline forward instead of featuring a world permanently frozen in the year 1914. The prophecy of the Leviathan that forms the focus of the story gave us a great goal and impetus for both Fallen and Faithful players to engage with the campaign. Will the dread Leviathan break the chains of God and regain the Throne of the moral sin of Envy, or will the devotees of the Sacred Affliction consume its flesh? To determine this, we are soon going to announce how you can take part in a worldwide Carcass Front campaign and help us to shape the events that will determine the fate of cities, armies, peoples and nations as the Heretics look to expand their domains.

The board is set and the pieces are moving: armies, fleets, heroes and villains, generals and footsoldiers. Among them is your Warband. We look forward to crafting the next chapter in the story of the Great War with you.

Carcass Front is calling your name!

Jervis Johnson

 

While I would love to take the lion’s share of the credit for the creation of Carcass Front, the sad truth is that my main role on the project was being the ‘project lead’ for the rules team. Oh well, someone has to do it I guess. This meant that I was mainly employed arranging meetings, attending meetings, and giving feedback on the incredible work that the rest of the rules team carried out.

On the other hand, being the project lead did allow me to see all of the different parts of the project as they came together. I think the thing I most enjoyed about this was the way something that started out as a tiny area on the Trench Crusade map and a few references in the Trench Crusade lore grew into a detailed look at the whole region. All of the different elements in Carcass Front – the campaign map and rules, the new factions lists, the Path of Leviathan campaign and scenarios, the descriptions of the important locations in the region, and, of course, the new miniatures and artwork – they all combine together to give a vivid impression of what the Carcass Front is actually like. It makes the place seem real, at least in my opinion.

Andy Chambers

I was really happy to be given work on Carcass Front as a new job. Tuomas is an old friend and colleague of mine, of course, and from my GW days (last century, if you can believe that) my mentor, the Prince of Reason himself, Jervis Johnson, was in on the project too. Sublime.

While Jervis took on the ornery aspects of general book-wrangling as project lead, I was scheduled to be writing two Warband lists derived from Faction variants: Heretic Naval Raiders (a Heretic Legion variant) and Procession of the Sacred Affliction (a Trench Pilgrim variant). In addition to that, I coordinated the narrative campaign with our scenario designer Giovani de Castro Fiorini. For writing lore on Carcass Front locations, the campaign narrative, the plot’s inciting characters and stories thereof, we also had the inimitable Graham McNeill, another old colleague. Giovani was joined by our newly hired games designer Brook Close to ensure our writing team wasn’t entirely made up of pensionable-age veterans.

Tuomas told me that the two Warbands we were doing were already very popular indeed and bound to become more so with the new plastic miniatures underway – Mike’s concepts certainly lent weight to that promise. Tuomas told me he trusted me to make the lists great, despite my rather fledgling experience level in the Trench Crusade game. No pressure there then. Fortunately, Brook is extremely experienced in Trench Crusade, having run most of the Warbands and multiple campaigns personally in addition to a very active role in the Trench Crusade community. So, to be very clear going forward, any imbalances or horrors in the new list are entirely Brook’s fault, and anything good about them that you like are my great ideas and mine alone, no matter what he tells you. 

To be honest with you all, between Mike’s concepts, Loic’s sculpts and siphoning out Brook’s brain cells (along with his endless enthusiasm) this was one of the easiest and most pleasurable tasks I’ve done for a while. I’ve done a lot of army lists in my time, and I like doing them. For me it’s where the rubber hits the road on games design as you take the game mechanics in a list and use them to show how it does what it does on the tabletop in characterful ways. Simultaneously (ideally), it’s supporting the lore for the Warband through how it feels to play and to play against. That’s the idea, anyway. For these lists, the idea was to take the  variant lists from Warbands of Trench Crusade and give them ‘full Warband’ treatment for Carcass Front. Extra lore, new models and new, unique Battlekit, that kind of thing. The only real constraint was not to mess with the original variant lists too much so we wouldn’t invalidate any existing Warbands players had collected.

I won’t get into detail on the lists here for the sake of brevity, but you will soon be able to see for yourself how we did. Overall, I’m very happy with the results. They both sailed through playtesting [I see what you did there -Ed.] and feel like goodly additions to the Warband pantheon.

Brook Close

It’s a strange feeling to be writing this. Carcass Front, whilst being worth all the excitement one can muster by virtue of its scale and scope alone, was also my first project upon joining Factory Fortress in late 2025, and something that would define passing my probation – AKA: whether I have a job. The sheer insanity of being interviewed for the position by Tuomas Pirinen, Jervis Johnson and Andy Chambers, three game designers who defined my childhood, to being set multiple design tests, to being offered the position and hitting the ground running on day one by being told ‘we want you to design the Map-based Campaign system’ felt like an absolute blur of adrenaline, joy and no small amount of imposter syndrome. Immediately, my late nights and weekends became a riot of maths and mechanical surgery.

I broke down the extant Trench Crusade campaign system and dissected its resource allocation and their impact before smashing it all together in different configurations like some foul, experimental Mammonite account-surgeon, building up paper mountains scarred with hundreds of dice rolls mapped to probability tables. By god, do I owe some of my maths teachers apologies.

Somehow, through a storm of work and thanks to the incredible guidance of the design team (especially Jervis, who both encouraged my weirder and riskier ideas and mentored me to see them fully actualised), the map-based campaign was done, and I think we made something wonderful that we can all be proud of.

So what’s new in the Carcass Front campaign? The first major feature is that it has a map! Maps are great, as dividing the theatre of war into discrete, linked zones already aids immersion, but the real juice of the map-based campaign system is what each zone gives you: resources.

Resources in the Carcass Front campaign are divided into four types:
1) Favour: representing glory and splendour for your Patron
2) Relics: representing apocrypha and ancient secrets
3) Supplies: representing rations, medicines, and ammo
4) Territories: representing reconnaissance, local acclaim and knowledge

What zones you choose to fight in determines which resource(s) you’ll get, each of which is tied to unique Exploration Tables, Camp Buildings (which provide further buffs to your Warband) and, most importantly, Campaign Victory Points – all of which are tracked on your Campaign Tracker (amongst other things).

This leads us to one of our main goals for the campaign, which was to make sure that there are multiple paths to victory. To add a bit more spice into that pot, I also designed the Patron Vision Cards, which are secret, unique objectives given out to players at the beginning of a campaign that help guide you towards a particular playstyle, and also ensure no two campaigns are the same.

I’m running out of words for this article now, and I could talk more about all of the fun and weird secrets to find in the four new Exploration Tables, or the fun synergies in the three Patrons I designed, or how stoked I was to get to work with Andy on the Drowned Choir variant for the Heretic Naval Raiders and the Knights of Saint Lazarus variant for the Procession of the Sacred Affliction, but it’s probably for the best that you see these things for yourself!

Oh, and, in case it wasn’t clear, I passed probation and got the job. Yay!

See you in depths, folks.

Graham McNeill

I’d loved what I’d seen online of Mike and Tuomas’ work on Trench Crusade and knew that it was so far up my street, it was practically in my house having a nice cup of tea. Tuomas and I knew each other from the Old Times, when he hired me for my first creative job in the Games Workshop Design Studio. And what with Jervis and Andy already hard at work in the game design trenches and Marc in the editorial fireteam, it really felt like getting the band back together. After writing Blood & Iron for the Trench Crusade Rulebook, I dug deep into the Carcass Front project, but right from the start, it was clear this was an altogether different beast.

Art by Eva Giunchi

For one, there was a lot more writing to be done, and a lot of what Andy, Brook, Jervis, and Giovani were working on was going to be, at least partially, hanging off the sections of the book I’d be writing. The first things I wrote were the backgrounds for the book’s two protagonists, Blessed Bartolomeo and War Priest Charon. All we had were their names and the factions to which they belonged, so once I’d written their backstories, I developed the proclamations that open the book and set the tone for what they each want and what they hope to achieve upon victory. Getting a sense of their characters really helped with the next part: fleshing out the landscape over which the battles of the Carcass Front would be fought.

Mike and James had already pulled together a rough map with ideas for what types of locations might be interesting to explore, and that gave me a great jumping-off point to flesh them out with evocative names and stories. One of the aspects that is simultaneously the most demanding and most rewarding part of writing for Trench Crusade is the blending of real world history, geography and mythology of places, people and cultures into something new and exciting. Figuring out what story I wanted to tell in each location and drawing from all of those wells (as well as the fantastic art and miniatures) to create something interesting and aspirational for gamers and hobbyists, while being respectful to those cultures, is just the kind of challenge I love to tackle. Finding ways to extrapolate what’s real and historical with what’s fantastical and mad is tremendous fun, as was layering in characters, events and story threads the games designers could incorporate.

That naturally led into the timeline, where we were able to weave together things that already existed in the world of Trench Crusade and the new events created for the Carcass Front. All of this gave a lovely sense of a world in motion, one that’s not static and feels more alive and where the actions of the various factions (and players) will change every facet of the Great War. Together with building out a battery of quotes to scatter through the book, it really felt this was a corner of the world that felt worn-in, but one where everything could all change depending on the outcome of this campaign and those to come. Crafting the Carcass Front with my old muckers from the Design Studio and creatives new to me (looking at you, Brook, Gina and all the TC folk!) was tremendously rewarding, and it was incredibly liberating to work with people whom I implicitly trusted to do awesome work and with whom I already had solid working relationships. It was like pulling on a penitent’s hairshirt, but finding out that it fits perfectly and really brings out your eyes. I really hope you all enjoy what the team has cooked up, and that you’ll have as much fun in the mud and blood of the Carcass Front as we did pulling it all together.

Mike Franchina

Art by Artem Demura

When we first started work on the Carcass Front, one of my main objectives was to introduce some new locations to our world that weren’t strictly trenches. I had seen a lot of amazing tables built by our fantastic community, but almost all of them included trenches. I wanted people to see that the world of Trench Crusade had a wide variety of battlefields. With Carcass Front, I think we’ll inspire players with new and exciting locations full of rich lore, lavishly illustrated by talented artists. 

The high-level inspiration for our Carcass Front campaign was Apocalypse Now. In that movie, the deeper they go into the jungle, the weirder and more surreal it gets, and the crazier everyone becomes. I imagined the players and their Warbands venturing deep into the Carcass Front, confronting strange and horrible things in the encounter table and fighting on progressively stranger battlefields.  

I am excited for everyone to get a hold of the Carcass Front. The design team did an amazing job on the campaigns and expanding the rules, the miniatures team pulled out all the stops on the minis, and everyone else on the team worked their hearts out to bring this to you. We really learned a lot on this project as a team, and this is only the beginning!

Carcass Front is upon us! If you want to pick up your copy, you can order it now through our website here!