The Fall Of Praetoria: by Warhammer 40K Campaigns

Attention citizen soldiers of glorious Praetoria.

Praetoria stands at Her hour of need.

The call has gone out across the galaxy, to our regiments, our neighbours, our allies and the mighty warriors of the Holy Emperor. Our appeals will not go unheard.

Now we must ready ourselves for the ultimate fight . Lest Praetoria be lost… Praetoria fall… Praetoria be no more.

Now that I have set the mood... whilst randomly surfing the net I came across some brilliant new Praetorian art work. At first I thought it was fan work posted on deviant art. As I found more I thought it must be from Fantasy Flight games, meaning Praetorians would appear in their RPG – an awesome prospect. Then I found the source site and I read the words ‘The Fall Of Praetoria’.

Warhammer 40K Campaigns is (as the name suggests) a campaign site that is still in development awaiting launch. It is being created by 40k fans for 40k fans. The ‘studio team’ is based in France but will have all content also available in English. Here is their own description of the site taken from their facebook page:

“Warhammer 40K Campaigns will include new campaigns for Warhammer 40.000 universe. Website will propose to players a complete history, a forum, items to be unlock, unique illustrations and more...

Website will be in English and French.

 

This fantastic collaboration will allow to the website to coming in 2014. All Facebook followers will have an exclusive access to beta test.

First Campaign will be The Fall Of Praetoria :

Campaign takes place on Praetoria Hive World, Imperium fights against a massive Ork invasion.

3 Adeptus Astartes, 6 Imperial Guard Regiments, and 4 Ork clans fight for ascendancy of the planet.

Takes place in this great adventure !

Future is in your hands on http://warhammer-40k-campaigns.com/ ...

Studio team.”

Obviously some help with English translation is needed but I was very excited by what I saw.

I was still full of questions about this project so I wrote to the studio to find out more. I was mostly interested in ‘how’ and ‘who’ rather than the exact details of the site and campaigns – fan made materials are some of the best but sometimes it gets squashed before it gets going.

Here is my short Q&A with Guerin Anselme the project manager (he apologised for his French-English translation).

Q) What is the studio behind Warhammer 40K Campaigns? This has been listed as a ‘fan based project’ so who are you guys?

A) The studio is a band of friends, 1 webdesigner, 1 encoder, 1 project manager and freelance graphic designers, others are volunteers, family member ... Only a fan project with friends in the trade and budget.

Q) From what we have seen of the project there is clearly a lot of work going into it. Are people donating their time or is it being financed some way?

A)  It comes to personal time to the whole project except the illustrations and proofreading English translations so that these are not a mixture of French / English. Project cost 7000 to 10000€ funded by the project manager.

Q) Game workshop are notorious for crushing fans and their projects, are you worried about IP infringements?

A)  I have an authorization  email from GW, all texts are created by us and illustration are also our property, it is not forbidden to use the universe of Warhammer 40k. We rely on fans to help support us with donations after opening site for it grows, the project manager is an ambulance driver he can invest more in the project.

Q) Many veteran gamers love Praetorians what made you choose them as the focus of the first Campaign?

A)  Because I’m a veteran gamer (20 years in hobby) and I really love Praetorian, so "Fall of Praetoria" is born.

Q) Is there anything that fans can do to contribute to this project?

A) Yes sure, when website will opening, we hope to have financial support (even $ 1 per person) for the server and of course create other campaigns. But we will need forum moderator (French and English), people who creating blog posts, painting tutorials, any help is welcome as simply ideas to improve the site.

We went on to discuss people’s Praetorian projects and background articles.  Guerin added “Of course we are looking for all the [praetorian] background including those of the fans and our main goal is to be closer to the fans even if we cannot satisfy everyone.”

Here are a few previews (sorry for the small size).

Due to primarily being a volunteer project it has had some delays and so will not be ready to launch in 2014 as planned. However, Guerin did say that we can expect to see an update on the home page soon and it will be launched in 2015 so watch this space! 

To follow the updates on this project check out their facebook page here. I, for one, am very excited about all that has been planned. I fondly remember past 40k worldwide campaigns and I'll be keeping a very keen eye on how this develops. 

On that note I'm off to finish what I have on my model desk so I can paint up some more Praetorians!