I tend to get a lot of use out of the game books I buy, and Pariah Nexus is no exception. I bought this Crusade book for $100 NZD and I've read 44 pages of lore and then spent a whole 2 months playing through its 15 missions in order. This is my review of the Pariah Nexus Crusade book's missions, and in a way it's a review revisited, with all the necessary data my cogitators need to pronounce a final judgement.
I've already praised the excellent story of Pariah Nexus Crusade book. Aside from that, the real value of this book is found in the last 15 pages. The mission designs in this book are really good Sure, there are a few missions that are just capture the flag, where the only thing to differentiate it from no mission at all is deployment zones, terrain, and objective locations. But that's just good pacing, frankly. If every mission forces you to invent a new strategy, then your default strategy is no strategy. It's nice to have a few missions thrown in that just lets your army be itself.
More significantly, the missions demonstrate how just a few minor changes to the old capture-the-flag motif makes a huge difference to a wargame. As far as I can tell, Games Workshop is not usually comfortable with minimalism. They publish rulebooks with hundreds of pages, and codexes with detachment rules and Crusade rules, and then more rules for Crusade, and then mission rules, and so on. And yet the missions in Pariah Nexus show real restraint in design philosophy.
I'll admit I often had to check and re-check the rules of the mission I was playing, but frankly I expect to not memorise a new rule that I don't have to remember beyond a single game. What I appreciate is that there's only the one rule to reference. The answer to the question "What's the mission, again?" is consistently a singular answer.
There's a single gimmick for each mission, and it makes each mission feel unique, and most importantly, surprising.
I was surprised and honestly disappointed by the lack of a narrative in the missions. The narrative is so strong throughout the rest of the book, but for the final 15 pages the story sinks into the background. The missions successfully set themselves within the story, and some mechanics even somewhat reinforce that, but I could have played the missions in any order and never have noticed. It's almost like every mission starts fresh, like you'd never played in this Crusade before. There's no sense of persistence or continuity to the missions.
When I played Into the Tomb, there were just 3 missions remaining, and I'd fully expected the story of the Crusade missions to follow the story provided at the start of the book. In my head, I was progressing through missions to reach a final confrontation in or around a pylon, or within a chamber that was the source of the energy creating the Stilling, or something. Instead, the missions as written took me to a tomb, and then to a battlefield with some nodes, and then a battlefield with some more nodes. In fact, most missions seemed to be about quasi gheist corrupted energistic nodes.
To be fair, my previous experience with Games Workshop campaigns before Pariah Nexus was from content published in White Dwarf (especially The Slidecrown Sundering that started in issue 493) and the Quest of the Ringbearer book for Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game. I played all or some of both those campaigns, and one mission very much led to another. In fact, if my memory serves (and it rarely does), sometimes the results of the previous mission influenced the setup of the next one.
I'd expected the Pariah Nexus missions to literally either re-tell the story from the start of the book, or else to tell a new story related to the start of the book. But the missions are basically self-standing missions with some cursory nods to the theme of the book, and that's it.
At the very least, I'd have appreciated it if the outcome of the penultimate mission was used to determine how many forces you could bring to the final mission. Personally, I'd take it farther than that. I'd publish a book with the missions integrated through the narrative section. In fact, I'd configure it like a pick-your-path game book, so that the outcome of a mission directed you to an entirely different story path than the one you started on. If Army X wins the mission, go to page 33. If Army Y wins the mission, go to page 45. That kind of thing. Nobody's playthrough of Pariah Nexus ought to be the same.
Of course, the truth is that it won't be. If you play Pariah Nexus, then you're almost certainly building your own story to justify why your armies are fighting. Your campaign is different from mine. I admit it works. It's just not what I'd expected, and I'm a little underwhelmed by the lack of integration.
I said in my book review that there were lots of new rules in the Pariah Nexus Crusade, but that's fine because you can pick and choose what rules you want to use and which to just ignore. I was both correct and naïve.
There are a lot of new rules.
You can choose what to use and what to ignore.
The problem is, many of the new rules are connected to other rules, and there's no way of knowing how it all connects until you start playing.
In my mind, the whole mission was primarily about collecting Blackstone because some of the rules leading up to the missions were very obviously about finding Blackstone fragments. What I didn't realise was that the Strategic Footing rules influenced Blackstone acquisition, or that Agenda rules could interact with Strategic Footing rules, and so on. I'd picked a set of rules to honour without understanding that many of those rules would never be optimised because I wasn't bothering to track a value set by different rule.
I wish there was a simplified version of the rules. For instance, Blackstone reward values (and XP rewards, for that matter) could be written into the Strategic Footing table, based on Victory Points instead of Agenda. The way you spend Blackstone remains the same, but the conditions for earning it is different. For a big multi-player campaign, the big complex rules are great because they give players a lot to think about and account for between games. But for a campaign you're playing alone or with busy friends who barely have time to meet each week for a game, much less to maintain an Crusade Force between games, the simple option would preserve the intent of the Crusade without requiring the same sacrifice.
I didn't use all the rules in the back of the book, but to be honest my experience didn't suffer for it (aside from my own confusion about my expected rate of acquisition and the actual rate.) There are many rules I really enjoyed. Some are unique to Pariah Nexus and others are just continuations of the standard Crusade rules.
For a while now, I've had the vague feeling that game companies release game material too frequently. I didn't purchase Pariah Nexus the day it came out, or even possibly the same year, but I can vouch that it takes a lot of time to read the lore, prepare for a campaign, play 15 missions, maintain your Crusade Force, and add to your Crusade Force, plus all the other normal hobby stuff you do. I guess some people play more frequently than I do, but then again I feel like I play more often than a lot of Warhammer players I know. Heck, just look at the maths. If you only play once a month, it would definitely take you over a year to get through all the missions.
I think with a lot of modern gaming content, you must decide to be happy with a subset of what's available. You can't own and store every army, so you play with the armies you've got, despite the latest craze. You can't read and play every book of missions that gets released, so you buy one that appeals to you and then live with that, to the exclusion of all else, for the better part of a year.
There's a lot to enjoy, and we've all only got so much time. Pariah Nexus is one option, and of course there are many others, past and future, to choose from. I don't think there's a wrong answer to that opportunity. You can jump in with the latest book, or a book you find in a second-hand bookstore, or just write your own campaign from scratch. It's all creative, and fun, and well worth the time and effort spent on it, as long as you enjoy it.
I don't think I can measure the enjoyment I've gotten from this book in hours, because hours just don't go that high. It's been literal months, in fact basically half a year. It's been the inspiration for learning new rules (um, and for getting them wrong), for painting new miniatures (Tyranids at last!), for crafting, for designing battlefields, for telling stories in the Nephilim Sector, for developing characters and backstories, for puzzling over army builds, for finally understanding some of the nuances to specific units, and so much more. It's been a healthy obsession.
I don't know that Pariah Nexus is necessarily exceptional compared to other Crusade books. It's probably fortunate for me that Pariah Nexus features a good amount of Adeptus Mechanicus in its plot. Then again, the animated show was about Adepta Sororitas and Salamanders and Astra Militarum, so probably Pariah Nexus isn't any more remarkable than any other Crusade. I suspect that if you throw yourself into any Crusade book, and do what's necessary to make it work for the toys and assets you have or can craft, and stick with it from start to finish, then probably any Crusade book is enough to satiate your thirst for immersive gaming. You may have to build your own narrative around a book that, puzzlingly, contains mostly narrative content, but I think that can be empowering if you let it. Sure I'd restructure things, were it up to me, but in its current form, Pariah Nexus was a success for me. It was engrossing, inspiring, and it provided months of hobbying and gaming fun.