I’d like to introduce a new region of the Corvus Cluster: the Varrenshall Subsector, henceforth known as “The Burning Frontier.”

The author/GM of this subsector is Jakup (aka Thurservor), a gamer who was intrigued by an entry on this website about collaborating with other hobbyists. He dropped me a line.

It seems he and his buddies were running a 40K campaign, and they thought it would be cool to incorporate their campaign into ours. I’ve always hoped to recruit fellow hobbyists in the development of the Corvus Cluster, and his suggestion stuck a cord.

So, the Burning Frontier is the newest chapter of our narrative campaign.

Space is big enough that, at first, the events of the Burning Frontier will be a distant rumble on the horizon of the Corvus Cluster. It will run parallel to the activities of The Gaffer and myself. We’ll share the same venue, but our battles will be light years apart.

The Burning Frontier lies adjacent to the Heart of Darkness warp storm.

But, slowly, we’ll integrate a bit. Heroes may jump from the Sculptor System to the Burning Frontier, or vice versa, and sometimes battles in one region of space may affect military campaigns on the other side of the Cluster.

It’s possible we’ll even run a joint mini-campaign some day, with my 4th Company of the Knights of Altair and Thurservor’s Vorpal Swords Space Marine Chapter attacking different parts of the same planet.

The exciting part of all this is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. As we’ve been writing this campaign, simply introducing a new character or planet has dramatically changed the story of the Corvus Cluster.

I put my Rogue Trader Adeon Drake on a desert planet for a skirmish game, and I ended up with my favorite world, Morkai, which now has an extensive background, two battle reports from the planet, and untold Rumors of the Underhive entries.

Indeed, I’m now feverishly working on more than 40 desert terrain pieces so I can expand my gaming on the world.

The Burning Frontier is near the Heart of Darkness, so that opens all kinds of opportunities for The Gaffer and myself. Indeed, as the Dark Mechanicus has a base there, it gives me incentive to get started on a Dark Mechanics force I’ve been toying with. See? We’re just introducing the Burning Frontier and already it’s corrupting my mind.

So, who knows where this will lead? Perhaps Count Feracci will decide there’s profit in exploring the Burning Frontier? Or perhaps some horrible menace will escape the Frontier to threaten some of “my” worlds. (Although they’re not solely mine any more, are they?)

That’s the fun of a narrative campaign where you have a group of hobbyists collaborating. We’ll work on this together, and the Corvus Cluster will surprise us as it takes on a life of its own. The universe is a big and crazy place . . . who knows what’s next?

In any case, stay tuned. The first tales of the Burning Frontier are on their way . . . .

—TheGM

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The Corvus Cluster is a Warhammer 40K blog documenting our gaming adventures in the fantastical sci-fi universe of Games Workshop.