The Global Campaign
The Severed Reach is a global narrative campaign from The Independent Characters, opening on October 1st, 2026 and running for twelve months. It takes place beyond the Great Rift, in the dark of the Imperium Nihilus, where eight factions are fighting over thirty-two worlds across nine sectors. Every one of them is cut off from home and on its own out here. The Imperium has lost contact with Terra, a T’au colony has heard nothing from its Empire in a century, and a Tyranid splinter severed from the Hive Mind has stopped migrating and learned to farm. Which of them holds this region of space when the twelve months are up is entirely down to the games you play.
Taking part is simple. You register, choose the army you collect and the faction you fight for, then log your games as you play them. Your opponent does not need to be in the campaign for your victories to count, so a pickup game at your local store or a weekend of tournament rounds all feed the war effort just the same. Anything set in the grim darkness of the far future counts: Warhammer 40,000, Horus Heresy, Combat Patrol, Zone Mortalis, Boarding Actions, Space Hulk, whatever you are putting on the table.
This is a considerably sharper version of the campaign system we have run before. Losses and draws now score, because showing up and fighting is worth something even when it goes badly for you. Worlds have to be taken in order, so an enemy fortress world cannot be touched until the lighter worlds shielding it have been broken. And be careful with the space you already hold. A world nobody fights over slips out of its owner’s grip week by week as its defences degrade, and a garrison left alone long enough becomes a target rather than a stronghold. Quiet territory is vulnerable territory.
Participation is open to Patreon subscribers at the Acolyte level or above, which is two dollars a month. You will get monthly updates as the map shifts, and we will be covering the campaign’s progress on the show with reports and discussion throughout the year. Send us photographs of your games and the narrative accounts of how they unfolded and we will share the best of them, or simply log your tournament results and let the standings speak for themselves. Either way, the ground you take is yours.
The Severed Reach
Beyond the Great Rift, past the point where the Astronomican’s light gives out, lies a region the Imperium’s surviving charts still label as the Severed Reach. Nine sectors sit here in the dark of the Imperium Nihilus, and at the heart of them is the Threnody Gap, unclaimed ground where every border meets and none of them holds. Eight powers have territory in the Reach. Not one of them can call home. Whatever thread tied each of them to a wider empire was cut when the sky tore open, and everything they have built in the century since has been built alone.
In the Coriolan Reach the Imperium holds four worlds under a Lord Castellan who has heard nothing from Terra since the Rift, steering her fleets by the light of a saint’s tomb because there is no Astronomican to steer by. The Aeldari of the Thessaly Drift guard a craftworld whose engines died sixty-five thousand years ago, and whose farseers have already read the sequence in which their sector falls. In the Ruinous Shelf the boundary between reality and the warp thins across four worlds until, at the heart of it, physical law is only a suggestion. The Karnathid Dynasty of the Karnath Expanse fights a patient, unhurried war conducted entirely by standing orders issued sixty million years ago, because their Phaeron has not woken and his stewards have no authority to decide anything he did not already decide.
The others are stranger still. Warboss Grubdakka has spent the century since the Rift growing the largest Waaagh! this region has ever seen, and has watched his enemies break his outer worlds one by one without much concern, because those worlds were never defences. They were the feeding grounds. In the Shatterwake, five mutually hostile powers, Aeldari Corsairs and Votann prospectors and Ork freebooterz and the Red Corsairs and whatever Chaos Space Marines drift toward an unwinnable war, hold together under an Accord kept not out of honour but because each of them has too much banked to walk away. The T’au of the Vash’an Corridor have held four worlds and absorbed two more for ninety-one years while receiving steady, wise guidance from a homeworld that has not been able to reach them since the third year. And in the Nidus Verge a Tyranid splinter, cut off from the Hive Mind and unable to move on, did the thing no hive fleet has ever needed to do. It stopped migrating and learned to farm.
Every sector here is peeled open from the outside in. Outposts fall first, then the resource worlds behind them, then the sanctified ground, and only then the fortress at the core. That is the shape of the war, and it is the shape your games will take. What none of the eight can see from inside their own borders is that something on the far side of the Rift started answering eleven months ago, and at least three of them logged it independently without ever comparing notes. The Reach has been alone for a hundred years. It may not be alone much longer.
How to Register
Registration takes two steps:
- First, sign up on our Patreon at the Acolyte level or above, which is only two dollars a month and is what gives you access to the campaign.
- Once that is done, come back here and click the Campaign Registration link under the IC’s Global Campaign, which will walk you through the rest.
You will pick the army you collect and then choose the faction it fights for, since a few armies can march under more than one banner. Astra Militarum, for instance, can serve the Imperium or take the field as Traitor Guard for Chaos, and that choice is yours to make.
Do not agonise over it! You can change your army or even switch factions later without losing any of the ground you have already taken, because every game you log is recorded with the faction you were fighting for at the time. Your past victories stay exactly where they are, credited to the worlds you won them on. Only your future games follow you to your new banner.