New Player’s Guide

Your Need-to-Know

1. Animosity Campaigns are annual five-week narrative events, usually beginning in July each year. 
2. A few weeks before the first Player Phase, you’ll be able to pre-register your choice of Coalition in our Discord via a Google Form, shortly afterwards there will Open Registration. You will be granted access to private channels to collaborate, discuss strategy, and engage in diplomacy with other players in your Coalition.
3. Players submit Reports each turn during the "Player Phase", which last 4 days and runs from 12:00am EST Wednesday through 11:59pm EST Saturday.
4. The update period - known as the "GM Phase" - lasts 3 days and runs from Sunday through Tuesday.
5. Reports are divided into four types: Play, Hobby, Writing, and Other (visual storytelling, arts & crafts, etc).
6. The more reports allocated to each Narrative Path, the more likely your Coalition will enjoy a favourable outcome in the Unfolding Narrative.
7. Winning Narrative Paths - and the margin you win them by - determines how well your Coalition does during the campaign.
8. Overwhelmed by our Discord server? Don’t worry- you can mute certain channels or even the entire server by right-clicking/selecting what you want to mute. You don’t have to keep up with everything - the #Updates and #Resources channels will always have everything you need to know.

Where to Start

1. Every player needs to join our Discord server. You can find it HERE. Discord is a free app for mobile and PC that lets people chat via text, voice or video in real time, and it’s where all our players can interact with each other, and the campaign team, about all things Animosity.
2. If you’re new to Discord, you will need to create an account and Discord username. Your Discord username will be needed later in the campaign, so pick something memorable!
3. Head to the “Rules” channel and familiarise yourself with the code of conduct, as well as a brief rundown of what each of the Discord channels are for.
4. Feel free to introduce yourself in the “Introductions” channel and tell people as much or as little about yourself as you’d like.

Once Da Warpath has started, it will be a good idea to head to the website (AnimosityCampaigns.com) and read the materials on the ‘Setting’ and ‘Figureheads & Coalitions’ pages (you can access these from the menu bar on PC, or from the menu toggle in the top-left corner of a mobile screen). These will bring you up to speed on where the current campaign is set, and who’s involved. 

Registration

1. Open Registration for each campaign will begin around June – a new “Registration” channel will open in Discord then.
2. Each player will need to join a Coalition to take part. To register, post in the “Registration” channel in Discord stating which Coalition you want to join.
3. You’ll be added to the relevant Coalition group and gain access to the private Coalition-specific channels, where you can discuss and plan with your teammates during the campaign.

Submitting Reports

1. Campaigns run for a total of five turns (with each turn lasting a week). Players have from Wednesday to Saturday each week to act and submit their reports as a coalition.
2. Each turn players can submit reports to aid their coalition. To submit a report, players should head to the ‘Submit Reports' page on the website, click the “Submit Report” link (which will take you to a Google Form page) and fill out the submission form. 
3. There are four different report types available – Play, Writing, Hobby, and Other. Players are allowed to submit up to three reports per turn. Definitions for each of the report types can be found below. If in doubt, ask!
4. Each coalition will be presented with Narrative Paths each turn – these represent the options available to the coalition during the turn, and are what players dedicate their reports to. When you submit a report, you will need to select which Narrative Path you want your report to count towards – basically, which course of action you wish to pursue - all your subsequent reports for that turn should be to the same Narrative Path. Generally, players in a Coalition will confer and discuss which Narrative Paths to dedicate their collective reports to in order to achieve a particular goal on behalf of their Coalition and Figurehead.

Using Discord

For general Discord usage, Discord has a series of articles that might be useful HERE.

• Lots of players change their Discord username to reflect their in-character persona. Depending on the device you’re using, there’s two ways to do this: on PC, right-click your username and select ‘Change Nickname’; on mobile, click the ‘Members’ icon in the top-right corner then select your username and click ‘Manage User’. You should then get the option to change your nickname. Note that this does *not* change your Discord username, so won’t affect your ability to submit reports for the campaign.
• We have a lot of channels on Discord for various different things. The ‘General’ channels are fairly self-explanatory. The ‘Hobby Hangout’ channels are for players to chat, discuss and share various hobby-related topics, Animosity-related or not.
• 'Other Stuff' contains our 'Content Feed' channel, where you can keep up with everything Age of Sigmar from some of our favourite narrative content creators, and 'Recent Releases' where players talk all about the latest exciting Age of Sigmar releases!
• Any campaign need-to-know information will be posted in the ‘Updates’ channel
• Any useful reference material and third-party resources will be posted in the ‘Resources’ channel
• Finally, please use the ‘Ask The Team’ channel if there’s something you need to know, and Team Animosity will answer!

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What counts as an Animosity Report?

There are 4 different types of report: Play, Writing, Hobby, and Other. The report form asks for: your name, Discord username, player character’s name, warband’s name, warband’s faction (this is a drop-down list of AoS Battletome factions, please choose the closest match).

All reports have a field for a brief summary of your report (with a 500 character limit). For example, who your forces fought against, where they fought, or what they uncovered in the context of your chosen Narrative Path. This is optional, but incredibly helpful for the writers, to enable them to quickly sort reports before reading the full text. A good summary will make your report easier to include in the weekly Unfolding Narrative.

Play

If you played a game you can report it as a Play Report. Games of Age of Sigmar, Warcry, Soulbound RPG, and Warhammer: Underworlds are all accepted. Your games can be in-person, virtually/remotely (via Tabletop Simulator, or video call “play-by-camera”), or solo. You won't be asked for any supporting evidence like photos or a long-form battle report. You can use the Summary field to briefly describe how it relates to the Narrative Path but it doesn't need to reflect the events in the game (obviously better if it does, but it is not required). If you want to submit a written battle report and/or photos of a game, they can be submitted as Writing or Other reports in addition to your Play Report.

Writing

Writing reports are text-based submissions like battle reports, short fiction, etc. The guideline word-count is 500 to 1000 words, which is roughly one to two pages of writing. With close to 200 writing reports per turn alone (plus double that possible number of other types of submissions) to comb through per turn, the upper limit of 1000 words is a hard-stop.

There is a field to add a link to your writing. Please make sure that the link is publicly accessible so the writers don’t need to ask for access during the GM phase of the turn. You can link to a document (we like Google Docs, but set permissions to "anyone with the link can view” or use the “publish to the web” function and share the published link), a social media post (make sure it can be viewed without an account for the platform), or a download link containing your writing,  

Hobby

A Hobby report can be submitted if you have built, converted, painted, or otherwise worked models or terrain. Photos are encouraged.

We generally count all kinds of Hobby progress as long as it's at least tangentially related to your warband or the campaign, but if you want it to have a chance of being showcased in the Unfolding, it needs to be directly related to what your Player Character and their warband are doing in the campaign. This could mean framing the models as the opponents your warband has fought against, the terrain they passed through, or a stranger who offered advice. Generally speaking we won't turn away anything AoS-related. They do not have to be Age of Sigmar models, or even Games Workshop models, but if you submit models from other settings (e.g. Space Marines) that would be very out of place they will not be featured in the Unfolding.

Work in Progress (WIPs) photos are always accepted. Our only requirement here is that you’ve put in at least one hour of work on it, and before and after pictures of your progress will help support this. Share images of your hobby! There is a field for you to paste a link and the same guidelines apply as for Writing reports (see above).

Other

The Other category was new for Animosity V. It rolls two old categories together into a catch-all “everything that isn’t a Writing, Hobby or Play report”. This is a wide category that includes the things that would have been Arts and Crafts reports and Storytelling reports in previous years.

Some examples include:

• Scenic battle photography, photo-stories of "staged" minis in scenery, edited video game screenshots.
• Video or audio recordings, such as spoken-word audio drama, singing.
• Drawings, paintings, poetry, music, cosplay.
• Image-based story-telling, like a photo-story or a comic book format.

Video games, of any flavour, have never been accepted for Play reports. (TTS is not included in the because you are still playing the tabletop game, in essence.) But carefully chosen and appropriate screenshots of them are definitely acceptable as story-telling reports, or as "bonus" illustrations in Writing reports.

This category of reports should be linked more closely to the Narrative Path in terms of content and themes than Hobby or Play need to be.