Playing Warhammer 40k in Roll20

As I’ve been diving into Roll20, I realized you can play more than just RPGs through the site. As I looked around, I found a whole community of people who play 40k via Roll20! I have a few friends who I’m unable to get out there and play 40k with, not only because of The Rona, but because we’re far away, or we don’t have the armies we’d like. So, I’d like to present you with a how-to on playing 40k via Roll20.

First of all, you’ll need to set up a Roll20 game. I labeled mine, cleverly enough, Warhammer 40,000. Invite your friends, and make them co-GMs, so they have full access to everything in the game.

Over on the Roll20 forums, they have a great page that collects the units and terrain you’ll need. The first post there has a MegaUpload link to all the units. I didn’t see any Titans, but a quick Google Search brought up a couple of good top-down views of some. One thing my brother and I have never been able to do is play with Titans because we don’t wanna spend 1000 bucks, so this gives us the opportunity.

If you’re not seeing what you want, give the Historical Battlefields Token Builder a try. Currently it only allows for World Wars and Future, but you can completely customize your IG or Space Marine units. The World Wars one works well if you want to do a Steel Legion army. There aren’t a ton of options yet, and I don’t know whether or not it’s an abandoned project, but if the models provided on the forums I linked to aren’t enough, you can give that a try.

Once you have a Roll20 page set up, create a different map for each army. You can then build your army inside of there. I use Battlescribe for army building. You can see my 1000 pt IG army here, with two Valkyries of Tempestus Scions, a Chimera full of Ogryns, a Vanquisher, and two Sentinels. It should be a fun list to play, but we’ll see.

I’ve then set up multiple maps, some using the terrain found in that forum post, and others by simply Googling Sci-Fi Battlemaps. I’ve got some trenchlines, and a few chaos-y warped battlefields.

I’m just waiting on my fellow players to set up their armies, and we’ll start playing! The nice thing about Roll20 is we can play it asynchronously. We can hop on there and talk and play live, or, if it’s your turn, you can hop in and make all your moves and attacks and let them respond later.

Once we’ve got some games under our belts, I’ll begin sharing some battle reports, so keep an eye on that!