I’m a big fan of TCRepo and the work they do. So if your first question is “What the hell is TCRepo?”, then the short answer is that it’s homebrew heaven: a place to find grassroots content for your favourite wargames, with AOS strongly represented. Today we’re catching up with Sean from TCRepo to share a little bit about the project and what kind of content you can find on there.

It’s an absolute treasure trove, and it’s free, so I reckon everybody should know about it. Let’s take a look at what they’ve got going on.

G’day Sean, good to catch up with you!  Can you please open up with a few sentences on what TCRepo is, what kind of content you host and what your goals are with the project?

Absolutely!  I’m really glad that you reached out and I am thrilled to be able to share a little bit about TCRepo with you and your readers.  I’ve always believed that we are the true owners of our wargaming experience and that homebrewing those wargaming experiences should be encouraged, celebrated, and shared.  Over the years I’ve enjoyed finding individuals’ passion projects but it occurred to me that the fruits of their labors-of-love were often locked away behind private Facebook groups, buried in abandoned blogs, or lost to crashed hard drives and deleted forum accounts.  I wanted a centralized location that both preserved this material and made it easy for users to find something relevant to them.  It didn’t exist so I created it.  

I have a soft spot for narrative events, linked scenarios, and campaigns so those were my initial target.  Knowing I didn’t want to restrict the site to one system, or even company, I called it the Tabletop Campaign Repository.  Since then it has grown to also include individual scenarios, rules references & templates, tournament packs, additional & alternate rulesets, and even freely available official material for 30 different game systems.  All of these downloads are available to anyone who wants to use them as they come or as a starting point, or inspiration, for their own creations.  Every download credits the author and links to all relevant sites/ profiles/ downloads/ etc.  

My goals with TCRepo are simply to:

1) Give local gaming groups an easy path to running their own exciting wargaming events that are maybe a little different than what is encouraged by official sources; 

2) Support those who take it upon themselves to create by providing them with inspiration as well as showcasing their work; 

3) Preserve historical gaming material for both active use and posterity.

Couldn’t agree more mate.  Those kinds of linked scenarios are the stuff that you will remember and still talk about years later, and making memories is the pinnacle of wargaming for me.  I find that the more time goes by, the more I want to get back to the way we played over entire school holidays in the 90s.

I feel the same way!  Maybe it’s just nostalgia but wargaming as a vehicle for telling epic stories and laughing with your friends at unlikely outcomes feels like the purest form to me.

So how about your own background in wargaming?  How did you get into the hobby and what games do you play?  Are campaigns a big part of your own gaming?

My first introduction to miniatures and wargaming was when I was young, maybe 8 or so, and my dad brought home HeroQuest.  I have very fond memories of playing it with him and my younger brother.  A few years later I got into Warhammer 40k with a 2nd edition box of metal Tactical Marines.  My first organized game was a large team vs team, Order vs Chaos, 40K event that had about 10 players per side.  As I recall, my Space Marine Bikes were quickly wiped out but it felt magical just to be there and be part of the epic showdown.  In Middle School & High School I really only played against one friend in his parents’ basement but we had a great time inventing battles from convoy ambushes to heroic last stands.  

After that I took about 20 years off when I went to college and then later got a job in the real world.  I actually got back into the hobby in 2019.  I bought a 2nd hand DSLR camera with a Macro Lens.  Excited about my new toy and looking for subjects to photograph, I decided to pull out the tacklebox with all my old Warhammer guys and document them.  It was this experience that made me want to start painting again and that in turn got me playing again.  I started back in with Age of Sigmar & Slaves to Darkness and I have been painting and playing ever since.  

In addition to Age of Sigmar I play some Spearhead and Warcry.  Most recently my local gaming group has gotten into Necromunda and I’ve Arbitrated two campaigns for us (with plenty of custom rules and scenarios!).  Campaigns are a big part of my gaming because of how connected battles can help us tell a more complete story.  Out of both interest and necessity I find myself organizing a lot locally, so I create what I enjoy, and people seem to enjoy it as well.

Ha!  HeroQuest was actually my own intro to the hobby.  On the last day in our Primary school every year, the kids could all bring in games, and there was always one “hot” game that everyone wanted to get in on.  In Year Six (so our last-ever day at Primary School) the table that you had to get a seat at was HeroQuest.  We sat there for a whole afternoon, all diligently plodding around the map 2D6 squares at a time, without a care in the world.

Now Plastic Craic is an AOS-focused blog so how about we launch into it and talk about some AOS-centric content you host on TCRepo?

TCRepo is organized by categories and tags.  The AOS category boasts more than 200 downloads and there really is something for everyone.  If you are a narrative player who just wants to jump right into gaming then there are custom scenarios, campaigns, & events that you can play with a friend or group.  If you are a creative then there are supplementary rules for things like siege & naval warfare.  If you lean competitive then there are rules references, tournament packs, & the Warcoda competition-ready battleplans.  If you’re an historian, TCRepo might be the only place around that has all of the old 1st & 2nd edition PDF Warscrolls (don’t ask me how much time I spent gathering and organizing those after GW abruptly disappeared them from their site…).

You are doing Gork’s work!  Are there any fan / community warscrolls or army rules for AOS on TCRepo?

There are quite a few!  For instance some of your readers are probably familiar with the Gnomad Feastmasters Battletome of which Darren was gracious enough to share with TCRepo.  There are also proxy rules for Bonesplitterz in Spearhead and if you want to make your own Warscrolls there’s a template for that too!

Love it!  We’re going to have our own competition on the blog soon to write a Gordrakk warscroll, because I think we can do it better.  So keep an eye out for that.

Great idea!  If I’m honest, I kinda hate how the modern assumption is often that “if it isn’t written in an official publication then you can’t do it.”  The beauty of these analog games, as opposed to something like digital video games, is that you can change, literally, anything you don’t like.  The world is your oyster and you simply aren’t required to “put up” with mechanics you don’t like.

How about generic map campaign systems that gaming groups could use in their local AOS games?

I love the idea of map campaigns and have tried to incorporate them into most of the Warcry & Necromunda campaigns I’ve run.  For the budding map campaign organizer TCRepo has several downloads that can help get you started as well as a list of map making tools to help you customize your narrative world.

Beautiful.  We’ll have to avail ourselves of those map making tools for the next PC Global Campaign (we’ve already got the map sorted for 2026).

What advice would you have for people writing community rules?  What have you seen that tends to work well, or pitfalls to avoid?

I suppose that my answer comes from personal experience more than other peoples’ submitted material.  At the end of the day, you have to “know your audience”.  TCRepo contains material that covers a huge range of goals from 1-to-1 proxy datasheets to entirely new rulesets full of new concepts and complex tables.  Have a serious talk with your gaming group and be observant of how your players engage.  Some groups want deep inter-game book keeping with lots of options and narrative flavor.  Other groups want streamlined rules that allow for competitive play.  Sometimes I’ve had to accept that the world I want to create is, perhaps, too complex for my gaming group and so some elements need to be toned down to meet my group where they’re at.

Yep fair enough.  And what are the big hitters on your site: which items see the most views and downloads?

You might think that the most popular items are narrative campaigns or sets of special rules but the most popular downloads are, in order from most to least popular: a Warhammer 40k 10th edition datasheet template, an incredibly detailed map of the 40k galaxy, a curated collection of fonts used by GW throughout the years, and a collection of Warhammer icons.  But this is really great!  These are not the end products but, instead, are the tools used to create brand new stuff!  So I love that the people accessing TCRepo are finding material to help them with their own, bespoke, creations.  Shockingly I actually created the first, third, & fourth most popular downloads so I guess I’m kind of proud of that and it tells me that there is a healthy population out there that loves to create.

Well done mate.  So coming at it from the opposite angle: do you have any tips for injecting some spice or joie de vivre into Matched Play-style games?

I’ll admit that I struggle a bit with the stock AoS Matched Play rules.  My narrative mind doesn’t identify with the, somewhat disconnected, primary & secondary objectives of Matched Play very well.  But if Matched Play is your jam then enjoy the heck out of it!  The biggest, and conceptually simplest, piece of advice I have is to put together a thematic table & bring painted armies.  While some folks are comfortable with gray plastic tokens representing gaming elements, I think that two fully painted armies on a table that tells a story makes all the difference in the world.  A setup like that elevates Warhammer from a game to a legend being told on the table.  With the proliferation of products like Contrast/Speed Paints and the availability of 3D printers & 3D printed terrain, it is easier than ever to set up engaging and coherent battles.  If you want to take some liberty with the term “Matched Play” then there are also lots of other opportunities to spice up these games with some simple additional rules like weather or environment effects and terrain pieces with custom rules.

Yep that’s good advice.  I’d also pitch in one idea from our friend and Patron Dadbod Napgod: “Play for bits”.  Winner takes a trophy from the loser’s bits box to use as decoration on their models: maybe a Stormcast helmet to use as basing material, or a Orruk head to stick on a banner pole.  Then any time you see that bit in your army, you’ll remember the game.

I love that idea!  I actually really enjoy intergame bookkeeping (a la Necromunda) and applying that concept to hobbying sounds like fun.  Plus, yeah, looking at your models and being reminded of epic moments from past games sounds lovely!

Now I’m going to ask you to make a pitch: what’s one piece of non-AOS content that you think our audience should take a look at?

I have some really fond memories of browsing the *old* Games Workshop site, as a kid, and checking out all the cool, free, campaigns they made available.  So a while back I dug through the site on the Wayback Machine, extracted a bunch of that old material, organized it, and put it up at TCRepo.  Now the Wayback Machine is not 100% complete and so I put a call out on the individual download page to see if the community could help fill in the gaps.  And in some cases they came through, particularly a guy who goes by the name Balmonec who helped with missing elements for 9 different downloads.  If your readers want to take a walk down memory lane, they can check out some of the, mostly WHFB 6th edition, material from the old Games Workshop site circa 2006.

Ha!  Love it.  One game that a few Craic Heads enjoy (myself included) is Marvel Crisis Protocol, do you have much in the way of linked game structures for MCP on TCRepo?  It’s always surprised me that AMG haven’t sold me a beautifully-printed, full colour campaign book for this system, because episodic content really feels like a natural fit.  And how about fan rules for any missing characters?

Well, you got me there!  I, personally, have never gotten into MCP and so haven’t stumbled across material for it yet.  Maybe one of your readers can help TCRepo expand into the Marvel Universe (anyone can hit me up at campaignrepo@gmail.com to submit material or make suggestions).

Let’s make it happen, nerds!

Now I’m not asking for dollars and cents, but just wondering if you pay for this out of your own pocket?  I notice you don’t have a Patreon.

Since its inception in 2020 I’ve paid for the TCRepo hosting costs out of my own pocket.  I put together the website myself (using WordPress) and have spent, probably, hundreds of hours finding, curating, and uploading material.  I’ve, literally, not received a single penny from the site.  Originally I felt uncomfortable asking for money or running ads (and I still do I guess) but I won’t lie, getting the hosting costs covered and maybe catching a few extra dollars for my time wouldn’t suck!  I’ve considered putting ads up on the site.  I think there is enough traffic to maybe cover the hosting costs.  Maybe a Patreon is the way to go.  I don’t know, but so far I haven’t pulled the trigger.  I’ve always felt like people might feel a bit betrayed if I started trying to make a buck off the site and I struggle with wanting Wargaming to be more about sharing passion projects versus the realities of infrastructure costs & simply not having enough hours in the day.

Nah I totally get that.   FWIW I paid out of my own pocket to run Plastic Craic for many years before I got jack of it and started passing around the tips jar, and now I’m rapt that a bunch of people enjoy our writing enough to support us financially.

So what’s next for TCRepo?

TCRepo came from wanting to have access to a library of homebrew campaigns, scenarios, rules and resources.  Since it didn’t exist I decided to make it exist.  But right from the get go I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up with a site that required constant updates to be relevant.  It’s why TCRepo has no “news” or “blog” sections.  So, truthfully, as long as TCRepo is helping people then I’m happy to keep it going.  I add content when I see it and enjoy knowing that it’s helping wargamers play on their own terms and helping creatives create.  But, otherwise, I’m not necessarily looking to take over the world.

Well it’s great to hear that the site is operating in a way that’s sustainable for you, because I selfishly want it to be around forever and keep growing.  Any shout outs or mentions you want to give?

Awww thanks!  If you’re in New York check out my buddy’s non-profit gaming space in Manhattan, The Spire.  No matter where you are, if you’re into or curious about Narrative AoS gaming events, go take a look at the NEON (Narrative Event Organizer Network) site.  And lastly, for a narrative gaming experience that anyone can participate in, without even leaving their backyards, checkout Milarki and explore the world of Meridia with your AoS games.

Thanks for your time mate, and good luck with it all!  And thanks especially for all your work on TCRepo so far, and here’s looking forward to many more years.

Anytime!  I appreciate you getting in touch and I love your site.  Cheers to keeping the community spirit of wargaming alive.

So check out TCRepo, tell your friends about it, keep an eye out for our Gordrakk warscroll and submit your own MCP content to the site!

Have a good weekend, nerds. Catch you on the other side.

~ Pete

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