The Carcass Front is a region of lands north of New Antioch that have been devastated by the fires of war. In the new Trench Crusade starter set and narrative campaign box, the forces of the Procession of the Sacred Affliction battle the Heretic Naval Raiders for control of this land in quick and brutal skirmish combat.

In this full deep dive and review we’ll be checking out the contents of the Carcass Front box, taking a look at the new rules and building up and painting the new miniatures to see what they look like in the flesh!

Massive thanks to Factory Fortress Inc for sending us over a copy to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not order your copy through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a full unboxing of the new set, which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado let’s rip open the box and see what lies within…

Carcass Front Review – Trench Crusade Narrative Campaign Box

Trench Crusade has been going from strength to strength over the last couple of years. For those that don’t know, Trench Crusade is set in an alternate 1914 in which the world is engulfed in horrific war between the forces of Heaven and Hell after a gateway to Hell opened in Jurusalem. Now these armies fight in the trenches of no-mans land to try and find the upper hand to break the stalemate of the war.

A couple of years ago a successful kickstarter launched a range of awesome miniatures for home printing, followed by the full rulebook for the system which also exists as a free digital download on the Trench Crusade website. The rules are penned by Tuomas Pirinen who is no stranger to skirmish warfare, being the lead designer for Mordheim!

At the tail end of 2025 Factory Fortress Inc announced they were moving from 3d printed models to hard plastic kits, and since then we have seen a couple of ace sets such as the Prussian Stosstruppen and Sniper Priests.

Carcass Front however might be the most ambitious release yet for Trench Crusade. The box pitches itself as a “Narrative Campaign Box” but it is also in part a two player starter set for Trench Crusade too.

So what’s in the box?

Clocking in at £99.99 this is in a similar ballpark to the recent Necromunda Skirmish we recently reviewed, and in a way it’s a similar product.

Inside the box are the sprues to put together two new and expanded Trench Crusade forces – The Procession of the Sacred Affliction, a religious order who are “blessed” with pox and disease and fight with holy fury for the forces of Heaven and the Heretic Naval Raiders, insidious marines who march out of the very sea itself. Also included is a sprue of terrain, allowing you to build a number of Levant Hedgehogs and Naval Mines

The models are absolutely gorgeous and are brilliant fun to paint up. The RRP of the existing Stosstruppen Warband is £35, so you’re getting good value here considering everything you get in the box.

Every single model in the box can be built in two different ways, opening up lots of options for how you put together your warband. At the time of writing I’ve not seen the final version yet, but as part of the assembly instuctions (digital only and available through a QR code in the box) you’ll also have two pre written warband lists allowing you get get a fully legal force together in no time at all!

The Heretic Naval Raiders are really nice and probably my favourite of the two Carcass Front forces. These guys often attack coastal sites directly from the sea, and all the models have fully enclosed diving gear to allow them to do that. I went for a dark and quick scheme with a limited palette to lean into the “grimdark” school of painting, and it was really fun to put these together using those restrictions.

The other side of the Carcass Front box are the “goodies” but no less grim and filthy than the Heretic side. These are a religious order who are afflicted by disease and pestilence that they see as proof of their humanity and riotousness by their God. They endure the pain and suffering caused by God in order to fight for the glory of heaven.

They are also most likely as mad as a bag of frogs, but they are a dangerous and zealous group of warriors that should not be underestimated by the forces of Hell.

I decided to lean into the “Afflicted” vibe by using sickly colours such as green to contrast to the spot colour of Red I used on the Captain of the Heretic army. Each model has a millstone tied to them and there’s lots of options across the force (with the option of upgrading one through the Wrath of God option in the army list – you get an extra 32mm base to allow this)

Like with the Heretics these were brilliant fun and I already want to paint some more!

Carcass Front also contains a really handy sprue of Blood Markers, Down Markers, Rulers and other tokens for use in your games. You might eventually want to get a set for each player, but there’s enough here to start playing games with the forces in the box.

Speaking of the forces in the box, Carcass Front also has some introductory warband lists and starter rules for Trench Crusade. Despite it not calling itself one on the front of the box, Carcass Front is a great starter set for TC. The intro rules give you the cut down basics in order to play the game and learn how the Blood Markers etc works along with enough to get your teeth into to get a feel for things. This is accompanied by a basic intro scenario for your first game and 2 really handy sheets that have some intro warbands using models in the box. Each force only has 3 models and all the rules related to them are printed on the sheet itself making it really easy to learn how to play. I’d have looked the full hardback rulebook being in this set too, but that would then increase the price and make it a harder sell for people who are already players. The full rules are available online after all, so it’s really easy for people who start playing with Carcass Front to progress to full fat Trench Crusade.

Rounding out the Carcass Front contents we get a collection of dice in different sizes and colours to make it easy to group them into different pools for easily identifiable dice rolls, a QR code with a link to assembly instructions (I’ve mentioned this before in other reviews, but lack of printed assembly instructions is one of the few misses for Trench Crusade sets, call me old school but I find it so much easier having a printed copy to build with!)

You also get a load of materials for the included Narrative Campaign – a set of cards with tasks from your chosen patron, a detailed campaign tracker pad to keep tabs on resources your forces have access to, and even a massive campaign map that is used to track the regions you are fighting over.

The quality of all these components feels great, and it’s really nice having physical things for the map and cards for example rather than them just being in a chart in the book. The map also doubles as a poster with the cover art too!

The final thing in the box is the Carcass Front supplement. This is a full source book dedicated to the Carcass Front and contains a load of stuff that is handy for both new and existing players.

We start with a really good 30 pages of the book (around a third of the total page count) dedicated to lore. In here we learn all about the Carcass Front itself, with some decent detail into a number of different regions and areas we will later be fighting over in the campaign itself. I’ve not got the current hardback Trench Crusade rulebook, and it was really nice being able to sit down and read the lore properly without having to look at it on a screen. It’s great when companies make digital resources for games, but you can’t beat holding a real book in your hands and being able to soak up the background while flicking through it. And based on the quality and gorgeous artwork in this book, I really hope that the Trench Crusade team put out more books like this, as it’s well worth adding to your collection.

What’s really nice about the lore section is that it gives you lots of inspiration for creating your own battlefields – Yes, Trench Crusade has a lot of trenches through no-man’s land, but there’s some really good ideas in here for other battlefronts that your forces might be fighting over. Coastal villages where the locals do unnatural rituals to ward off evil, Industrial areas with entire train lines dedicated to removing corpses from the front, battlefields littered with titanic war machines and the ruins of tanks or even encampments surrounding massive city sized cannons. There’s lots here to spark some really good ideas for creating your own battlefields, and these are all locations you will encounter during the campaign itself.

The next 30 pages of the book is dedicated to the two new army lists for the miniatures included in the box. Both of these forces have been expanded from their existing sub-factions into full fledged warbands of their own right. This is something I suspect we will see as we go forwards with Trench Crusade – it let’s the team focus on a niche of an existing force and turn it into something with its own design identity and aesthetic, fueling the potential for more awesome models and ways of playing.

The full Warband lists for both of these factions are detailed here, along with their armory tables, unique battlekit and profiles for all their units, including some that are not included within the box itself.

The Procession of the Sacred Affliction are a combat focused warband with the ability to increase injury dice output. Using their Millstones, they get an additional Injury Dice when attacking something that is down, and there’s actually an upgrade available that lets you add another additional dice on top of this at the cost of slowing the model down due to the weight of the stone. There’s a really cool feel here of your units smiting down the forces of hell by bashing them to death with these cumbersome heavy stones they lug around with them to battle.

A single model in the warband is also able to be upgraded with the Wrath of God ability – this means they never gain Blood Markers and negate fear, making them really good! The box contains an extra 32mm base to allow you to build a model in this way too!

There’s some nice unique battlegear available to them too, such as Penitent’s Phylactery which allows you to place an additional Blood Marker on targets with Heretic, The Court or Black Grail keywords even if the injury roll has no effect!

The warband looks really fun to play, and there’s some nice stuff they can do – Anti-Tank Hammers in particular are a great pick as you can take 3 of them across the warband, and there’s lots of FIRE gear available such as Flamethrowers and Molotov Cocktails. Some of your units have some great upgrades too – Zealot Strength allows Leper-Pilgrims to wield heavy weapons with no penalties, making for a force that hits really hard in combat, and reliably so with the extra dice from the Millstones.

There’s a couple of units here that we don’t have models for yet such as the combat monster that is the 40mm based Communicant or the mighty Anchorite Shrine, a massive (60mm base) mechanical construct with a Pilgrim tied to it’s Catherine Wheel which it uses to protect itself (the Pilgrim is less lucky however…)

We also get two sub lists in the book too – The Knights of Saint Lazarsus which is focused on Nuns and Knights (upgraded Castigators) or the Blessed Flock which is a more elite force based around Castigators and Communicants (You can normally only take one, these guys can take up to 6!)

The other force in the book are the Heretic Naval Raiders – These are more an elite warband focused on speed and putting out a lot of shots with weapons such as submachine guns.

They will hit you fast, whenever they do a DASH action they get to add an additional dice to the roll, and 3 Elite models can be given Infiltrator too! Even your basic Raider can be upgraded to add 1 dice to their melee or ranged stats too!

Being elite and well equipped they are pretty expensive though, so you’re going to probably have a much smaller force than the Affliction (and this is also represented by the model counts for both forces in the box too). You’re going to struggle to get all the toys you want in the force.

The list is really cool though and again has a couple of units that we don’t have plastic models for yet such as the Abyssal Commando, a Melee specialist who can leap to another target and fight them after killing someone else. There’s also a profile for the terrifying Sea Hag, a naval variant of the Artillary Witch that has some awesome artwork that will make for a phenomenal model!

Like the Sacred Affliction they also get two alternate lists in Carcass Front – The first is the Drowned Choir which leans into Drowned Choristers as you would imagine, they have to upgrade one into a Levithal Chorus, which looks to be a bigger Chorister with multiple bodies together in a single large helmet and mounted on a 40mm base.

The other alternate list is the Leviathan Shoal, and this goes all in on Anointed Heretics, allowing you to take 0-4 of them.

I’m really excited to see what we get from these wider model ranges and I hope we get another wave of plastic models shortly after the Carcass Front box to give players the access to all these cool new units.

The final part of the Carcass Front book is focused on Campaigns, and we get a lot of content here. The book contains rules for the terrain pieces in the box and collects together 5 new narrative scenarios set within the different environments that are detailed earlier in the book. These missions are designed to be used with the two narrative campaigns that are also detailed in the book, and have consequences that affect the gameplay based on what has happened in the previous mission during Path to Leviathan campagins.

There’s lots of nice flavour with these missions and I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into them now the contents of the box are painted!

On top of these narrative flavored scenarios, there’s also a full scenario generator to create games on the fly set within the Carcass Front. Likewise they can also be used within campaigns too, and there’s quite a bit of freedom here to have a blend of the two in order to create an interesting sequence of games.

The book also includes a trio of new Patrons, one for the Iron Sultanate, one for Faithful and one for Fallen – What’s nice is that these can be taken by any force, regardless of if you are running a Carcass Front campaign or not.

The star of the show however is the new Carcass Front campaign though, this is a sprawling multiplayer map based campaign that allows a group of 2-8 players (though this can support up to 16 players if you have an additional pack of cards) to play through 4-12 missions in order to determine the fate of the front. There’s lots of really cool stuff here such as a full campaign tracker that that keeps track of your resources and encounters during the campaign. Essentially depending on how the battle goes and where you have fought over you will fill in a number of different tracks on the sheet, with some squares unlocking additional bonuses and resources and even allowing you to unlock new buildings for your camp – these have multiple tiers and grant you more bonuses as you develop them.

At the start of the campaign, each player also receives a card representing visions received from their patron – these are special objectives that the patron wants achieving during the campaign, and there’s a really nice element here where each player keeps these cards secret until the end of the campaign, so you can never quite be sure what your other players are trying to do over the course of it!

There’s lots more here that I haven’t touched on such as being able to commission aircraft to do bombing runs of the battlefield, building outposts across the map and unique exploration charts with lots of narrative flavour! I don’t want to spoil everything and it looks to be a really enjoyable campaign.

This is really fun and I’m looking forward to playing through a full 12 game campaign with the entire Sprues & Brews team. Continuing campaigns are where games like Trench Crusade really shine, and I hope we get more books like this in the future that gives us more fun systems to play through.

It’s also worth noting that the Trench Crusade website has a file with all the tokens, markers and terrain overlays that are needed for the missions in this book, so make sure to download them here

Finally, Carcass Front also includes a narrative campaign that is designed for two players to fight through all 5 narrative scenarios in order to tell a full story of the conflict between both forces in the box. You are of course able to use other warbands, but I feel this is a really nice way of crafting a story for two players new to Trench Crusade who want to see a developing storyline across the course of 5 missions.

Summary

So what do I think of the new Carcass Front box for Trench Crusade? Well this is so much more than just a 2 player starter set – while it contains basic intro rules and warband lists for new players, it is very much a self contained narrative campaign in a box that just so happens to contain two brand new warbands too.

I’m a big fan of narrative play, and this kind of release really sings to me – not only do you get a pile of ace miniatures, but the book and campaign itself really is excellent reading and looks even more fun to play through. We’re going to be playing through both of the campaigns here on the site and have plans to share our tale both on YouTube and the website, so stay tuned!

For just under £100 this is a great buy both for people new to Trench Crusade but also existing players – and considering just the two Warbands would cost a total of around £70, the box is great value considering all the other contents such as the book, map and cards!

The terrain is a little on the sparse side, but realistically a box that contained a stack of plastic terrain would cost a lot more than this, and there’s lots of resources that exist that allow you to get some Trench Crusade terrain together really quickly – though I do wonder if we will ever see any official plastic terrain at some point too.

Carcass Front is an excellent box, and I can’t to see what is up next for Trench Crusade

Carcass Front is available to order now and is released 31st August

Factory Fortress Inc provided Sprues and Brews a free copy for review purposes.