From Lockdown Project to Campaign Archive: The Origin of TT Armoury

Every good origin story has to have a beginning, and I suppose the TT Armoury story is a pretty cool one. Back in 2020, when the world shut down, I was furloughed from work. I lived alone, caught COVID, and was quite ill for a while. I’ve never been very good at doing nothing, and suddenly there was nothing but time. Living in a house with just a couple of cats can make a person feel very aware of how quiet things are.

My older son Dan was heavily into wargaming. He painted miniatures, played regularly, and was deeply invested in his armies. One day, during one of our long lockdown conversations, he asked if I would design him a Crusade Journal for his army, The Astral Spears.

It felt like something I could do while recovering in bed. More importantly, it gave us a project to talk about. We spent hours discussing layouts, what needed tracking, how campaigns progressed, what players actually wanted to record. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so alone.

When the journal was finished and printed, Dan shared it on a Reddit forum. Not long after, he started telling me that other players were asking where he got it and how they could get one too.

And that’s where it began.

Over the next two years we worked on more journals — some completely unique for players’ own custom factions, others inspired by well-known armies within the game. What started as one journal slowly grew into fifty different faction Crusade Journals, Kill Team Rosters, and notebooks, all structured around 9th edition campaign play.

What began as a small lockdown project — something to keep me occupied and connected to my son — quietly became something much bigger. 

Over time, I began to realise something important. Campaigns aren’t just games played over a few weekends. They’re stories built over months. Units earn honours. Characters fall. Strategies improve. Players grow. Those moments deserve to be recorded properly — not scribbled on scraps of paper and forgotten in a drawer.

That’s really what TT Armoury is about.

It’s about giving narrative players the structure to track their battles, reflect on their decisions, and take pride in how their armies develop over time. Some players use the coilbound versions at the table. Others keep the hardbacks lined up on a shelf — a record of campaigns fought and lessons learned.

Campaigns deserve to be kept.

And TT Armoury is simply my way of helping make that happen.