It’s Christmas, 1990. The two halves of the Channel Tunnel (one British, one French) have just been connected to each other 40 metres beneath the English Channel seabed, establishing the first land connection between Great Britain and the mainland of Europe for around 8,000 years. The Soviet Union is in the process of collapsing. At CERN in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee completes the test for the first webpage, and a 13-year old me receives a copy of Advanced Space Crusade from his parents as his main present that year.

Advanced Space Crusade featured squads of Space Marine scouts assaulting Tyranid hive ships. Prior to this game (and the Space Marine novel), Tyranids were a background species, briefly mentioned in Rogue Trader (and completely unrelated to genestealers). It was ASC which launched Tyranids as a playable faction in Warhammer 40,000.

Advanced Space Crusade was a weird mess of a game, not really related to the original Space Crusade at all, with overly complex rules, and a body-horror style inspired by the late, great Ian Watson novel Space Marine (in which Biff Tundrish, of the Imperial Fists, excitedly announces, “we’re going in through the anus!”, just as the boarding torpedo he’s aboard penetrates its target hive ship).

The ASC rulebook featured two different chapters, both devastated by the arrival of Hive Fleet Kraken. Those two chapters were the Lamenters (an already established chapter at that point), and the Scythes of the Emperor.

It was the latter of these two chapters that I fell in love with.

And yet, until this year, apart from some of the scouts from Advanced Space Crusade and a squad of RTB-01 beakies, somehow it had never occurred to me to build and paint a Scythes army, in any of the 40K game systems I’ve played.

Finally I am putting that right, and have started building a Scythes of the Emperor army for Battlefleet Gothic. Here you can see the first batch of ships: a couple of strike cruisers and some escorts

More pictures below the fold.

I bought the Battlefleet Gothic boxed set back when it was released in 1999, which included a full range of card counters and tokens for the game, including fighers, bombers and attack craft. These work perfectly well, but check these out! Aren’t they cute?

I found this set of STLs on Cults, which printed off fairly well (I had to cut a few bombers off and glue them onto 20mm MDF squares). Just a drybrush of Fenris Grey over black and they look perfect.

I finished them just in time for the opening game in a Battlefleet Gothic campaign which starts on Friday. I have been working on a narrative background for the campaign, and will incorporate each game into the story. Obviously you need to stay tuned for updates!

Having written it, In turned it on this site, and found a whole bunch of broken links, some dating back more than fifteen years! This site has lived on many different platforms (self-hosted PSG, Wordpress.com, self-hosted Wordpress and finally self-hosted Jekyll) and a bit of link rot has been introduced with each migration. Hopefully those are all fixed now.

Although GW “retired” Battlefleet Gothic (and the other “specialist” games) back in 2013, the community has kept it alive and it seems to be as well-played now as it ever was. I think this has a lot to do with the “open source” approach to game development that was trialled for BFG, with a “rules committee” guiding its development both during and after the period it was offically supported, and the vast range of excellent 3D-printed (or printable) miniatures that are available.

This community effort culminated in Battlefleet Gothic: Remastered, assembled by Simon Saier from the offical GW publications and FAQs and errata. BFG:R consists of two high-quality publications: a rulebook and a fleets list, which are all you need to play the game (apart from the usual dice, scenery, and some models).

While the PDFs are of superb quality, they are quite large, over 700 pages in total, and I’ve found that their sheer size causes problems while playing the game:

1. I personally find a physical book easier to use while playing a game, but 700 pages would leave most home printers a smoking ruin, and having them printed commercially would do the same thing to my wallet; and
2. A PDF can be quite difficult to scan through and search on a mobile device like a phone or tablet, when you’re in a rush to check a rule in the middle of a game.

So I decided to “scratch an itch”, and create an online, searchable and easily-navigable version of Battlefleet Gothic: Remastered. It can be found at battlefleet-game.org.

The site uses the same open source backend that others have used to create online versions of miniature game rulebooks (IYKYK). I use a similar tool to publish this website, so it felt like an obvious solution. I also decided to follow the same approach used by those other sites, of omitting all the “fluff” and limiting the site to just the rules needed to play the game.

The content of the site is intended to exactly mirror the source PDFs. The only original content is the colophon^(?), which describes the technical information about how the site is maintained, my editorial approach, and how users can report issues or provide their own contributions.

My plan is to maintain the site on an ongoing basis, so as and when the PDFs are updated, I will update the pages on the site to reflect those updates. That probably won’t happen very often with the rulebook, but the fleet lists are still a “work in progress”. Having said that, in the process of converting the rulebook PDF to Markdown, I found several errors in the original text, some of which date all the way back to the original GW publications, so maybe there will be some updates to the rulebook after all!

I have already found the site useful during my games, and I hope the wider community will too.

Last week I played a game of Legions Imperialis and wanted to use some of the new (well, new to me) hardware, namely, this Fellblade, plus a Mastodon Super-Heavy Assault Transport, some Land Raiders and some Whirlwinds. So I quickly painted up some of them, and here they are! One of the nice things about super-heavies is (a) they are easy to paint and (b) you don’t need many of them!

I am quite pleased with how they performed so I will be adding more to the Covenant of Ruin very soon.

More photos below the fold.

I bought these Star Galleon ships from Vanguard Miniatures ages ago, but didn’t get round to painting them until now.

As I have been working through the various scenarios, campaigns, and fleet lists from the Battlefleet Gothic: Remastered rulebook (about which I will post soon!) I have come across a few scenarios that look fun to play and which require reserves and/or specialist ships. These two will stand in as Inquisitorial cruisers, or maybe Adeptus Custodes cruisers from Battlefleet Indomitus. I love how the design calls back to the original ships from Space Fleet!

Here is the entire, reinforced Battlefleet Vastus, in all its glory.

More pictures below the fold.

Here come the final reinforcements for Battlefleet Vastus, for now at least!

The showstopper is obviously this awesome 3D-printed Emperor-class Battleship, the sister to Invictus. Look at all those launch bays.

She’s not arrived alone, but the rest is below the fold.

Stay tuned, as the ships of Battlefleet Vastus will be sailing en masse very soon!

Here are three new cruisers to reinforce Battlefleet Vastus, along with the escorts in my last post.

Here we have (left to right):

1. the Mars-class Battlecruiser Praetorian of Terneth;
2. the Gothic-class Cruiser Lord of Iron;
3. the Lunar-class Cruiser Wrath of Rennax.

There is one more ship to come, and then I think Battlefleet Vastus is pretty much where I want it to be, giving me enough flexibility to build 1,000-1,500 point lists to take on all-comers. So stay tuned!

The veterans among my readership may notice that the Firestorms are not the frigates from Battlefleet Gothic released in 1999, but the cruisers of the same name from Space Fleet, the forerunner to BFG, which was released in 1991.

Stand by for more BFG hobby content in the near future!