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.
