So my local gaming club actually plays Battlefleet Gothic pretty often with events being held ever 2-3 months using the "Battlefleet Heresy" rules the podcast "Remembrancers Retreat" had developed over a few years. The BFH:RR rules provide a great starting point and they allowed our Horus Heresy player base to also become our BFH player base over the course of the last few years. Unfortunately the BFH:RR rules aren't a well refined or completed product with the same standards of BFG:XR, and so issues have stacked up over time to the point where everyone is familiar with them.
Some legions are overpowered, like Dark Angels, while others are severely underpowered like Space Wolves. Beyond that the choices for what ships you can take are both bizarrely restricted and they also altered a bunch of ships such that it often feels like everyone is running just slightly different versions of the exact same ships. For example they made the prow lances of the Dauntless Class Light Cruiser have a 270° arc of fire while they increased the speed of the Voss Pattern light cruisers to 25cm, which means that they're all virtually identical to one another. Apart from those issues there are also a lot of obvious "first draft" rules like their version of the plasma destructor and anti-boarding spines (which prevent all boarding actions and thus neuter some factions).
Last year I introduced the lead organizer to the BFG:XR rules and he was blown away by how the BFG:XR rulebook incorporates all the rulebooks and pdfs into one single document, and we've been using it for the last two events now. For the last few months I've been running ideas by him and a few others on how we can improve the BFH:RR rules and as of this weekend we've finally officially begun the project to produce a BFH:XR supplement, essentially think of it as the "Ships of the Great Crusade" book.
I'd love feedback and help from the BFG:XR community just like in the good old days of 2015-2020, so I'll post this up on the old forums as well as here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DBO603VujsV63A9swg71dCGZFYPWiM9yRRVJAVuFT4A/edit?usp=drivesdkHere's the first part of that product that's ready for playtesting. In this document there are rules for 3 new weapons, the Plasma Scourer (which replaces the Plasma Destructor that most people didn't even know was in the game), Cyclonic Torpedoes, and reworked Ursus Claws. Anyone who's played BFG against Tyranids will pick up on the inspiration for the Ursus Claws I'm sure.
It also has new legion traits for all 18 legions. With this system every legion gets a pair of traits as well as a "legion refit" which all of their ships have access to when you build your fleet. These refits are from the Imperial Refits table from BFG, which bizarrely wasn't included in the BFH books as far as I could tell, and the refits synergize with each legion's traits. Most legions have two moderately powerful traits while a few like the Thousand Sons have one powerful trait and one weak trait. The goal with these new traits is to give each legion a few things which make it play slightly differently DURING the game instead of just before it during list building as most of the existing legion traits from BFH:RR rules do.
Oh and one last subtle change is to how Mimic Engines work, they've now been updated to work in line with how they work for BFG:XR Eldar (Check the Alpha Legion stuff).
Everyone should be able to leave comments and download this document, so please provide your feedback and feel free to ask any questions you have about how any of these things work. While I strove to word the rules in the same style as the original rules for BFG just because this text makes sense to my brain doesn't mean it will for everyone else, so yeah tell me if my words don't read good.
The next phase of the project is going through the ships list, which will take a while to finish, so until then these rules are compatible with the existing ships from the BFH:RR books, and anything that isn't covered in this document is to be considered unchanged.
One big thing we are looking to do from the start of this project is to refine the ship design system a bit. It works quite well as is, and the BFH:RR actually has a far more well written and organized version in their first book than the classic BFG magazine article did, but there are some glaring oversights we want to address with it. The biggest two examples are the way that weapons cost the same no matter how many arcs they are able to fire into and how there is no discount for building ships slightly less optimally like taking light cruisers with a 45° turn instead of a 90° turn.
We've discussed some ideas on how to improve this, but I'm very curious whether there was an already customized ship builder for the XR project that I never saw?
Oh and for reference here's the BFH:RR stuff
https://rr30k.com/battlefleet-heresy/.
