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I think the big question would be if GW would evolve the main players in the setting and how that would change the design language of factions.

You can tell whatever story you want, but visually what are you telling.

30K already has issues in that a LOT of its range basically is just alternative sculpts of concepts we have in 40K. Heck the Custodes still directly share models and a good many of the 30K Imperial vehicles are things stolen from 40K forgeworld releases that have been on the market for decades.
A lot of the Mechanicum models would work perfectly with the Mechanicus etc..



There are subtle differences, but its not a big design language nor even army composition change up.



That I think is the big issue - would GW be able to make it part of the setting whilst at the same time changing enough to make it stand out on its own.

That's why I always lean toward the idea of a setting change that lets there be new factions within the game. That easily allows there to be a fresh new design language without just taking an existing faction and changing everything about them "just because".

 Overread wrote:
Krorks would basically be Ork Space Marines from what I can recall - organised, smart, brutal and efficient. No ramshackle football hooligans. Oh and much bigger took.

We have basically no lore on Krorks. 99% of what I can find out about them online is memefests from r/grimdank and the like where people hype each other to the clouds imagining how OP they surely must be. What little lore we even have about them is far from certain (for example, it's not at all confirmed that the Orkoid monstrosity Fabius found was a Krork, only that Fabius speculated it may have been).

Considering how awful the Beast novels were and how damaging I think they were on Ork lore, I kind of am not very excited about the notion of seeing anything more about the Krork.

I'd like to see the Age of Apostasy, which could be done as a campaign setting )I think) rather than a stand-alone game.

The six Sororitas Matriarchs, Sebastian Thor, Vandire, Bucharris and maybe a Daughters unit and a Brides unit.

There were rumors years and years ago of Battlefleet Heresy set during well the Horus Heresy. Which always seemed really boring to me.

But Battlefleet Great Crusade... with Crusade Fleets, Orks, Eldar, other funky Xenos that might be a lot of fun and way to do the that era with a fairly light lift (compared to launching a 28mm game).

Epic Great Crusade might also be a good direction.


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 PenitentJake wrote:
I'd like to see the Age of Apostasy, which could be done as a campaign setting )I think) rather than a stand-alone game.

The six Sororitas Matriarchs, Sebastian Thor, Vandire, Bucharris and maybe a Daughters unit and a Brides unit.

IIRC they were were originally the Daughters of the Emperor then changed to the Brides, which may indicate other changes in their roles as well.

But yeah, could work as a campaign, especially if set on Terra.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
There were rumors years and years ago of Battlefleet Heresy set during well the Horus Heresy. Which always seemed really boring to me.

It's my one big fear if GW brings BFG back because they've locked their specialist team outside of 40k and the other other setting they've formally got is 30K; and I just don't see GW starting a 3rd "age" of the setting for a specialist side game. Heck even the new Epic game suffers from being locked to 30K. Fantastic models, but we know there will never be a single xenos appear

Battlefleet Heresy does feel more plausible, for the same reason LI is Heresy instead of 40k, and indeed the same reason the original Titanicus was also set in 30k.

It's cheaper to have 2 or 3 factions fight themselves than to make a dozen of them.

After seeing both Epic and WHFB brought back as fiddlier, more complex adaptations of their former selves that eschew streamlining in favor of a 'more is more' approach, I can't get all that excited about a possible BFG reboot.

The original BFG is still a great game, well supported in the modern era via 3D printing and third-party casts, that makes up for a few dated design elements through an efficient and evocative design-for-effect ethos that modern GW just does not understand or appreciate at all.

If GW brings back BFG as Battlefleet Heresy, dollars to donuts that means a minutiae-focused ruleset with bigger models all locked to the heresy setting and I can't help but see that as a net negative.

 catbarf wrote:
The original BFG is still a great game, well supported in the modern era via 3D printing and third-party casts, that makes up for a few dated design elements through an efficient and evocative design-for-effect ethos that modern GW just does not understand or appreciate at all.

Can you explain more what you mean by this in detail, if you forgive me imposing?

 catbarf wrote:
After seeing both Epic and WHFB brought back as fiddlier, more complex adaptations of their former selves...

Necromunda also...

I really wanted to like Necromunda, but by the 4th "Gang War" supplement I saw where things were going and bailed.

Now we're having a summer campaign of the old rules (NCE version).

BFG uses lookuo tables for attack resolution it's practically the most outdated game GW has ever produced
Still fun though

Especially Necromunda I think suffered from its own success. GW has wanted to capitalis and turn that popularity into profit, and that's meant printing more and more expansion books for it. Which has over time driven the game into ridiculous heights of nonsense.

Titanicus is still a smooth and great game, largely because I'm sure it didn't sell as well and GW didn't bother writing a million supplements.

Gonna disagree on Necromunda.

The original was a well received and is still a well regarded game. And indeed gaming experience. But, with only one expansion and very sporadic releases after that, it floundered.

When the current version launched? It was clear the release schedule was intended to maintain ongoing interest, and of course purchases. I said at the time that whilst a bit 40K? If each book came with sufficient content? I’d be cool with it.

And they certainly did that. Not just expanding mission and campaign types, but creating loads and loads and loads of new background. And so it’s stayed in production for nearly a decade.

The volume of books always seems to have been the plan this time around,

Ashiraya wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
The original BFG is still a great game, well supported in the modern era via 3D printing and third-party casts, that makes up for a few dated design elements through an efficient and evocative design-for-effect ethos that modern GW just does not understand or appreciate at all.

Can you explain more what you mean by this in detail, if you forgive me imposing?

Take gunnery as an example.

Battlefleet Gothic is a game where lore-wise an Imperial cruiser could be armed with varying assortments of missiles, macro-cannons, plasma batteries, and other big guns, but because the underlying identity is that they fling a thing from A to B they are simply given a range and firepower rating and covered under the mechanics for 'weapons batteries'. To actually shoot them, you look at a simple table and find the row for your weapon battery strength, then go across to the column for the aspect (closing, moving away, moving abeam) of your target class (capital ship, escort), and the result is how many dice you roll against the target's armor. If you're within 15cm you shift left one column, which is good. If you're beyond 30cm you shift right, which is bad. If you're under Lock-On orders you get to re-roll failures, and if you're crippled or under other special orders you roll half dice.

It sounds like a lot, and from what I gather people hear 'table' and imagine Avalon Hill CRTs of old. But it's not like that at all. In practice, you spend no more than ten seconds assessing the situation, five seconds to look up how many dice you need to roll with no brainpower involved, and then make one roll of rarely more than 10 dice, and you're done. It makes combat heavily dependent on positioning and maneuver, without requiring a lot of stacking +1/-1s or re-rolling 1s. And it also provides a lot of levers that the designers can work with to differentiate the factions without tons of bespoke weapon profiles or special rules. A Tyranid pyro-acid battery is a weapons battery that is short-ranged but causes extra fire critical hits. Eldar weapons batteries always get a left shift. Chaos weapons batteries are older and more sophisticated than their Imperial counterparts so typically have longer range on the profile. Space Marine bombardment cannons determine their dice like weapons batteries, but do damage on a 4+ regardless of the target's armor. Simple and effective.

Then when ships take damage, first the hits get applied to shields. But you don't have to track shield state, you just place a physical blast marker in contact with the target's base for each hit that gets absorbed by shields. Each blast marker in contact consequently reduces the currently active shields by 1. A ship thus regenerates its shields by flying out of the blast markers on its own turn. Flying into areas of residual explosions reduces your effective shield strength, and ships in close proximity to one another risk mutual shield loss from incoming fire (if the market touches both bases). No explicit rules are needed for any of these things, they're natural consequences of shield damage being represented by persistent two-dimensional tokens on the table.

The whole game is like this. BFG employs a lot of clever 'shortcuts' that might seem unintuitive or simplistic at first, but keep the game moving while still translating a complex game state into appropriate outcomes. It's about the big picture, about what happens when you out-predict your opponent and your point-blank raking broadside down the throat of their flagship triggers a warp core detonation, not about the caliber of the guns that do it.

Meanwhile, Legions Imperialis individually models each sponson-mounted heavy bolter on a Predator with its own stat profile, subject to several special rules in addition to any provided by the choice of faction. The Old World requires you to keep track of the result of your charge roll since it produces an initiative bonus in the subsequent combat phase, and every basic infantry unit has 3-5 USRs. Horus Heresy has brought back multiple psychology types and a whole slew of both USRs and bespoke special rules on top of its 40K 7th Ed core. These are games that work and are fun in their own right, but are undeniably more complicated, fiddly, and detail-focused than Epic/WHFB/40K that preceded them.

So if GW ever brought BFG back, I would expect it to be another special-rule-driven experience where each ship has multiple special rules and/or USRs, where combat is the more familiar but significantly slower roll to hit -> roll to penetrate armor -> roll for damage paradigm, and the areas where this detail-driven approach gets unwieldy (like trying to model those range/size/aspect factors as modifiers to a single to-hit roll) would be simplified at the cost of tactical depth. I would expect a game that downplays maneuver, and derives its tactics from weapon-target pairing and employment of layers of rules and special abilities instead. In short, GW's current design philosophy for its specialist games is the opposite of what made BFG good in the first place, and consequently I'd have low hopes for a reboot.

That's my essay, thanks for coming, I would also like to see a Badab War classic-40K but for similar reasons would be wary of the implementation.

Thank you! Good post.

I am a big fan of Horus Heresy in general (though admittedly less so its current edition) but I think BFG is very elegant for what it is and is better served that way.

I agree if BFG was revived it would also be altered like you describe, because I think it's just what the rules writers are used to now, and they feel it gives them more room to differentiate small, well, differences in the model they sell.

I still would want BFG back if only for the 2026-quality miniatures!

The differentiation came from varying Range, Firepower and Placement. This included Dorsal Mounts, which could fire either side to boost that Batteries total for calculating its number of dice.

You also had Lance Batteries, which were a straight 1D6 per point, hitting on a 4+.

Torpedoes were launched from the front, and unless Eldar Torpedoes, would travel in a straight line until shot down, they hit something, or moved off the board. Also, not every Torpedo in a salvo would hit. So the salvo would deduct the number of hits, and keep on trucking.

The game really centred on maintaining your line, planning manoeuvres well in advance and the strict limits on how nimble a ship was as they got larger.

This allowed the comparatively undergunned but incredibly slippery Eldar to compete against even the biggest, slabbiest of ships.

Didn't Eldar also get a magical 2+ save against all the best weapons, so were pretty OP by dint of being the "counter-meta" faction.
Next to Necrons who broke the meta by just being faster, more maneuverable, more durable, and more heavily armed than any other ships of comparable points

Personally I think I do prefer a system of modifiers to BFG's table system. I just like the ability to memorise half a dozen modifiers (which I'm good at doing) followed by some Qwik Maffs (which I'm also good at doing) and being able to know what's up.
VS having to keep a look-up table to hand to refer to replace the Qwik Maffs, and perhaps a few fewer modifiers.

But I'd have to sit down and work map out the comparative maths perhaps of what could be achieved with some modifiers. Certainly you couldn't just replace the column shifts with +/- 1 as modifiers skew weirdly depending on the to-hit score (which in BFG is normally the target's armour value).

Certainly GW's approach of giving every particular weapon mount it's own specific statline is massive overbloat. Although they have been backing off of that in 40k now.

The gunnery table is essentially an averaging of a to-hit roll. The four main columns are the average result of a 3+, 4+, 5+, and 6+ roll against that row's firepower.

The use of the table simply (1) resolves that calculation faster than it would take to gather up all the dice, determine the required value, roll them, and count the results, and (2) normalizes the outcome to an average value, limiting the randomness to the damage roll, so that you are much less likely to get an extreme result from shooting than if both components were fully random. This matters a lot at long range and bad angles, where an 8-firepower broadside being reduced to 2 dice means it isn't possible to cripple a cruiser with a lucky roll.

You can very easily replace the gunnery table with a to-hit roll. It just makes the game worse. I'd expect a modern reinterpretation would ditch the gunnery table, but I do think it's unfair that some folks write the game off entirely because it actually uses an intelligently designed set of play aids, as if we've all Stockholm Syndromed ourselves into preferring gakky convoluted rules that we just have to memorize.

The holofield rule on the other hand is a known problem, because a single right column shift against weapon batteries is way less impactful than a flat 2+ save against lances. I am partial to the community-made Remastered list that gives Eldar conventional shields in addition to a weakened holofield rule, but YMMV.

I don’t recall Holofields giving a save against Lances at all?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I don’t recall Holofields giving a save against Lances at all?

Yep, 2+ save versus everything except Batteries.

My recollection from back in the day was Eldar were almost immune to them, but if you got lucky, it was real bad news. Massed batterys was the better option.

I should re read the rulebook.

Wait, dim recollection coming back. Yeah, Batteries were definitely the way forward, thanks to I think a universal 4+ Hull on all Eldar Ships? So there was no advantage in using Lances in the first place, as you always needed a 4+ to hit.

Puts me in mind of BSG’s magnificent flak screen.

the 1980"s. Bring back real Epic, Epic Space Marine and Titan Legions.

Hoping GW eventually takes legends and does something like they did with warhammer the old world.

Is no one going to say things like the Dark Age of Technology?

Pre-Imperium humans, pre-Fall Eldar. Men of Iron. All sorts of crazy new aliens to potentially work with.

If you're looking to expand the setting as a whole, late Dark Age of Technology has a lot of space to work with.

 BorderCountess wrote:
Is no one going to say things like the Dark Age of Technology?

Pre-Imperium humans, pre-Fall Eldar. Men of Iron. All sorts of crazy new aliens to potentially work with.

If you're looking to expand the setting as a whole, late Dark Age of Technology has a lot of space to work with.

People already complain that 30k explores stuff that they'd rather want unexplored (I prefer 30k to 40k, so I definitely shake my head at it, but those people do exist).

Imagine how much that would explode if they delved into DAoT.