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Back in the day, preceding either 4th or more likely 5th edition, the rumor mill was in full swing when all of a sudden, there was the mother of all leaks, an entire 40k rules playtest document, a massive PDF that seemed to detail the entire nuts and bolts of the system, sans any fluff or flourish, for the new edition. Only.... it wasn't. The finished edition didn't actually look anything like that, and the entire thing was soon forgotten. We never did learn who put out that original PDF and to what end (other than tricking people), but it did not appear to originate from the GW studio at all, or if it was, it was an early draft outlining a direction the game did not end up taking.

Did this actually happen or have I dreamed it up? I can't find any evidence of the thing in my somewhat cursory searches.

“Pancake” edition, named due to the password on the PDF IIRC. I still have a copy on my laptop. I never really dug into it, but it exists.

Ah, I knew the file had some whimsical name like that, which I could not for the life of me remember

Out of curiosity, can someone post them up?

Upload brothers so us geniuses on Dakka can all critique

I too would like to see this. It's tough with fan editions, they usually get about as much wrong as GW, maybe half as much, but it's never entirely right and it'd need to be to put the time and to try to convince other people to play. House rules to change the current edition are relatively easy to implement.

I found evidence of it being true but no link to the rules.

There was 1 then and another 1 mid 7th, they come up time to time. Its just fans making it up for wish listing.