Book of the Arbitrator Rebooted!

Easter is finally over, which means I've got some spare time to do some hobby related activities, which mostly means that I've had a chance to paint! Right now I'm working on my as of yet unnamed Space Marine chapter, but whilst painting I got to think about an old project of mine; Book of the Arbitrator, and that I feel that I have neglected it a lot.

The basic premise for Book of the Arbitrator (or BOA for short) is a set of house rules for 2nd edition Necromunda that I compiled and wrote in an effort to spark some interest in a more narrativistic gaming style, as seen on my favourite 40k blog Tales from the Maelstrom. Whilst Col. Kane and the gang prefer to use straight up Rogue Trader, then I personally never got my head around it (nor Inquisitor for that matter) and decided to write down a couple of notes which then grew into a fully fledged set of campaign rules.

What started as a few simple clarifications and alterations soon grew into a project that allowed the rules to convey the feel of the Dark Millenium as portrayed in various pieces of background material; drawing inspiration from all iterations of the Warhammer 40.000 setting as much as I could, from various Black Library publications to what is considered canon - all of this in order to play a couple of games.

Well, it has been roughly six months or so since I finished the first version of BOA and there have been a couple of things that have annoyed me with it, as well as a couple of ruleclarifications that are in need of - erh - clarification. When I got around to write Combat Squads I found some elegant solutions on how to handle various rapid fire weapons and have come to the conclusion that my initial idea for the scope of BOA (roughly a platoon's worth of men per side) meant that I needed to scale down on some of the details for the weapons.

The problem was that there were too many details in the core game to allow for a fluent gaming experience; especially the initiative sequence needs tightening. So this long-winded post is basically a reminder to myself - as well as an update to those following this blog - that I'm going to reboot Book of the Arbitrator!

Apart from correcting the various mistakes from the first version, it also means that I'm going to work on a campaign setting for my own purposes. So far the basic idea is a newly settled world on the fringe of Imperial Space, with two rival Rogue Trader families locked in a bitter struggle for the trading rights; a corrupt government caught in the crossfire as no formal tradelanes have been established and with something dark luring in the deep and unexplored jungles.

This setting book, or World Book, is going to detail a single campaign and will be a work in progress as the actual campaign unfolds. The idea is to give periodic updates here on this blog (battlereports to you and me) and to show how you could use Book of the Arbritrator to kickstart your narrative gaming campaign.

Thus, apart from the many other projects for the Dark Millennium, then Book of the Arbitrator has also made it to this blog! Hopefully I'll have an updated version ready by the end of the week. Unless of course Real Life intervenes. Cheers!