Hi fellow GMs,

I had a space battle a few weeks ago between my player's raider and a Rag'dol ship in order to defend a mining transport.

The battle was entertaining for my players but felt messy from my side in spite of the limited number of ships involved.

I thought that description could be enough to manage ships mouvements but we quickly had to use placeholders to figure the position of each ship (with the iphone of despair, the pen kit of retribution and the Magnificient Nokia of Scintilla).

I would like to know if anybody uses accessories to smoother and clarify space battles (mag, BFG minis, ...) and how do you manage large battles?

Whiteboard with grid-lines marked on it, crapton of BFG minis off eBay. If I didn't have access to that, I imagine I'd use OpenRPG or something on my laptop but it's not an ideal solution. It makes it much easier for everyone if they can see exactly what's happening around them.

As to large battles, it depends on the purpose behind them. If it's to make the players feel like they're part of something grand, I make sure to use descriptive language about what's going on around them, occasional wild shots impinging on their own battlefield, et cetera. If they've actually picked a fight with a large number of opponents, there's a couple of options. Generally I just use mook rules (if there's ten guards shooting with an average skill of 30, three shots land on particular targets. 20 guards, six shots, etc.) If they get hit, take off armour, toughness bonus, then the rest of the damage goes straight to critical.

I got a piece of board 3 foot square from B&Q, spray painted one side of it black (two coats for a nice even finish) and when that was dry used some white paint and an old toothbrush to add some "stars".

I finished it off with a metal rule and silver paint pen by making a grid in silver.

I use battlefleet gothic miniatures acquired on the cheap from ebay (and have even picked up some paints for miniature painting). This works prety well and we've handled large fleet battles using the squadron rules from Battlefleet Koronus. Although our fleet battle did take all evening.

We sometimes use minis from FFG's Twiglet Emporium, since they have a decent variety of ship types including fighters and starbases, and come in several different colours. Very handy to use minis to keep track of the assorted Maneuvers and fire arcs. I think I'd avoid going to more effort than this though, or you'll soon be spending the whole session playing BFG with optional RT rules.

There are multiple printable options out there, for instance an entire set of BFG proxy paper miniatures, as well as ship tokens. They are all very useful.

Larkin said:

Know of a link? Google fu failed me.

Ha, I can't find them now either. I spent several hours looking around and downloading things when I did turn them up, but here's an idea. If someone provides me with a decent hosting site, I'll upload the files myself, and provide the link.

First thing I came across on the internets: http://www.the-waaagh.com/forums/?showtopic=29911

I use a small 22x34" Deep Space mat from Hotz . I got mine printed with 1.5" square grid which seems to work well for the standard GW flying bases. We use BFG ships on the mat (hope the pic shows up, using a new host):

Larkin said:

Isn't Dropbox a good option for this? I haven't used it to publicly host anything, but I know it can be done.

Also Errant, the DL link within that link is broken. A shame, as it looked like an interesting idea. Sure, with the BFG PDFs anyone could reconstruct that but that would take a while.

Sure I'll just share the compressed file on my dropbox then. Should have thought of that myself.

You'll need a .rar decompresser to access the files which are located here . Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I created none of those files, and I tried to credit where I found them with links or recollections as able. Check the Text file for details.

One thing I've done is to play with the whole radar/auspex image dealy: a role of black cloth left over from one project or another, and a load of small plastic counters (28mm round miniature bases are ideal), sprayed black with a green "contact" splodge painted on, and a small strip of paper with a ship's identity and (known to player) details tucked underneath.

The player's ship, being a known quantity, is a converted BFG ship painted a ghostly greeny turquoise (hololithic display style), planets and celestial phenomena are slightly recoloured (again, hololith green'd) counters from Ad Astra, and so are recurring NPC ships that they've either repeated seen at close quarters or have made a point of scanning

Now thats an excellent idea and really plays up the importance of good intelligence rather than just blasting away at the foe.

I like this.

I just found these that might help http://darkreign40k.com/drjoomla/index.php/component/docman/doc_download/352-ship-and-planet-tokens-a4-inch-versio-2

Thanks for the various tips ^^

I've just ordered the 22x34" Deep Space mat from Hotz with 1" square grid (it seems 1,5"is only for hexes ). The tokens given by Gathris will do the trick, my storage space is limited for BFG minis and GW doesn't do Rak'gol ships anyway

An erasable battle mat and a variety of wet-erase markers is indispensable. I also recommend a pack of Loony Labs gaming pyramids . One pack has enough pieces to represent fifteen void ships of varying sizes. I also recommend having something the players can use to keep track of the hypothetical movement of their own ship (this is assuming your players agonize like mine over just how they plan to reposition their ship based on various factors and the outcomes of maneuvering rolls).