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Warhammer 40,000 3rd Edition Rulebook

From Lexicanum

Warhammer 40,000 3rd Edition Rulebook, sometimes refered to as the Big Black Book or just BBB, was the 3rd core rule book for the Warhammer 40,000 game.

1 General Structure
2 Contents
3 Authors, Artists and Coworkers
4 Other Details
- 4.1 Publication Details

General Structure

Cover of the Warhammer 40,000 3rd edition rulebook aka 'Big Black Book' or 'BBB'

The 3rd Edition Rulebook, also known as the Big Black Book, was first published in 1998 with the third edition of the game. The book contained rules, that although very similar to the first two editions, were much more austere, removing many of the more difficult ideas of the previous versions in an attempt to streamline the game. This was heavily criticized at the time by more veteran gamers, who had become used to the tables, charts and templates that had been employed previously, as it was seen as being too simplistic and had eliminated much of the fun of the game as well. Nevertheless, the modesty of the newer rules opened the game out to a wider (and much younger) audience.

Edit from a games developer who worked on this title: The design objective was not to 'dumb down' the rules and make it more accessible to younger players as has been suggested. Rather it was to emphasize tactics over detailed rules knowledge. While coming up with the design draft of 3rd ed WH40K, Rick Priestly and Andy Chambers had been playing a lot of WWII war games which were all about movement and strategic mobility. They wanted to bring that feeling into 40K as well and promote tactics over simply making an extremely powerful character to achieve victory. Another issue was the large number of special rules in the previous edition. Practically everything had a unique special rule which often clashed with a different special rule of another unit. A high level design objective was to flatten all of these rules into generic abilities which would work in the same way for any model that received it. In this way, new troop types could be easily balanced with existing ones without having to consider all the cases where a unique rule might cause problems. Overall the aim was to create a slicker, faster flowing game, both from a tactical, battlefield point of view but also to reduce time spent away from actually playing the game to look up rules and such like.

The book itself was written from a much more imperio-centric point of view, and contained large quantities of information on the basic structure of the Imperium, from Imperial planetary classifications to the Imperial dating system and more. It also departed from the previous edition in its much more pessimistic outlook; Appearing much more grim and dark than it had previously. Lines between good and bad were blurred to the point that they were almost unrecognizable. In addition it contained background for many armies as well as simplistic, pre-codex army lists for the Space Marines, Dark Eldar, Tyranids, Eldar, Chaos Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Orks, as well as a small Sisters of Battle list with various heroes of the Imperium such as Confessors and Preachers.

These lists were succeeded by the various codices that were released subsequent to the rulebook. The newer book, the 4th Edition Rulebook, had only modified the rules found in the 3rd Edition and so most of the codexes published during the 3rd Edition could still be readily used along side 4th Edition, although not as easily.