General Quarters Stuff

In 1999 I bought all of the ships of the major WWI Mediterranean fleets (France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain) in 1:6000 scale for playing fleet-scale battles between WWI-era battleships. To play with them I use GQ 2, the old set of simple, fast-play naval rules from the 70's that are just too classic to die. In these pages are documented the work I've done to make this game faster, more playable, nice to look at, and fun to play. Gamers love toys, and my GQ collection is a veritable attic full.
Map Campaigns
I've always been fascinated by the fog of war, and love reading accounts of WWI naval actions (including the Grandaddy of them all, Jutland) where two fleets spend days steaming around a region seeking or avoiding the enemy, and neither knowing quite where the other is until they stumble into shooting range. Here's how I do it.

WWI SDS collection
I did a lot of work to create nice SDSes that work with my house rules and GQ gaming props. Here are all of my SDS collections for the major navies of the Mediterranean at the time of the Great War.

Quick Reference Cards
I've made enough changes to the way that GQ is played that I had to make my own cheat sheet of tables and charts.

Range Finders
I made these neat props in order to speed up GQ gunnery resolution.

Streamlined Torpedo Rules
In my efforts to speed up GQ, one of the areas I've tried to speed up is the torpedo rules. Here's what I've come up with.

Markers and Props
A collection of little toys to assist play.

My House Rules
A synopsys of house rules I use.

Experimental Rules
House rules I'm considering, but haven't yet tried out.

A note about my documents

All of my electronic documents are in Open Office formats; the versions for download on this web site are PDFs made from those Open Office originals. If you want the editable Open Office version of any document, just email me and ask, and I'll send them to you. I don't have them in Microsoft formats, nor am I willing to convert them for you. You are free to do that yourself (Open Office can save documents in MS formats, with some loss of complicated formatting), but first you will have to download and install Open Office... and of course, once you do that, there's no reason to use Microsoft Office anymore.

For those who don't know, Open Office is a semi-clone of Microsoft Office that is almost as fast, nearly as easy to use and just as powerful. Best of all, it's free, and it always will be. You can download it for any major operating system from www.openoffice.org.

Mail your input to Ix (fathom at armory dot com).