Book Review: Dread Fleet

Waaaaaaaaay back when Dread Fleet came out I went down to the FLGS and noticed all of the boxes and along with them was a little book by Andy Hoare that went with it.

I really regret not getting the Black Reach book and the Space Hulk book (which I have recently fixed) so I picked this one up.

This story is about Captain Jaego Roth and his Ahab-like thirst for revenge for Count Noctillus after he wreak  Jaego's home town and is generally a bad dude.

Roth starts out by going to the Empire and stealing a vessel he believes is capable of taking out Noctillus' flag ship the Bloody Reaver. After that he assembles a gang of like-minded captains to help him take down Noctillus. This story reminded me of the old Sinbad movies from the 70's-80's with it's road trip feel how at each stop they picked up someone to add to their super group.

I really liked the road trip aspect of the book, but it also lead to the downfall of the book in my opinion, the characters and ships of the captains that joined later weren't really shown very well. Another thing I really didn't like was that this book was just too short. I know that all of the books (Black Reach and Space Hulk) were just short stories, but this one just begged to have the captains fleshed out, and I wish we could have seen more from the "evil" captains.

Another issue is that this short story costs $8 which is $1 less than the new Horus Heresy novel Know no Fear. This is a bit much in my opinion. I would have felt fine if this had been a $5 book.

All-in-all this is a great short story to go along with a game that has some beautiful models. I give this story three-animated-undead-sailors out of five.