ON FEBRUARY 2, 2000 the Jungle went online; today, we commemorate this site’s 25th anniversary, and the beginning of its 26th year of posts. When I hit the upload link 25 years ago and launched the Jungle onto the Web, I had no inkling that it would: 1) resonate with thousands of gamers; and 2) persist well into the future. For both of those, I have you, Gentle Visitor, to thank, whether this is your first time, or you’ve been here since Day One. Without you, this site would not exist.
I created the Jungle because I thought there was a need for a 40K site that was different from all the others out there at the time. A site that would try new things and present new ideas, and would “inspire, educate, and entertain.” I think we can add “…and endure” to the Jungle’s motto.
What you’re viewing right now is the third iteration of the site, which debuted in June 2022. Lots of things have changed since 2000, but much has remained the same. In this post, I’d like to discuss the past, present, and future of the Jungle.*
*Admittedly, “the Jungle” is an odd name for a 40K site. I call it that because I envisioned it to showcase my Fighting Tiger Space Marines. And where does one find tigers…?
Where We’ve Been
When the Jungle debuted, I had a lot of free time, so I had posted every Monday. There was even a brief stretch when I was updating twice a week. The Jungle was organized into sections,* with about half of it devoted to displaying and describing the Fighting Tigers (my first army); and the other half featuring campaigns, battle reports, editorials, themed army ideas, etc.
*I used to call that kind of website, with sections on certain topics, a “magazine-type” site. Many sites in the early 2000’s were set up like that. Not so much anymore.
From the beginning, my best friend and fellow 40K player Patrick Eibel joined me as a “Jungle Guide,” regularly contributing posts. In particular, Pat crafted many of the campaigns that we ran and documented, and we exhibited his many armies on the site.
The Jungle quickly became famous—or infamous—in part because the Fighting Tigers of Veda featured female Space Marines. When I had started writing up “fluff,” or background material, for my army in the late 1990’s, I had explained the painting of some of my figures as “white tigers” as being because those Space Marines were female, and were marked by different-colored armor.
I hadn’t really put much thought into it, and how it contradicted the established 40K lore, and I really didn’t care much. If people liked my female Space Marines, fine; if not, that was okay by me, too. Plenty of gamers on both sides of the issue told me their opinions, but I wasn’t trying to make any kind of socio-political statement, or advance an agenda; I just did it because I thought it was different and interesting. More about female Space Marines later.
The years went by, and Pat and I kept chugging along, with occasional contributions from others. We participated in several gaming events, especially Games Day in Baltimore, where tens of thousands of gamers used to gather at the massive Baltimore Convention Center. More fun were road trips to smaller, multi-day gaming meet-ups (dubbed “Fall From Grace,” or “Counter Offensive”) where we would get together with friends made online.
The Internet gaming landscape was very different from what you find today. The Jungle was one of many sites that featured armies, batreps, and rants. Forums were extremely popular as well. Bandwidth, storage space, and download speeds were considerations, and as YouTube was in its infancy, video was practically unheard of.
After playing scores of games, publishing hundreds of posts, and posting thousands of photos and images, all of which reached an untold number of people, things began to slow down as our priorities shifted. Pat had a son, and I developed a side career as an author of fantasy novels. Updates went from weekly, to monthly, to sporadically.
Eventually, the outdated apps (Netscape Composer, if you remember back that far) and processes that I was using made posting material tedious and laborious, taking way too much time, and often with inconsistent and unappealing visual results. A change had to happen. In late 2017, I rebooted the Jungle into the blog-style format that continues to the present day.
Which is not to say that all went well. The blogging app and hosting service that I had switched to proved to be buggy and unreliable, and Jungle 2.0 crashed in 2021 after just three years. Some of that material, alas, was lost forever. I moved to a better system and provider in 2022, and Jungle 3.0 has been humming along since then.
Where We Are
Lots has changed even since this current version of the site powered up. Let’s go over some of those changes, starting with what I think are the most important ones.
No Mas 40K. In 1987, I started playing Warhammer 40K with its first version (“Rogue Trader”), and dutifully continued through good versions (3rd, 4th, 8th) and bad (5th, 7th) until I gave up on the game in 2022 with the 9e rules (and no, I did not bother with 10th Edition).
As I discuss in this post, the game had simply become too complex and too much of a timesuck for me. I’m tired of how rapidly it changes, both between editions (which lately, has been on a three-year cycle), and with updates, tweaks, and points adjustments during editions (how many FAQs and errata has GW issued in the past year)? Nor do I enjoy purchasing expensive new books every so often just to keep playing with the models I already paid for.
All of which is to say that while the Jungle was originally built for 40K, I’m no longer writing 40K-exclusive content. The fluff for my armies will continue to be set in the 40K universe, as will narrative batreps, but I’m not following what GW is doing with the game, and I won’t be writing about new developments.
Which does not mean that I’m done with tabletop gaming: far from it. For reasons I discuss here and here, I switched to OnePageRules’ Grimdark Future, a simpler, rules-lite version of 40K whose rules are free to download. And I’m not the only one. My brother-in-law Drew, his son Daniel, and my neighbor Nathan are all aboard the Grimdark train. The four of us live near each other, and we’ve formed a gaming group that has started to get together regularly. We’re hoping to add others we know who are burned out on 40K.
Alone in the Jungle. Pat’s contributions to the site had understandably slowed over the years: I can tell you from personal experience that having a young child takes up a lot of one’s time. But two years ago, in January 2023, his wife Pippa (to whom he had been married for almost 30 years) suddenly passed away. Not surprisingly, Pat stepped aside to mourn and re-evaluate his life, donating a lot of his gaming stuff, including several armies.
Pat seems to have recovered as much as one can from such a loss, and he and I have talked about getting together and throwing dice, but I don’t anticipate him contributing to the Jungle any time soon, if ever again.
No shade is implied: we’re both pushing 60 (!) years of age, and there are lots more important things in life than a gaming website. Any time he wants to, Pat is welcome to take up his pith helmet and machete and resume his duties as a Jungle Guide; until then, I’ll continue to explore this place solo, which means that updates will continue to happen when they happen (though I try to post monthly).
Rebooting the Fighting Tigers. For quite a while, the Fighting Tigers of Veda have been noticeably absent from this site, which purportedly showcases them. The reason is that I’m giving them a soft reboot, which “Inquisitor Varman Kumar” (an admittedly unreliable narrator) has been chronicling in his reports to the Imperium (beginning here).
I’ve been collecting the army since I started playing 40K in 1987, and it grew to be very large, with hundreds of figures and dozens of vehicles. The number of models has become unwieldy, and the narrative I wrote about them has grown stale to me. So, I’ve made a few key changes:
- The Fighting Tigers of Veda Chapter now consists solely of the orange-and-black models, and use the Grimdark Future rules for “Battle Brothers” (think, generic Firstborn Space Marines).
- The mustard-and-brown models are grouped into a successor chapter called the Sabretooth Tigers of Veda. They use the Grimdark Future rules for “Blood Brothers” (GF’s version of Blood Angels).
- The former “female Space Marines” are no longer that, but are grouped into the White Tigers of Veda, which use the Grimdark Future rules for “Blessed Sisters” (think Adepta Sororitas).
The last change mentioned is sure to raise some eyebrows, and maybe even lose me some fans. Though I wove plenty of ambiguity and plausible deniability into Kumar’s “debunking” of “female Fighting Tigers,” in actuality, I’m done with female Space Marines. I don’t have any in my armies anymore, or in my fluff going forward.
That’s not because I’m a misogynist or a transphobe or a MAGA extremist, or whatever you might want to call me. It’s not because I’m trying to run away from a “woke” ideology that I used to embrace (which I never had). It’s merely because the concept no longer interests me, and it hasn’t been worth the hassles and arguments and name-calling and ridicule that I’ve put up with for the last 25 years.
If you want to have female Space Marines in your army, that’s all good with me (not that you need my permission), and I wouldn’t ever talk shit about you. But I’m not going to do it anymore. As I mentioned, the topic of “female Space Marines” was not a social justice crusade for me, it was just something that, more than 25 years ago, I thought was different and interesting. Now, in 2025, it just bores me, and I’m moving on from it.
Ongoing Series. I currently have two series of posts that I add to every so often. Deployment For Dumbasses (Like Me) began in 2015, under the original Jungle site, but was never completed. It was initially written specifically for the 40K rules, but in bringing it back, I’ve attempted to make it rules-neutral. So far, I’ve covered deployment for “Heavy Support” and “Troops,” and this year, I’ll cover “Elites,” “Fast Attack,” and “Character” units.
“KD&D” is where I discuss the many changes I’ve made to how I run 1e Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Presently, I’m going through each character class, and then I’ll get into combat.
My current AD&D campaign started in 2020 and is still going strong; I write about it here and here. I probably won’t have much more to add, because hearing about what’s going on in someone else’s campaign is like hearing about what someone else’s kid is up to: unless it’s a spectacular fail, no one’s really interested, but we all have to be polite and pretend like we are.
The Scorpion & The Wolf. Updates might be slow for the first part of the year, because I’m finishing up my next novel, a young adult fantasy book called The Scorpion & The Wolf (which is set in my D&D campaign world). It’ll be published on April 4 of this year, and I’m debuting it at Awesome Con in Washington, DC. If you’re interested, you can learn more about it here. It will be available on Amazon in softcover and for Kindle, and on Kindle Unlimited, like my other books are.
The Online Gaming Landscape. The “magazine-type” gaming website (like the original Jungle, which ran until 2017), with sections devoted to various topics, is, if not nigh-extinct, certainly not as popular or widespread as before. Almost all the ones I frequented back in the Jungle’s early days are gone, including, alas, The Millenium Gate (though it has been reborn on Facebook). A few of the larger forums (Dakka Dakka, and The Bolter & Chainsword) survive to this day.
When it comes to discussing games online, video is king, IMHO. I follow several YouTube channels, and I share the more interesting episodes on the Jungle’s Facebook page.
Where We’re Going
As I alluded to, once TS&TW drops, I’ll be focusing on my current series, but I also have more updates planned. In 2025, I’ll post at least three batreps; they use the Grimdark Future rules, but if you’re still with 40K, I think you’ll enjoy them anyway. The batreps are Orks vs. Dark Eldar; Necrons vs. Ultramarines; and a four-player fight of Ultramarines and Sisters of Battle vs. Orks and Tyranids.
Tying in with the batreps will be the return of another series, Armies of the Jungle, which showcases each of mine as examples of cool stuff you can do. Hopefully, it will inspire some folks when creating their own armies.
I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to cover my Tiger forces—Fighting Tigers, Sabretooths, and White Tigers—under AotJ, or keep going with the Varman Kumar posts, which were meant to take the place of the old Codex: Fighting Tigers of Veda section that I had on the original site. We’ll see.
I’m also going to continue to bring back the best of the Jungle posts from 2000-2017 under the “Vintage Jungle” tag. There was a lot of good material that is still relevant, and with some tweaking, it’ll see the light of day again.
As mentioned, I don’t anticipate covering 10th or 11th Edition Warhammer 40K, but I will do more about Grimdark Future. I’m not interested in the 2024 version of Dungeons & Dragons (is it still 5th Edition, or is 5.5?), but I’ll do more about 1e AD&D.
Speaking of D&D, I am very seriously considering taking my “KD&D” ideas and publishing a game built around them. The only things that are slowing my roll on that are: 1) The world needs another retro D&D clone like OnlyFans needs more pr0n; 2) it would require some serious crowdfunding.
Going forward, I think the number of gaming blogs like this one will continue to shrink, but hopefully, there will always some folks out there who prefer reading over video. I might experiment with video, but the technical aspects and speaking on camera are not strengths of mine; writing is my forte.
Conclusion
So, that’s the state of the Jungle in 2025. Though updates are not as frequent as they were many years ago, and though (tbh) the number of visitors is not as large as in the heyday of 40k sites, I have no plans to retire any time soon. Indeed, I am energized by the Grimdark Future game, and the group of players I have. I also still enjoy playing AD&D, and will share my insights on it.
Thank you for coming along with me on this trip through the Jungle. I hope to see you again very soon. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, drop me a line here or on the Jungle’s Facebook page.
Kenton Kilgore writes books for kids, young adults, and adults who are still young. Follow Kenton on Facebook for frequent posts on sci-fi, fantasy, and other speculative fiction. You can also catch him on Instagram.
