Mostly Geek

WFRP 3e? Really? Oh dear.

There’s been a bunch of rumours around RPG.net and the like recently that a third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay might be happening. This was fuelled by comments on the official Fantasy Flight Games message boards and the like and by the fact that FFG have released bugger all WFRP books since they got the license, concentrating instead on Dark Heresy. All that has been released is a) the Career Compendium, a classic end of line product (see the Spell and Magic Item Compendiums Wizards released just before announcing D&D 4e); b) Shades of Empire, a organisations source book and c) The Thousand Thrones a big adventure. My understanding is that at least the latter two of these were basically written before FFG took the license as well. Other than that, they’ve made the out of print 2e books available as PDFs. No other action.

Then today I see that The Altdorf Correspondent blog has a post linking to Black Library Author Graham McNeil’s blog. Here’s the relevant section:

WFRP 3
A coupe of weeks ago, our regular roleplaying group was privileged enough to playtest 3rd Edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The guys from Fantasy Flight Games were over at Games Workshop HQ, and Jay Little very kindly did a show and tell for us over at Alessio Cavatore’s house, where we saw how much the game has changed from its previous incarnation. Our gaming group has been going for some time and we were all interested to see what was new with WFRP, since we’d playtested the previous edition also. It was in interesting evening, and the game was very different to anything I’ve played before, with a lot of table space taken up by character sheets, action and ability cards, dice etc. It felt like a strange hybrid of board game and roleplaying game at first, but once the notions of the new mechanics took hold, it felt very natural. Likewise, the new dice pool system felt odd at first, but once we’d rolled a few dice it immediately became very intuitive, which is surely the holy grail of any roleplaying system.

By the time we’d despatched the goblins and rescued the coachman, we didn’t have much time left to play out the more interpersonal encounters of the intro game, but we’d already gotten our heads around the system and were already looking to develop our characters – which is a good sign in any playtest. Overall, I really liked the changes to the game, and it makes a nice change from sitting with my Players Handbook and a grubby character sheet. I’m liking what Jay has done with the game, and there’s a clear desire to make it fit properly with the Warhammer World, where a lot of the previous edition’s books, with the best will in the world, just didn’t.

Oh dear. Ability cards? Fitting more into the Warhammer World?

I’m a traditionalist in these things, by and large. I like my RPGs to be RPGS – dice, books, character sheets and some minis (sometimes). And I like the WFRP version of the Old World, not the current battlegame version. So this doesn’t appeal.

This is a watch this space, but I’m glad currently I’ve got my WFRP 2e and 1e books…

Tags: Dark Heresy, edition wars, fantasy, Fantasy Flight Games, Graham McNeil, RPGs, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, WFRP 3e, Wizards of the Coast

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