I’m hoping that off the back of this positive response to the game that Green Ronin firms up the plans for further products as well as officially announcing when the Campaign Guide will be released. According to a report from Gen Con on the Green Ronin boards, the hold up is not that they are waiting on approvals from George R.R. Martin. Though this of course should be taken with a grain of salt until there is some sort word from Green Ronin.

Most of the other award winners covered off DnD 4th ed, Dark Heresy and Paizo Publishing, though it was great to see that some of the smaller publishers and games had a good showing like Mouse Guard (which I own, but have never actually played) and Evil Hat Productions with both Don’t Rest Your Head and Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies. Unfortunately my friend Malcolm’s Hot War didn’t pick up awards in the two categories (Best Setting and Best Writing) it was nominated.

A full list of winners can be found over at the ENnie Awards site.

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…

I’ve got exactly no experience on running one-shot games so I enlisted some help at RPG.net and set to work. The problem is that running a one-shot in a  system you’ve never played is tricky – especially when the key advice everyone gives you is ‘use pre-gens’. Making characters took forever, but I got some good advice at RPG.net and then at Dark Reign, and whipped up five options for what turned out to be three players. I got:

• Mae, an assassin with a long las (sniper rifle) and twin chainswords;
• Constantine, a cleric; and
• Able, a psyker.

I ran a guardsman called Octus to help round out the party and my poor, slaved over Arbitrator went unused. All the PCs were rank 4 – that’s where Dark Heresy characters get to start using some pretty cool things – heavy weapons, prominent psychic powers and the like. I played up the ‘grimdark‘ nature of the setting a bit too much I think, but the caricature helped people get into the appropriate mood.

The mission was pretty simple: go here, clean out the traitor heretic scum from these tunnels and come back alive – in other words a dungeon crawl. And while I thought I’d prepared adequately – 5 encounters, with some easily removed, pre-generated characters and a fairly clear linear plot with little room for distraction my friends proved, once again, that they can fuck up the best laid plans.

They snuck down the stairwell and listened at the metal door, with Mae and her heightened senses hearing some low chatter and grumbling form the room beyond so Able decided to use his Frightening Aura power so they could scare their enemies once they got the door open.

Now, as fans of Dark Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay know, supernatural powers are dangerous things. In Dark Heresy even time you roll a 9 while trying to ‘cast’ one of your psychic abilities something bad happens. In this case, Able’s party mates were driven into a frenzy and threw open the door and charged without a care for their own survival. This clearly made things a bit difficult – they ran right to the line of barrels the gang members who had been paid to wait for them had put up for cover. While they recovered quickly, Able managed to then accidentally cause an earthquake and then call down a mass possession – a psychic attack lasting 11 rounds on everyone within 100 meters by rolling 9s for the first three things he did in the game.

The game went, well, not down hill but certainly a little weird from there. The PCs proceeded to the next room, filled with exploding barrels and gun servitors (heavily armed cyborgs) while the possession was in full swing meaning that half of them were on the ground being ravaged by psychic pain every round. Not the smartest tactical move, but certainly an interesting option.

Unfortunately, real life intruded a bit and we didn’t get to finish the scenario as people needed to head off to children and partners. Everyone seemed to have fun though and I got to try out a game that’s been on my to do list for some time and although I didn’t get to drive them mad and/or dead with the final demon encounter, we did get the aforementioned psychic phenonema to entertain us. The best line of the night has to be the one I included in the title of this post:

What Nice Flagellations You Have

Dark Heresy includes a ‘talent’ some PCs can purchase which enables them to temporarily increase their Willpower in return for doing themselves damage – very flavoursome and appropriate for the setting.

Which brings me to rules. Dark Heresy has a lot of good stuff in common with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (unintentional effects of magic/psychic powers) with some nice additional extras (automatic fire, fatigue). Some of the same problems still exist however – even at rank 4 we still had a lot of missing shots from both sides and once parry and dodge rules come into play it can take a long time to resolve combat. When a  hit does connect, it can be brutal (especially with open ended damage dice) and after a lot of the enemy gang members passed out from fear of the psyker and as a side effect of the psychic storm, they met their ends pretty quickly.

I’d like to run another Dark Heresy game sometime soon – perhaps as a small, 5 or 6 session campaign rather than a one-shot so I can do more investigation and the like. Like the fantasy version, the rules are serviceable with a few bright spots rather than fantastic rules I’d use for everything, but we certainly had a lot of fun in my older Bretonnia game so I think we could have a good time here as well.

1. I finished Fable II this morning when Abbie took Felix to the markets with her. This was a good fun, if a bit too casual, RPG. I didn’t adore it but I certainly enjoyed it. I’ll try to write a proper review in the coming week.
2. I’m running a game of Dark Heresy next weekend, all going according to plan, while Ciaran is here.
3. I’ve also been playing in Dan’s Mythic Senguko Japan game as a sort of Buddhist mystic. Only 2 sessions for me so far but good fun and a very well realised campaign world. I’ve been meaning to write up some character notes and stuff about the game as well.

That’s it so far – 5 video games left to finish and 3 RPGs left to try, but progress at least!