Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
WFRP 2e stuff going cheap!
Now that the 3rd edition/entirely new game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is out, FFG are dumping stock on WFRP 2e. There’s some great books here actually, especially the Realms fo Sorcery and Tome of Salvation for US$5 each. some of the best stuff is already gone, but this will be the last chance to grab this stuff ebfore it skyrockets on eBay so get stuck in.
I’ve stopped commenting on WFRP 3e – I’ll say more when and if I get a chance to actually play the damn thing and no idea when that might be.
New Warhammer Fantasy scenario competition
Given the demise of Black Industries and the effective end of support for WFRP 2e by FFG now that WFRP 3e is coming out, I assumed that this meant the end of the really amazing competitions that BI used to organise. Luckily, fansite Strike-to-Stun have stepped into the breach. I assume they’ll make them all available for download like the old BI competitions which will mean at least 5-10 excellent scenarios.
PS – there is an archive of all the BI web support files (including adventures, generators and ogre PCs) but I can’t seem to find it. If anyone has a link, please post in the comments.
What I want from WFRP 3e
I guess no on with an NDA can say, but while I had plenty of problems with WFRP’s system I liked what it was trying to do with that it. As I see it that boils down to two things:
- Be about ordinary people (ie. students, bughers etc) trust into extraordinary circumstances; and
- Be gritty – lots of chance of death, disease and general mayhem.
So what I want from WFRP (as opposed to D&D or GURPS or whatever) is to play a game about ordinary people with real risk to their lives.
In 1e/2e, the careers system is a good way of bringing this into play, combat can be very deadly and there are plenty of rules for disease, madness and the like. So the style of play I want from WFRP is supported by the rules, even if I have some issues with the specifics. (DISCLAIMER: this isn’t to say that the only way to play WFRP is to have ratcatchers and peasants dying in the mud of the bloody flux and mutation after 2 sessions)
I don’t care however about the particular way that these rules are delivered – I’m not wedded to the percentile system. Give my issues with the specifics (mostly that magic is too restrictive and that combat tends to be dull then over rather than particularly compelling) a new system with a complete overhaul could be a good way to achieve them.
What I want to know, sooner rather than later, is how well WFRP 3e adheres to the ordinary and gritty aspects of the WFRP world.
And the final WFRP 3e thing for today
FFG have updated their WFRP site with pictures of the special dice and some cards, including a big pic of the troll slayer career card. Here’s also a pic of the ‘party card’.
I can’t tell much about the game form this, except that it looks fairly simple. We’ll see…
And another little WFRP 3e tidbit
Apparently, and this still counts as rumour, it’s going to be set before the Storm of Chaos.
If so, this is god. The fluff never properly supported the idea that the Empire was half in ruins and was emerging from a massive war. So I pretty much ignored that about it. This should make it easier to present the Empire as a functioning society, something that never really worked previously.
So … WFRP 3e
A new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was announced at Gen Con this week, as we expected it would be. It’s looking pretty different. There’s a summary of the known facts here, but in short:
- It’s being sold in a box set, with special dice and cards and stuff
- It still has careers but it won’t be a percentile based roll under system like the previous editions.
- Our of the box there will be Humans, Dwarves, High Elves and Wood Elves. Plus there are party mechanics and a party ‘character sheet’ sort of thing.
- Out of the box you’ll get enough stuff (funny dice and cards I guess) for 3 players and a GM. There’s an expansion pack to allow more players but it’s not clear what the actual limit is, or how necessary the cards will be to play. What has been said is that the cards reduce a lot of book look up stuff, so that might be cool.
- The basic box will cost US$100. In Australia I can see that being $150 easy.
It sounds like a really interesting idea but it also sounds pretty unlike my beloved WFRP. So we’ll see. There’s so much speculation at the moment that it’s hard to know exactl what to think, but if they can make it faster and less annoying in combat while retaining the grit and deadliness I’m in. I’d sort of want to play it before I bought it, but there’s bugger all chance of that happening unless I go to a con where it’s being demo’d. So I reckon, provided I’ve got some players, I’ll pick it up.
Here’s some more links:
- Pictures of the box set: pic 1, pic 2, pic 3, pic 4.
- Some encouraging comments from on of the Strike To stun regulars who playtested it (his name is RuneFang, but you have to scroll down).
PS. FFG aren’t calling it 3e but everyone else is, and so will I.
Modern vampires – the neutering.
I recently finished George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream – a vampire novel set on steamboats in the Pre-Civil War South of the US (some spoilers follow). I recently watched season 1 of True Blood. I’ve read a bit about, and heard people discussing, the Twilight series. And I was always a big fan of Angel.
So it was with some interest that I read this article about how vampires have lost their bite, as it were. Because all of these examples feature vampires who are trying to redeem themselves, especially through their lack of human blood-letting.
Largely due to goths and Anne Rice, I’ve always found vampires sort of annoying. But last year I made a vampire the big bad of a WFRP campaign I ran and I’d happily use them again. But the article’s right – vampires are far more interesting as charming but powerful and diabolical monsters than as safe but sexy wimps.
Let’s make vamps a threat again – no friendly vampires looking to reunite with humanity. No sexy vampire boyfriends. No animal blood drinking softies. Let’s get vampires in our games and our fiction who rip out throats, seduce and then slay and do all the nasty vampire things we know and love.
As a side note, I’d really recommend Fevre Dream as well – it’s very well written and having read so much of Martin’s work through A Song of Ice & Fire, it was interesting to see him tackle something quite different.
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…
Cattle Finding & Combat – a WFRP actual play
I was in Brisbane again for work this week and managed to play a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game with some people I’d met via RPG.net. This was very nice of them as I was essentially hijacking their D&D game night to demand we played a game I was keen on.
It was a simple one-shot scenario – cattle are missing and the sheriff won’t do anything about it (he’s a drunk) so our heroes agree to take on the task. We did standard WFRP random character generation, which led to much hilarity and ended up with a dwarf bodyguard, an elven apprentice wizard, a human pit fighter (me) and another human whose career has escaped me! › Continue reading
An unbelievable heist – a real life RPG scenario
I bought the new issue of Wired for my flight yesterday and found this article: ‘The untold story of the World’s biggest diamond heist‘. Go and read it – it might take a while so do it over lunch, or print it out for the bus ride home.
Go on!
Now you’ve had a chance – and how cool is that – what a wealth of possibilities for a RPG that could be. The whole set up: elite criminals brought together by a corrupt merchant, an unbreakable vault (could be technological, could be magical), and the final betrayals by both an unhinged friend and by the merchant himself (or not) would make for a great session or series of sessions.
I’m tempted to do it a short campaign next time the Mythic Senguko Japan GM is away for a period. I’m thinking:
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: the PCs are three Tileans and a halfling employed by a Sea Elf merchant in Marienburg; or
- GURPS DMZ: based on the DMZ comic series, the PCs are a ragtag bunch of survivors hired to do pretty much everything that the story says, but in the New York DMZ. This has the advantage that you don’t have to come up with too many of the new details – no extra tech like you’d need for a sci-fi game, no weird magic like for the WFRP game.
Knowning my players, it’ll be the WFRP game they’d chose but it would be fun either way! What would you run with this set up?