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Review by Richard Cowen
“There are worlds where courageous heroes who stand for all that is good and righteous watch over populaces of decent folk who seek to enrich their own lives and better those of the people around them.
This isn’t one of those worlds.
The Old World is one of blood, pain, sacrifice, treachery, deceit, and malice. Many of the Empire’s ‘heroes’ are dangerous rogues and blood spattered butchers. The people of the Old World are superstitious and insular, swift to believe the worst of others and slow to trust, often with good reason. Corruption is the rule, honesty the exception. Those few bright souls who still manage to accomplish truly heroic tasks frequently have to act under cover of darkness, lest they be accused of being in league with the very forces they try to combat.
Sound like fun? Good.” Page 192, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
Bloody advanced orders. Whose idea was it to release a game on the day after the Easter bank holiday weekend? There was no post on three of the four days before the release date, so I didn’t get this until yesterday (30th March).
Anyway, it’s here now. I opened the package and giggled like a delirious fanboy being confronted with something beautiful. There’s a reason for that. I was.
Right, just for a bit of context. I’ve been playing Games Workshop games since Hero Quest in 1989. I graduated to full wargaming in 1992, and then moved over to roleplaying in 2002 when I bought the 1st Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. (Christ, I’m getting old…) Apart from a brief dalliance with Warzone after one of Games Workshop’s price hikes, I’ve been a GW addict for most of my life, and it’s only financial insecurity and a lack of painting and wargaming time that’s slowed me down. I’ve written a free RPG based on a cross between GW’s Inquisitor skirmish game and WFRP, and nowadays I’m mainly a roleplayer. For the past year and a half, I’ve been planning to run The Enemy Within, a superb WFRP campaign let down only by the weakness of the final two books.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was first released in 1986 as the roleplaying version of the Warhammer miniature wargame. The basic setting is a late medieval/early Renaissance low fantasy world where humanity (and elves, dwarfs, halflings, orcs, goblins, ogres and the rest) live under the ever-present threat of the world being overrun by the Daemonic forces of Chaos and their mortal followers, the Chaos warriors of the northern tribes, half-animal mutant beastmen of the dark forests, and the heretical Chaos cultists that lurk within the walls of civilisation. It’s dark, with no expectation of glory and wealth on the part of the adventurers, where the best you can realistically hope for is survival and a bit of comfortable living for a few months.
After a few years of popularity (including The Enemy Within winning joint Best Roleplaying Campaign Of All Time award), it went out of print as Games Workshop decided the money was in miniatures. It came back in the mid-to-late 1990s, under licence to Hogshead Publishing. Under the guidance of James Wallis (subject of this article and author of this response), Hogshead went and added several new books to the range, including the long-awaited Realms of Sorcery. I saw my way into the RPG writing world, and crafted a proposal for a sourcebook for the city of Nuln, and sent it in. I got a reply stating that Hogshead was giving up the licence, James Wallis was selling the company on, and it would be handling D20 products from now on.
My response was something along the lines of, “Bugger.”
Anyway, back to the present, and the drooling fanboy opening the box.
The 2nd Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP) is presented in a gorgeous, hardback, 256-page corebook. The name of the game is functional, but nothing special, and just as descriptive as Dungeons and Dragons, to be perfectly honest. The cover’s stylings are very much in synch with the current edition of the Warhammer wargame, with pseudo-Saxon swirly bits and the ‘Warhammer’ logo in red-edged gold. Beneath the title lies a nice depiction of the twin-tailed comet (the symbol of Sigmar, the patron deity of the Empire, the largest human realm in the game).
The cover painting, by Geoff Taylor, is truly impressive (as far as RPG covers go), and a massive improvement on the 1st Edition cover. Where 1st Ed had a bunch of adventurers scrapping against a load of goblins and orcs in a dungeon, 2nd Ed takes away all the dungeonhack bumf and replaces it with pure, low fantasy, Warhammer imagery: You have a party of adventurers, outdoors, surrounded by Chaos beastmen (rather than more stereotypical orcs), with various skeletons-on-spikes amongst the devastated town background. It’s dark, with all the characters heavily shadowed – just like WFRP.
The adventurers themselves aren’t exactly the noble stereotypes either. First up is a slayer (dishonoured dwarf determined to commit suicide-by-troll, or giant if that doesn’t work, or daemon if he screws up at that as well…) waving a pair of blood-spattered axes. This dwarf’s pig ugly and built like a five-foot tank. Behind him is a warrior-priest of Sigmar, clutching a warhammer (another of Sigmar’s symbols) and laden down with heavy chainmail, devotional scripts, and a big book. He’s built like a brick shithouse as well, but in the ugly, brutish way, rather than the action movie hero look beloved of high fantasy. Then there’s the female in the party. I can’t tell how large her breasts are, since they’re hidden behind the dwarf’s axe and her own tabard, chainmail shirt and shield. She’s also got a pierced nose and a big gash across one cheek. No supermodels with chainmail bikinis here, thank you very much. Then there’s the Bright wizard with his archetypical orange robes and flaming sword, and a noble in early-Renaissance garb and an impressively big Germanic beard. Oh yeah, and he’s got a bloody bandage over one eye.
The only thing I can think of that could have improved the cover illustration would have been if the adventurers were more heavily wounded or battle-scarred. Ripped and blood-spattered chainmail, or maybe a hook-hand or something would have added that little bit extra.
My housemate also thinks that the flaming sword of the wizard is a bit too high fantasy. He might have a point, but the cover’s intended to attract attention to the game, and a nice bright fiery effect adds that bit of colour to the gloom that even the robes of the wizard and dyed hair of the dwarf don’t penetrate.
Opening it up, you’ve got the usual credits page. This is worthy of note because you read it and think, “Ooh, that’s a lot of playtesters.” Then you turn to the contents page, and you think, “Holy living fuck, that really is a hell of a lot of playtesters…” The bottom third of the double page is filled with playtesters credits, crammed together, in small type. Good luck finding your name, if you were one of them.
The contents page does its job. Nothing special. Move on.
When I’m specifically discussing differences between the 1st and 2nd Edition, I’ll be italicising the paragraph. These paragraphs still form part of the whole article, so you may as well just keep reading through, even if you’ve never even heard of WFRP before. On the other hand, 1st Ed players who just want to know what’s different this time around can just look for the italicised paragraphs.
Chapter I: Introduction
First up is Life, After Death, a short story by Dan Abnett (author of the Gaunt’s Ghosts series of novels for Warhammer 40,000). It’s about a party of adventurers protecting a gang of scavengers in the ruins of Wolfenburg during the Storm of Chaos (a massive Chaos invasion of the Empire, played out as last summer’s global Warhammer wargame campaign). A soggy arquebus, hideously mutated beastmen, and multiple severed limbs let you know it’s distinctly Warhammer. The plot itself is pretty straightforward: a mercenary, a militiaman, a tomb robber and a dwarven rat-catcher encounter a Sigmarite priest on a quest to recover artefacts from the temple in the sacked city of Wolfenburg. Over all, not a bad piece of fiction. It’s not too long (four and a half pages), which is good. And it’s not written in silly White Wolf typefaces or anything, which is better.
Following this is the ‘What Is Roleplaying?’ section, as well as an example of play following continuing the plot of Life, After Death. The example doesn’t cover the rules, but does a nice job of explaining how players run their characters and the GM deals with plot.
Chapter II: Character Creation
The chapter begins with a summary of the four PC races in the game: Humans, Elves, Dwarfs and Halflings. The non-human races have the most background, as they deviate most significantly from the game’s default setting of the human-dominated Empire. Each race has roleplaying hints as well (for Humans, this is the suggestion that, “You should know how to play one of these”). The hints for the Dwarf made me cringe a little, as they veered just maybe that bit too close to cliché. As a note here, the default Elf types are the Old World dwellers (either wood elves or the sea elf merchant families of Marienburg and Altdorf), rather than the more aloof and alien High Elves of Ulthuan.
Character creation in WFRP is random-roll. There’s a simple reason for this – points build wouldn’t work in the setting. You aren’t playing heroes, you’re playing people, and random-roll gives you a character who’s roughly average, but maybe better or worse in certain areas. There are several methods of dealing with debilitatingly bad rolls, but I’ll get to that later.
Essentially, the statline is split into two parts: the main and secondary profile. The main profile holds all the percentile stats: Weapon Skill (hand-to-hand combat), Ballistic Skill (ranged combat), Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, Will Power and Fellowship.
To dispel the accusations now, these aren’t the stats lifted straight from the wargame. In fact, Agility has never existed before (although it’s really just Initiative with a slightly different job). Intelligence, Will Power and Fellowship haven’t been in the wargame in almost 13 years. The Leadership stat is missing, since it’s not really of any use in an RPG. Okay, you could lead an army eventually, but your face-to-face commands are Fellowship-based, while your strategic planning is going to be Intelligence-based.
The secondary profile basically pulls together the non-percentile stats (Attacks, Wounds, Movement), Insanity and Fate points, and three new characteristics: Strength Bonus, Toughness Bonus and Magic.
Strength and Toughness Bonuses are equal to the tens digit of the appropriate main profile stat (and so is on a 1-10 scale), and are used when determining combat damage. I’ll go into Magic a little later, when discussing the revised magic system.
The Human is the benchmark on which the other races are measured, and has all of its main profile characteristics as 20+2D10, so an average of 31. Elves, Dwarfs and Halflings vary in either direction from this.
Shallya’s Mercy is a nice rule that allows you to slightly tweak your main profile. It simply means that you can raise a single below average characteristic to the average. This very useful for Strength and Toughness, since it will probably also increase your bonus as well.
For those of you who’ve played 1st Edition, the obscenity that was the Elf statline has been given a thorough kicking. Ditto the Dwarf, although his crimes against game balance were far less severe. The upper end of the range is 30+2D10, while 10+2D10 sits at the bottom. Halflings are still substandard physically (except their excellent Ballistic Skill and Agility), but that’s fair enough.
Also, alignments have gone entirely. None of that bullshit in this game any more, thankfully.
Wounds and Fate points have a simple D10 table to determine how many you get. This is a necessity of WFRP shifting from the full spread of dice to just using D10s, but is quick and easy to use.
Yes, you heard: no D20s, D12s, D8s, D6s, D4s or D3s any more. It’s just D10s and D100s.
Movement is a flat rate, depending on your species. Humans and Halflings get Movement 4, while the slightly slower Dwarfs get 3, and the faster Elves get 5. These are effectively the Movement rates from the wargame, but are in WFRP more as a comparative thing, unless you’re determined to use models and grid maps (whereby they mark how many squares you move in a round).
Please, don’t get put off by the use of miniatures. It’s not expected by the rules at all, just accommodated.
Each race also gets a collection of Skills and Talents. Sadly, Dwarfs again fall prey to stereotyping, with one of the compulsory skills being Trade (Miner, Smith or Stoneworker). On the plus side, they’re also very good at it, since they have the Dwarfcraft talent, which grants a bonus to those trades, plus a number of others. Also, because of the thousands of years of genocidal war against goblin invaders, Dwarfs also have Grudge-Born Fury, which grants them a small WS bonus when fighting orcs, goblins and hobgoblins.
Humans have the advantage in that they’re playing at home, with Common Knowledge (the Empire) and Gossip, both of which make it easy for them to get by in Imperial society. Elves gear towards either the mystical or crafted types, with several either/or options for Talents. Halflings, being citizens of the Empire (albeit in the semi-autonomous Mootland) have the Gossip skill that helps them communicate with the wider world, and are also Resistant to Chaos, which means they’ll never mutate and are more resistant to magic, but cannot become spell casters.
Humans and Halflings also receive randomly generated talents, which is an oddity. I’d prefer it if Elves and Dwarfs gained at least one random talent, just for variety, even if it increased the number of random talents for the two races that already get them.
Many of the talents are simply the bonus-granting skills of 1st Edition, plus various racial special rules. The author decided to split them into two categories because they work differently and
As an aside, the Night Vision talent now has a flat range of 30 yards.
After working out your stats, you roll for your character’s career. The WFRP career system is the closest you’ll come in this game to either classes or levels, because both of those concepts suck ass. (That was a personal opinion added at the end of that sentence, by the way.) Instead, a WFRP character starts as one thing, moving on into new areas of expertise as they gain experience, knowledge and maybe even social standing and wealth.
Starting careers are now rolled on a single chart, rather than being divided into Warrior, Ranger, Rogue and Scholar career classes, as they were under 1st Edition. This has the advantage/disadvantage (depending on viewpoint) that you could end up playing an utterly pathetic soldier with WS 22. I like this randomness – it fits WFRP’s ‘uphill struggle’ ethos.
The careers are weighted differently on the chart for each race (by dint of each race having its own column of D100 results). Each race also has some careers that others either cannot start out in or maybe not even enter at a later stage.
The actual careers available to starting characters range from the cool-as-all-hell to the shit-stained-scum, with pistol-toting roadwardens, professional soldiers, apprentice wizards, barber-surgeons, grave robbers, rat-catchers, peasants, bone pickers and charcoal burners. Additionally, there are several non-Imperial careers, such as Estalian Diestros (swashbuckling swordsmen), Kislevite Kossars, Norse Berserkers (see, they don’t all worship Chaos…), as well as the non-human careers like Dwarf Trollslayers and Runebearers (think messenger who runs through tunnels) and Elven Kithband Warriors. Halflings have access to nearly all the Human careers, albeit with different frequency.
If you don’t like the career that you roll up, the chapter provides the suggestion that you roll twice and pick the result you prefer, or that the GM allows players to pick their careers.
Something that’s changed in the careers since 1st Edition is that the Roadwarden is no longer utterly crap, with only the Ride skill, a sword and a chainmail shirt. Now he’s got a brace of pistols, and a whole clutch of skills and talents. Similarly, other sub-standard basic careers have been boosted, in order to provide increased game balance.
Rounding out the character creation chapter are ten questions to ask your character to help determine motivations and personality, and a three-page series of optional random charts for height, age, star sign (including the Greased Goat, which is the sign of Denied Passions…) and distinguishing marks. Additionally, there are birthplace and name generators for each of the races. I only noticed when attempting to gen up some completely random characters that there were no surnames provided. The Character Pack (available separately) provides more on that though.
Not a problem for long-time players who own Apocrypha 2: Chart of Darkness, with the last edition’s expanded character generation stuff, I suppose.
The blurb on the back of the book proclaims that it is possible to fully generate a PC in less than half an hour. I tested this twice. Taking into account the interruptions of a housemate with a sore head and pauses to watch him play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, that’s about right as well, even when I use all the optional random vital statistics generators.
The characters I came up with were a Kislevite Kossar with the made up name of Igor Petrovich, from the equally made up market town of Volnisgrad, in Kislev, and a Dwarf marine named Erika. One problem I noticed with the character sheet is that there isn’t much room to write the names of longer skills, like ‘Common Knowledge (the Empire)’ or ‘Secret Language (Battle Tongue). Still, it’s only a minor thing: write smaller or abbreviate skill names.
Chapter III: Careers
I’ve touched on careers during the character generation chapter. This chapter explains in more detail what the career you rolled up in Chapter II actually means, plus how to move from that career to another.
This chapter also includes how to spend Experience points. That bit’s pretty straightforward.
In order to provide flexibility and to slow down characteristic increases, characteristics now advance at a rate of 5% per 100XP, rather than 1st Edition’s 10 points.
You can now buy mastery in skills. Basically, when a new career says you can take a skill that you already have, you have the option of buying it for a second time, which gives you a +10 bonus (or a third time for a +20 bonus), or you can just leave it alone. I like this mechanism, because it prevents the situation where a character spends his entire life working as a historian, only for someone to turn up late with their Intelligence boosted by studying law, only to pick up the Academic Knowledge (History) skill and become the first character’s equal.
Sixty basic careers and almost the same number again advanced careers are described in this chapter, with all the profile advances, skills, talents and trappings (equipment) of each.
The career entries no longer give trappings like ‘crossbow and ammunition’. Now, thankfully, it’s ‘crossbow with 10 bolts’. While I’m on the subject, it might just be my imagination, but it seems that there’s fewer careers dishing out missile weapons. Maybe there’s just more non-military careers now.
Each entry takes up half a page and includes an illustration. The illustrations are, in the main, excellent, with only one or two that are a little too cartoony (Rogue, for example). All, though, are grim in tone. The warriors are scarred thugs, the poorer characters are haggard and unhealthy, the wealthier ones are fat, the religious ones have that look in their eye that says, “I dare you. Question my faith. I dare you…” My only real issue is that the Boatman, Seaman and Mate all have peg legs. Like sailors are the only people to ever lose limbs…
Yes, that’s fewer careers than in the 1st Edition, even with the new careers in this edition, but many of the less important careers have been blended together. Physician’s Students are now part of the Student career, for example, and all wizards are of the same kind (so no Elementalist, Necromancer, Battle Wizard setup. Druids are gone.
Knights finally exist as a career, rather than simply leaping into Templar as soon as you can (the place of the Templar career is now taken by the higher-ranked Knights of the Inner Circle, even though any knight or inner circle knight can be a templar simply by being part of an order attached to a temple). Nobles also have more of a range as well, starting with Noble and rising through Courtier, Politician and Noble Lord. Oh, and there’s the option of becoming a Pistolier as well.
Hey, and the ubiquitous Mercenary Captains no longer exist! Yes, you no longer have to leave the army to become an officer any more, and nor do you have to become a Judicial Champion or Templar if you want to improve your combat abilities. Instead, careers for Veteran, Champion, Sergeant and Captain have been introduced to provide opportunities for either becoming well ‘ard or taking command of a body of troops, depending on which way your ambitions lie.
Troll Slayers are still here, as mentioned earlier, followed by Giant Slayers and Daemon Slayers (giants clearly aren’t what they used to be in the old days…). No Dragon Slayers though, which seems odd, particularly since traditionally they’ve been the third step on the scale, before Daemon Slayers, if I recall. I may be wrong on that; my Dwarf-Fu is weak. All three types are still combat monsters, but thankfully the Troll Slayer career now has a note at the beginning saying, “Taking the Slayer’s path is a sure route to death. Think carefully before entering this career.” In the meantime, the Daemon Slayer career has but one Career Exit: Glorious Death.
Some of the careers in WFRP 1st Ed were commonly deemed dodgy. The insane +40 Initiative of the Highwayman (particularly elven ones…), or the +3 Attacks of the Assassin, were gamebreakers. Highwaymen now have a maximum +30% Agility, while Assassins are at +2 Attacks, on a par with most other highly-skilled warriors.
There also seems to be a lot more scope for staying within the same rough career area now as well. Whereas 1st Edition characters bounced around all over the place, career-wise, 2nd Edition careers are set up so that there are a series of careers of the same type: Thief to Cat Burglar to Crime Lord, with the option of taking the Master Thief, Fence or various other vaguely related careers along the way. The descriptions of careers also suggest how characters can get from one career to another, particularly if its an unusual career exit (merchants purchasing titles, crime lords dabbling in politics, .
At the same time, there’s a lot more freedom to switch from one field to another, thanks to a thoughtful reworking of Career Exits.
Chapter IV: Skills & Talents
This chapter explains the task resolution mechanics of WFRP. In its simplest form, you roll a D100. If the result is equal to or lower than the characteristic being tested, you succeed.
It gets more complex as you apply modifiers and so on, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before in other systems.
Skills are vital to performing a task competently. If you haven’t got the skill in question, your characteristic is halved. This is why Humans and Halflings get the Gossip skill at character generation, and why it is also handed out in a significant number of careers.
Instead of a +30% modifier to a Gossip test, you have a ‘very easy Gossip test’, or a -10% modifier gives you a ‘challenging Shadowing test’. This briefly confused me on my first read-through, but it soon becomes second nature. Conveniently, the sample adventure uses the format of ‘very easy (+30%) Gossip test’. Hopefully, this will continue throughout the WFRP2 line.
For every full ten points of the margin of success, you get one degree of success. This was touched on informally in various tables and adventures in the 1st Edition, but now it’s been codified as a core rule. Degrees of success are especially used in opposed rolls, where both characters pass their skill test.
The skills are laid out clearly in alphabetical order, and are divided into Basic and Advanced skills. Anyone can attempt a basic skill test with the penalty described above, but anyone trying an advanced skill test without actually possessing the skill is doomed to fail. For the sake of convenience, all of the basic skills are listed on the 2nd page of the character sheet, beside tick boxes marked ‘Taken’.
Talents are laid out in a similar way. These represent inherent abilities or learned abilities, including things like non-career characteristic boosts for starting characters, specialist weapon masteries, skills-within-skills like surgery (being within the heal skill) and special rules like causing terror or being undead.
Chapter V: Equipment
In 1st Edition, the equipment cost lists were towards the back of the book. Now, they’re before the combat chapter. I’m not sure where I stand on this. Sure, placing weapon stats next to the combat section is probably a good idea, as is combining stats and price charts, but it’s now harder to open the book and find the price charts when your party is going shopping. Maybe that’s just me, an old-timer, and I’ll get used to the new way of doing things.
The first thing you’re presented with in this chapter is the paragraph with optional rules for Encumbrance. These are pretty straightforward (carrying capacity = Strength x 10), but it can be fiddly recording the weight of all your items. I’ve never had a problem with it, but I know a few players who are averse to putting in any kind of book-keeping (even ammunition counts). I’d argue with those players over the importance of an accurate ammunition count, but I can see why Encumbrance is something that can be left optional, particularly since, in the case of WFRP, the armour rules already compensate for their weight.
Coinage is something I’ve always respected WFRP for. It’s based on an exchange rate of 1 gold crown = 20 silver shillings = 240 brass pennies (so that’s 12 pennies to a shilling). It’s not the simplest method, despite whole generations of Britons using a similar system up until around 1970, yet it works very well within the setting and can easily be picked up by most players. And the best thing? Gold’s not as common as muck. Even an innkeeper only earns about 20-30 gold crowns in a year. Of course, adventurers get a fair bit of cash, but then, armour’s expensive, as are travelling costs, new weapons, physicians’ services, food and so on. You’ll be extremely lucky to get into three figure profit after bringing in a good haul.
So, no massively unbalanced economies here. (Where the bloody hell do those high fantasy goblins get their money from, anyway?)
The availability of items for sale is determined by the size of the town, the general rarity of the item and the level of craftsmanship you’re interested in.
Unlike in 1st Edition, the availabilities don’t translate into direct percentage chances of finding stuff. Instead, they become a modifier to a Gossip test. This is an interesting way of handling it, which grants a slight advantage to higher Fellowship PCs. On the other hand, it could just mean that they get given a list by their lower Fellowship colleagues and sent off on a shopping trip every time the party reaches a new town. Of course, the GM can make things difficult for the party in this situation, by massively increasing the time the shopping trip takes.
(Alternatively, you can just ignore the availability rules, as has been done a lot during games I’ve played in.)
Weapons are defined by a basic profile, plus any of fourteen different qualities they may have (Tiring, Impact, Armour Piercing etc.). Additionally, some require an appropriate Specialist Weapon Group talent in order to be used effectively.
Thankfully, 1st Edition’s arbitrary WS/BS = 10 if you didn’t have the Specialist Weapon skill has been changed to halving your WS/BS. Now, more proficient fighters are penalised less severely for lacking a particular facet of their training.
Each weapon also has a handy description. As is traditional with WFRP and the Warhammer wargame, swords, hand axes, clubs, maces, hammers and other one-handed weapons have been merged into the ‘hand weapon’ profile. This has the advantage that almost every attack from PCs and NPCs has no damage modifiers or special rules beyond those imposed by the combat system.
WFRP 2nd Edition actually has two sets of rules for armour. The Basic Armour rules are simple. If your armour is predominantly leather, you have 1 point of light armour on all locations. If it is predominantly mail, it’s 3 point medium armour, or 5 point heavy armour if it’s predominantly plate. Nice and simple, and good if you’re not interested in the level of detail where you’re laying mail over leather, or whatever.
Advanced Armour is given as an optional rule (though I’ll always insist on its use when I GM, because it’s not exactly difficult to understand). Each hit location has its own armour value, depending on what you’re wearing there.
Both rule sets are accommodated (with no clashing or confusion) in the careers section, with armour being listed as, for example, ‘Medium Armour (Mail Shirt, Mail Coif, Leather Jack)’. However, you can’t really split the party into Basic Armour and Advanced Armour players, since it’d unbalance things somewhat. On the other hand, NPCs could very easily get away with using the Basic Armour rules while PCs were a little more detailed.
Both armour and weapons have rules for the quality of craftsmanship, although these can very easily be left out for the sake of simplicity. In the case of armour, it’s the encumbrance that’s affected, and high or low quality weapons affect WS or BS.
This chapter also includes rules for starvation and getting drunk, since this is also the page you’ll be on when you’re buying food (or wishing you had) and ordering ales. There’s a mildly amusing Stinking Drunk table as well, but which kicks in only after you’ve gone way beyond your limit.
Clothing is sold by the outfit, listed by quality and function, rather than by the article of clothing, although hats, coats and so on are still available separately. If veteran players want the extra detail, you should be able to just use the 1st Edition clothing price chart.
Flicking through the rest of the equipment chapter (which is taken up with various useful bits and pieces that an adventurer might want to buy, complete with useful descriptions that were missing in 1st Edition), I came across the following: ‘A match is a thin sliver of wood with one end chemically treated to produce a flame when drawn across a rough surface.’
I have no idea when matches were invented in our world, but I’d have guessed some time after the late medieval, early Renaissance period of the Empire. Still, it’s a nice convenience for PCs (or rather, something else to get damp when it next rains or their boat sinks or whatever…).
I was also surprised to find healing draughts in the equipment lists. It just seemed a little high fantasy. Then I spotted that it isn’t magical in any way, and that it requires an apothecary spending up to ten hours per draught to produce, and restores 4 Wounds only on characters who aren’t already at death’s door. So it’s still no replacement for a physician or Shallyan priestess.
Heh heh, there’s a load of prosthetic limbs on offer as well. That seems nice and appropriate, since we’re just moving onto the combat chapter…
Chapter VI: Combat, Damage & Movement
Combat in WFRP is bloody, with PCs and NPCs alike dropping with a single lucky blow.
Initiative order is handled slightly differently than in 1st Edition, with each character (or group of NPCs) rolling a D10 and adding to their Agility. Then it’s the usual countdown style of initiative, with each character taking their turn. The same initiative order is kept for the rest of the encounter. This system (and the reduction in the average elven Initiative/Agility characteristic) gives just that bit of randomness to combat order, yet not so much that it unfairly penalises characters with high Agility.
The main combat system has seen a lot of changes since 1st Edition. Combat is a lot more strategic now, with a list of manoeuvres, each taking a free action, half-action, action or longer (when one action = one round). Aiming is a half-action, as is firing, so you can now aim and fire in one round.
I was initially hesitant when I saw the array of possible combat actions, as I’ve always liked the quick mechanics of a WFRP 1st Ed combat round. On further reading (and playing out a few sample combats), I soon realised that all they’d done is codify things that have become accepted house rules over the past eighteen years of 1st Edition.
You can only attack once in a round, with a standard single attack taking half an action. Alternatively, the ‘swift attack’ action allows you to attack with all the Attacks on your secondary profile. Intriguingly, this specifies that you may make ranged attacks as well, but only with weapons where reloading is a free action. This normally means just the incredibly rare repeater crossbows, but a character with a bow and the Rapid Reload talent, plus multiple Attacks, gets to fire multiple times. This looks as if it could be a good way of increasing the potency of missile combat in WFRP, whereas in the past ranged weapons are often discarded at the end of the first round of combat in order to charge into hand-to-hand combat.
Assuming you hit in combat (which requires a WS or BS test), you reverse the D100 roll to determine hit location. I love the simplicity of this method, which reduces the number of dice rolls per combat round by one.
Damage is determined by rolling a D10, adding your Strength Bonus(or simply the Strength of a missile weapon), plus any bonus given by the weapon you’re using, and then subtracting your opponent’s Toughness Bonus and Armour. The difference is the number of Wounds the target loses.
There’s a major difference here between 1st and 2nd Edition: a D10 is being rolled for damage, rather than a D6. The difference in the number of wounds caused is absorbed both by the increased number of Wounds that characters have in 2nd Edition, plus the higher Armour values (5 for full plate, rather than 2 under 1st Edition).
An effect of this system is that there should be no more of 1st Edition’s ‘Naked Dwarf Syndrome’, where a Toughness 6 unarmoured dwarf could absorb more damage than a human in full plate armour (Toughness 3 + Armour 2). Now, the dwarf’s still at Toughness Bonus 6, while the human’s at Toughness Bonus 3 + Armour 5.
If you roll a 10 for the damage roll, there’s also a chance that you can roll again, and again if you roll another 10, and again, and total up the damage rolled. This is enough to take even the most powerful PCs or NPCs down to 0 Wounds and beyond in just one or two strikes. Combat in WFRP is anything but predictable.
Once a character reaches 0 Wounds, any further damage causes critical hits. These are very messy injuries, resulting in shattered or severed limbs, internal bleeding, arterial sprays, disembowelling, snapped spines and all sorts of gory loveliness. And, new to this edition, there’s the possibility of a critical hit damaging armour as well.
Fate and fortune points can be used to save you from the more horrendous injuries. Fate points are incredibly valuable (effectively extra lives) and are only replenished as a reward for incredibly major plotlines. Fortune points regenerate at the start of each day, and can be used to re-roll failed characteristic or skill tests, improving initiative rolls, gaining extra half-actions or parrying or dodging enemy attacks. In many ways, Fortune points (a new mechanic to WFRP) remind me of Might points from Games Workshop’s The Lord of the Rings skirmish wargame.
The chapter also covers ‘natural damage’, an awkward name covering fire, suffocation and disease. Various ailments are covered, and none of them are pleasant: Bloody Flux, Galloping Trots, Green Pox, Kruts (which the game implies is believed to be spread by sexual intercourse with livestock, hence the social stigma of contracting it), Neiglish Rot (also known as Nurgle’s Rot, a gift directly from the plague god of Chaos), Scurvy Madness, Stenchfoot Fever and Weevil Cough. The effects of each illness are nice and simple, and the diseases themselves range from the serious to minor, meaning that a GM can throw a minor illness at PCs without worrying too much about killing off half the party. Handily, each disease also suggests amusing folk remedies…
The movement and flying rules I’m going to ignore, since they’re the kind of things I prefer to run via narrative, rather than with rules.
Chapter VII: Magic
There’s a brief section to open the chapter about the superstitious (and negative) attitudes that most people have regarding wizards, and the source of all magic in the Warhammer world – the Realm of Chaos (or the more euphemistic Aethyr). Magic splits into eight ‘colours’, known as the ‘winds of magic’. Because all magic comes from the twisting, corrupting source of Chaos, spellcasters risk their lives and souls every time they cast a spell.
Good. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
There are several requirements for a character to cast a spell, chief among them the Magic characteristic. This is a number, usually between one and four, that indicates how the maximum number of D10 you can choose to roll when casting a spell. Ingredients add bonuses to the total, which is then compared to the casting number of the spell in question. Equal or beat the casting number, and the spell is cast.
Of course, it’s not always that simple. If your dice all come up as 1, you automatically fail to cast the spell, and might gain an Insanity point as magical energy sears through your brain.
Even more fun is Tzeentch’s Curse, which only affects arcane magic users (wizards, in other words). Tzeentch, being the Chaos god of change, mutation and magic, gets involved if you roll any double, triple or quadruple results. The spell succeeds or fails as normal, but there are some lovely charts to roll on, with results ranging in severity from milk curdling, through temporary daemonic possession, up to being sucked into the Realm of Chaos.
God, I have to play a wizard in this edition of the game…
Divine spell casters (priests) get it slightly easier, in that they only invoke the wrath of their patron god if they screw up, but there’s still a tiny chance of a Chaos deity deciding to get involved and screw them over.
Just to make things more interesting, there are guidelines for when the GM decides that a location is particularly drenched in magical energy (or when it is parched). These generally take the form of either modifiers to casting rolls, or altering the number of D10s available for casting spells.
There is a selection of petty and lesser magic spells, the latter being common to all kinds of magic users, and all of which are learned separately by spending XP. The meat of the Magic chapter though, comes from the Lores. There are eight Arcane Lores, nine Divine Lores, and two Dark Lores, provided in the corebook, along with the promise of more in a future publication.
Elementalism, Illusionism and Druidic magic are absent from this edition of WFRP, as are High magic and the Skaven and Orcish lores that were introduced in 1st Edition’s Realm of Sorcery sourcebook. Presumably, at least some of these will be amongst the lores in the future publication mentioned, although Illusionism appears to be covered by the Lore of Shadow (see below).
The lores are used in an interesting fashion in the game. It costs 100XP to buy the necessary talent for an Arcane or Petty Magic lore, but this grants you access to all of the spells within that lore. (Of course, your Magic characteristic won’t be high enough to cast the top level spells, with casting numbers in the twenties, for quite a while yet.) Meanwhile, Lesser Magic spells are bought individually, for the same cost. The setting reason for this is that lesser magic spells are not taught by tutors, but learned out of books, which takes far longer and is far more difficult. I suppose that makes a kind of sense.
The eight arcane lores are each named after one of the eight Winds of Magic. Intriguingly, the appearance of arcane wizards tends to change as they advance in their studies, so that they become more and more like their beloved lore. In other words, they become Chaos-tainted mutants. No wonder the witch hunters keep an eye on them… The arcane lores are:
- The Lore of Beasts (Brown or Amber magic, centred on wild animals) - The Lore of Death (Purple or Amethyst magic, centred on natural ending of all things) - The Lore of Fire (Red or Bright magic, or Pyromancy, about blasting things with fire) - The Lore of the Heavens (Blue or Celestial magic, or Astromancy, about reading signs and portents) - The Lore of Life (Green or Jade magic, centred around nature and the seasons) - The Lore of Light (White or Light magic, cast by Hierophants, and all about physical and mental illumination) - The Lore of Metal (Yellow or Gold magic, cast by Alchemists, and obsessed with logic, transmutation and scientific research) - The Lore of Shadow (Grey magic, which is all about concealment and illusion)
The divine lores each centre on a single god worshipped within the Empire and the continent of the Old World as a whole:
- Manann (god of the sea) - Morr (god of death and dreams, and enemy of all those soulthieving necromancers) - Myrmidia (goddess of soldiers and strategists, mainly worshipped in the lands to the southwest of the Old World) - Ranald (god of good fortune, the trickster god) - Shallya (goddess of healing, mercy and childbirth, a pacifist god, with a notable and vehement exception when it comes to the followers of the plague god Nurgle) - Sigmar (the barbarian founder of the Empire and now its patron god and protector) - Taal and Rhya (lord of nature and the mother of the earth, nature gods) - Ulric (god of battle, winter and wolves, a savage alternative to Myrmidia, and the second largest religion within the Empire) - Verena (goddess of learning and justice)
The dark lores use Dark magic, one of two types of magic that use all eight winds at once (the other being the elven High magic). Dark magic is an easy route to power, granting the user an extra D10 when casting spells (discarding the lowest result, but counting all the dice for checking for Tzeentch’s Curse). There’s also a risk of developing allergies, aversions to sunlight, madness, palsies and other side-effects from using Dark magic. The two dark lores are:
- Chaos (the magic of change, destruction, temptation and decay, allows the summoning of daemons) - Necromancy (extending life and conquering death, in violation of natural order, raising the dead, all the cool stuff)
Of course, both dark lores are utterly illegal in the Empire and all other civilised nations, so any PC using Dark magic can expect to be burned at the stake for witchcraft or sorcery if caught.
The chapter also includes brief rules for casting ritual magic, and two sample rituals (a third is available in the sample adventure), and a similarly brief section on magic items.
Yes, you read that right. This is a fantasy roleplaying game with only two magic items in the corebook. As the book says, there are no magical smiths churning out enchanted items. Each individual item has its own powers and history. Most magic items within the Empire are kept under lock and key by the Imperial Armoury, the temples and the Colleges of Magic, as much to stop anyone else getting their hands on them as to keep them for the Imperial military.
(Some have pointed out the discrepancy between this and the wargame. A poster in a recent RPG.net thread pointed out that his 250-man Empire army has fewer magic items per head than his highly experienced 1st Edition adventuring party of five. Another analogy given in the same thread was that a modern-day wargame would feature a lot of tanks, yet a modern horror RPG would probably feature none.)
Chapter VIII: Religion & Belief
There aren’t any rules in this section (assuming you don’t count the narrative-based guidelines for divine intervention, or the lack thereof, in WFRP), just breakdowns on the major religions of the Empire, their symbols, cults, temples, strictures, traditions, as well as punishments for when you break strictures. Additionally, the chapter provides a useful explanation of the Empire’s major religious festivals and folk worship rites of passage.
Briefer rundowns are given of the elven and dwarven gods, along with a paragraph about the halfling aversion to religion (with the exception of Esmerelda, the alleged goddess of hearth and home, who apparently gives them the excuse for the debauched excesses of the Pie Week festival…).
Sadly, the section on forbidden worship is also, with single-paragraph descriptions of Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch, the four Chaos gods. There is, however, a summary of six different types of forbidden cult. Since Chaos cults are the traditional foe faced by adventuring parties in WFRP, this is an excellent resource of seeds for when the GM is trying to put together a distinctive coven, rather than yet another bunch of knife-wielding guys in robes.
Since the Divine magic supplement was never released for 1st Edition, this is probably the most information about the gods any old-time players will have gotten the hands on.
Overall, this is an excellent background chapter.
Chapter IX: The Games Master
This chapter provides the GM with tips on running a game of WFRP. The Golden Rules section has some excellent advice for first-time GMs. There’s a section on how a randomly generated party can be brought together to a common cause, as well as adventure and campaign seeds (one of which regurgitates the entire plot of the award-winning 1st Edition The Enemy Within campaign) and advice on tone, scope and balance between combat and investigation.
Along with the story elements, the mechanics of the game are also the subject of advice, with a large section on Fate points (an improvement on the original game, although it did eventually have an article in one of the Hogshead compilation supplements).
Overall, I’d say this was the best GM’s advice section I’ve seen since Call of Cthulhu.
Following this are the Insanity rules. Yeah, this really isn’t D&D. With a well-crafted and detailed mixture of mental illnesses, mingled with genuine daemonic possession, it massively enhances the grim anti-heroic approach of WFRP. Your PC might become manic depressive (aka ride upon the Wheels of Dread and Pleasure), or go sociopathic (The Beast Within), or develop the Fear whenever he encounters goblins.
In a vast improvement on the 1st Edition’s Insanity sytem, the insanities are described in terms of symptoms more than rules, and have examples of PC behaviour, and the reactions of other people around him (including suspicious witch hunters and fascinated Chaos cultists), as well as GM’s advice on how to describe the world to an insane PC.
You can cure or suppress insanity by means of surgery (dangerous and unreliable), drugs (expensive and unreliable) and magic (rare and incredibly expensive).
Next up is a series of guidelines on using magic in the game, and preventing magic-using PCs from getting out of hand and firing off spells left, right and centre, regardless of consequences. Mentions of how wizards see the Colours of Magic flowing around the real world, how elf wizards (who are unlicensed) may get into serious trouble with the law, and how spellcasters may get lynched by angry mobs if they do anything particularly dramatic in public make for an inspirational read. To end the section, four Chaos spirits are described who some day might appear in a wizard’s mind to attack, torture or madden him.
The chapter rounds off with advice on the rewards you can give to PCs, starting with several methods for distributing XP, moving onto money, equipment, special training, Fate points and increased social standing.
Chapter X: The Empire
The background really kicks in here, with a decent-sized description of the Empire (the early-Renaissance human civilisation at the heart of the game), including its politics, geography, history and cities. Additionally, a rundown is given on the main threats to the Empire’s stability (Chaos worshippers and their daemonic allies, the ‘non-existent’ Skaven ratmen, and the Undead, particularly the vampire counts of the province of Sylvania. Although there’s not much new here for long-time 1st Edition or Warhammer players, anyone only just getting into WFRP will find this chapter invaluable.
More original information can be found in the Allies and Neighbours section, where the other human kingdoms of Kislev, Bretonnia, Estalia, Tilea and the Border Princes are described.
Bretonnia, in particular, has long been a controversial issue for WFRP fans, largely due to the drastic change that the Bretonnia of the Warhammer wargame has undergone. From being a corrupt, decaying, scummy totalitarian monarchy in the 80s when WFRP 1st Edition’s background was set down, it has since been rewritten in Warhammer as being an Arthurian kingdom. Although recently reworked to be slightly less shiny again, as the wargame has gone back towards its low-fantasy roots, it is still shinier than many WFRP veterans would prefer.
The version presented in this chapter is interesting, because it tries to reconcile the two visions of Bretonnia. The aristocracy still tramples on the peasants (“Help, help, I’m being oppressed!”), there is no middle class to keep the nobility in check, and the feudal system is wholly intact. There’s plenty of opportunities for darkness in the modern Bretonnia, if you just know where to direct your PCs – after all, a gang of rat-catchers, thugs, berserkers and thieves aren’t exactly going to be welcome at court of King Louen Leoncouer, are they?
I will be watching for a Bretonnian sourcebook with great interest though. I hope I won’t be disappointed.
Chapter XI: The Bestiary
This is very short chapter, only ten pages in length. It contains only the most basic of monster types: orcs, goblins, beastmen, daemon imps, lesser daemons, mutants, skeletons, wights and zombies, although it does have Thug, Sneak and Chief ‘careers’ to produce more dangerous variants.
This is not necessarily a weakness in the book, since WFRP is traditionally almost entirely based around humanoid foes in the shape of cultists, criminals and bandits. Handily, a lengthy selection of human NPCs are given, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to modify them to the elf, dwarf or halfling. NPCs can also be generated using the character generation system as well, which expands the range of potential NPCs massively.
Horses, dogs, wolves, bears and so on are also detailed.
There is at least one bestiary book coming out soon, which concentrates on the creatures of the Empire and Old World.
Chapter XII: Through the Drakwald
Back in 1st Edition, the sample adventure was almost a dungeon crawl through the Nuln Thieves’ Guild and the smuggling tunnels beneath. Times have changed since 1986, as has WFRP.
Through the Drakwald is a properly plotted adventure set in, believe it or not, the Drakwald forest. The PCs are accompanying the surviving inhabitants of Untergard (sacked during the Storm of Chaos) towards Middenheim, trying to outrun a warband of beastmen.
To complicate matters, one of the townsfolk has a dark secret. I won’t elaborate any further, for fear of spoilerage.
What I will say is that the adventure is well illustrated, with characterful head shots of all the major NPCs, plus a picture of the most sinister wood elves I’ve ever seen. There’s also a couple of handouts, one summarising the PCs’ limited experience of the Storm of Chaos and the other a letter.
Artwork, Layout and Editing
The quality of the artwork throughout the book is, with a few exceptions, excellent. Comment has already been made on the cover, the career illustrations and Through the Drakwald, but special mention must also go to the halfling arsonist in the Insanity section – that crazed, spaced-out expression is simply disturbing. Most of the art in the book is original, although a number of cover paintings from miniatures boxed sets and Black Library novels provides excellent illustration, particularly the Bretonnian men-at-arms on page 126. A lot of the art is dark and disturbing and conveys the mood of the WFRP world perfectly.
On the downside, there’s a couple (but only a couple) of pictures that look as if they were CGed, which I always think looks wrong in a fantasy game, and in at least one case appears to be blurred. Of course, artwork’s entirely personal opinion.
The page layout of the book is perfectly functional. The book is entirely in colour, with pages a kind of parchment colour. Every page also has a pseudo-Bayeux border that features various orcs and dwarfs and weapons, in the artistic style of the time of Sigmar. The same border repeats throughout the entire book. It would have been nice to have these borders change depending on what chapter you were in, but you can’t have everything, can you?
Tables are numbered to ease cross-referencing from the rules text (though all tables are close enough to the relevant rules).
I’ve spotted a few editing oversights (missing ‘of’s and so on), but nothing jarring, and certainly no chopped sentences, ‘see page XX’ errors or anything like that.
Overall, I’d say the book is extremely well put together.
Conclusion:
Well, I’ll have to be honest and say that it would take a hell of a lot to make me mark this game poorly. Even so, I feel that the mark I’m giving it, 5 for Style, and 4 for Substance, is well deserved. This is a high quality product that, although not perfect (hell, even Unknown Armies wasn’t perfect), doesn’t lose any marks on Style. The only reason I’m dropping a mark on Substance is because, although the rules seem to have solved all the major flaws in the original edition, I’m not as yet 100% convinced that the actions/half-actions system is the most elegant way of presenting the WFRP combat system. Maybe I’ll change my opinion once I get a couple of games in.
I get the feeling that GW and Green Ronin are trying for an entry level RPG, angled towards the current Warhammer crowd, but perfectly willing (and able) to draw in anyone else as well, particularly those wanting a fantasy RPG that’s kind of off-kilter from the standard assumptions of the genre.
The dangerous magic system and the emphasis placed on the scarcity of magic items in the setting may alienate some existing roleplayers (particularly those coming across from something as magic-saturated as D&D), but shouldn’t disappoint newcomers because there should be enough flashy special effects to impress them.
Some time over the next few months, I’ll be starting The Enemy Within, updated to fit into the post-Storm of Chaos setting, and I’ll gladly use this new edition of the first roleplaying game I ever bought.
And maybe I should try redoing that sourcebook proposal as well…
Style 5 Substance 4
