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And he was dead right. WFRP is one of the old guard. Created in 1984, it is esoteric, unique, strange and wonderful, doing things that no other RPG had done before or indeed has done since. It is also somewhat broken and rather confused, even for its time. Yet it also one of the most popular RPGs ever: the highest selling non-American RPG ever made, played continuously across the last twenty years, without ever once releasing a new edition, a game with legions of passionate, devoted fans, and not just because of the popularity of the wargame. And many of those fans believe that some of the broken things are part of its genius, its charm and certainly part of its popularity. So how do you fix something so loved, preserving all the strangeness and charm but making it work properly? How do you take one of the oddest items in roleplaying history, and make it into a modern game?
But Chris Pramas has proved it can be done. He has indeed produced a new WFRP, completely refreshed for the modern age, but so rich in the ancient spirit of WFRP it’s a wonder the pages aren’t soaking with mud, blood and nightsoil.
(Note: that was just a metaphor. If they are actually soaking in any of those, you should consider changing game stores. Indeed, you should find your copy to be extremely attractive, with beautiful art inside and out – a very attractive package.)
The thing about all this dripping, of course, is that the old edition really wasn’t always as grim and perilous and atmospheric as it wanted to be, nor as many of its fans wished it was. Oh, it tried hard, and succeeded at many points, but it wavered in others. In many places, it remained very reminiscent of hack-and-slash D&D, consciously and deliberately so. In others, it collapsed into silliness under its eccentricities. It was very combat focussed, but also full of useless fops, who only found a place when The Enemy Within campaign explained that darkness didn’t only exist on the battlefield. And it could never really decide if it was a game of swashbuckling and puns, or blood and horror, with later writers each pulling it each way.
Not any more. This is a WFRP that knows exactly how dark it wants to be, and plays it to the hilt. Where the first edition’s world was capricious, it is now cruel, and where it was misanthropic, it is now damning. Don’t get me wrong though, the humour is still there, it’s just more subtle, and it is less a part of the rules. You won’t, for example, roll up a career as a bawd anymore, or making fun of the uselessness of Halflings, or enjoying your collection of hats as a Charlatan. The insanity rules are now bleakly realistic, Witchhunters are about as funny as McCarthyism and every peasant seems to grate under the harsh inequalities of the feudal system.
Probably the best example of the darker tone and how clearly it comes out is in the opening fiction. In the first edition, we had a fairly bog-standard story describing a fairly bog-standard dungeon crawl - nothing that could not have happened in D&D. The new edition begins with a fantastic story of terrifyingly savage combat, insanity, grief and physical and spiritual desolation, all painted with sickly realism by a very talented author. I shuddered to read it, which hasn’t happened since the opening fiction in Call of Cthulhu. The main character is an ex-cobbler, who fights hideous beastmen in the devastated ruins of his hometown, for the sole purpose of finding his dead father’s shop and his cobbling tools so that he can make shoes for the desperate refugees who live in the shanty town below. First edition was only occasionally this grim, but even when it was, it wasn’t this scary.
This is partly because of something called the Storm of Chaos, an event that I’ve never heard of but all the players of the wargame are talking about. It seems that some huge armies of Chaos have invaded recently, and plunged much of the north into war. They have been turned back, mostly, but where the old edition presented a world enjoying centuries of peace and becoming complacent as a result, this is instead a world that has just suffered an invasion of Napoleonic proportions, and is still living under the constant shadow of war. The old WFRP was about the insidious powers hidden behind success and skulking in the shadows beyond the torchlight; the new one has the hordes of chaos but a day’s march away, your father’s blood still staining their blades.
Indeed, this is exactly the setting of the included adventure. Compare that to first edition’s Oldenhaller Contract, which was shadowy intrigue amongst crime wars.
All that said, though, I must stress again that there is much fun to be had and funny to be found here. And there’s still academic and criminal folk to play. The Rat Catcher still has a small but vicious dog. The streets of Altdorf are full of drunken students, guttersnipes, bad actors and quack surgeons. Chaos cults lurk behind courtly powers, the church and the state play endless political games and the halfling’s pies will send you galloping to the privy. In fact, all halflings now seem to resemble Terry Pratchett’s Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, which is just one of the many Discworld influences on the new book. Granny Weatherwax appears in the adventure, the colleges of magic are much like the Unseen University, and there’s a brief mention of a guild of assassins. No word of the clacks – I mean signal towers – we saw in Enemy Within, but they’ll probably be coming. Considering that I’ve been saying for years that WFRP is effectively a Discworld RPG, this was a nice touch. And it adds to the humour, as does the use of “Withnail and I” quotes to explain the different levels of delirium on the Stinking Drunk table.
So despite the slightly darker tone, this is still the WFRP you remember. It’s not that things have changed, so much as been expanded on. Halflings are the perfect example: they are still mostly useless, annoyingly cheerful pie-obsessed weirdos. Only now, they also make rude hand signals wherever possible (for more comedy), are feared to carry the dreaded Stenchfoot Fever (for added grimness and/or comedy) AND - because they share a border with the vampire-haunted Sylvania – are also primed for kicking ass (for more perilousness, and playability). In the old WFRP, you were often forced to choose between being funny or being grim – and most people went for grim because that was the only way to get combat advances. Now, you can be both at once! Yes, you’re still a useless, cheerful, pie-obsessed weirdo, but now you’re also a useless, cheerful, pie-obsessed ZOMBIE-KILLING NINJA.
And I, for one, welcome this.
Alright, enough about tone. Let’s talk about what this game actually IS, as opposed to what it has come to feel like - not least so those new to it can understand.
For those who don’t know (and if you don’t, then the Games Workshop promotional stormtroopers are probably hunting for you as you read this), the world of Warhammer is the setting for Games Workshop’s flagship fantasy wargame, now called Warhammer Fantasy Battles. It is a late medieval/early renaissance world, enjoying the virtues of gunpowder, rife with politics, intrigue and a squabbling middle-class, and teetering on the edge of science, humanism and exploration. Indeed, the main area of land that is used is called the Old World, as the New World has just been discovered.
The world – much like Pratchett’s Discworld – borrows heavily from the real one. The Empire, largest nation in the Old World is something like the 16th century Holy Roman Empire, with neighbours Albion, Brettonia, Norsca, Estalia, Tilea and Kislev approximating England, France, Norway, Spain, Italy and Russia. The similarities are not just lazy short-cuts however. They make the world seem instantly familiar, but they are different enough to remain interesting, and fantastic enough to be easily adjusted to whatever plot you require.
Also familiar are the elves, dwarves and orcs you’ll find here, and again, they’re a nice coupling of instantly understandable yet with their own little quirks. The elves like the forest and use bows, the dwarves live in the mountains and like axes, but (again, much like the Discworld) this is used to extrapolate some fun and interesting cultures for them. The end result is a world extremely easy to learn about and feel at home in, much like Tolkein’s Middle Earth, but where Tolkein drew from mythology, the Old World draws more from history.
Indeed, it is the grounding in fairly realistic historical sensibilities (and references) that has always been one of the greatest strengths of WFRP. This is due in no small fact that it was created by British authors – ie people who actually know something about medieval history – and it is good to see the colonial Pramas not dropping the ball here. Of course, he’s aided in this by his decision to preserve as much of the old mechanics as possible, for the grim and realistic world was ground into every inch of the mechanics.
The first example of this is random chargen. We’re going to take a little break now. Join us again when you’ve stopped screaming and frothing at the mouth.
Okay then.
Yes, random chargen, and what’s more, excellent random chargen. Characters are built on eight attributes, a whittling down of the old profile to just the essentials: Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower and Fellowship. The prominence of the first four point to the wargaming origins of the RPG, but WFRP has never shied away from that or tried to pretend it was anything other than what it was. All of these rolls are made with 2d10, with a base added depending on your race: Dwarf, Elven, Human or Halfling. To make a test, players must roll under the attribute’s value on d%. All mechanics in the game work on this central mechanic.
Attributes can have a fair spread, but nothing can really cripple you or advantage you unfairly – in WFRP, it is not so much who you are as what you do that matters. So the next roll is on the careers table, to pick your starting career. Want to be a mercenary? TOUGH NOOGIES! In WFRP – the game and the world – you can’t simply walk into the career you want. Life casts you in whatever lot it chooses, and you must work from there.
Or, you can just pick the career you want. That’s a new optional rule, letting you choose how harsh you want the world to be.
For those who don’t know, WFRP doesn’t use classes. Characters rather have Careers, indicating what they do when they aren’t adventuring. This provides them with a list of abilities with which they begin the game, and a list of stat increases. Each increase costs 100 XP, and when you collect all your increases, you can go onto your new career. This is a huge part of the heart and spirit of the game – characters strive not just to acquire XP and money but to use that to advance into game mechanic concepts that have literal, in-setting analogues. No more going from a thief level one, to a warrior-thief 5/4; instead you’ll be born a simple Thief, steal from the wrong person and become an Outlaw, rise to Outlaw Chief and then sell your stealthy abilities as you become an Assassin. What’s more, since you have to purchase the trappings of your new career before you can move into it, WFRP remains the only fantasy game where you go dungeon crawling in order to pay for med school.
For those who knew it and loved it from first edition, the career system is back in all its glory. But the list has been completely revised and re-organised. Some of your favourite careers may be absent (Muleskinner, Herbalist) or approximated (Beggar is close to Vagabond) or encapsulated under a larger heading (Baud and Gambler are now part of Rogue). Some will also be horrified to find that there has been much done to balance the careers. Some are still better than others (Bounty Hunter is great, Peasant is pretty awful) but there are not total munchkin options, nor horrifyingly pathetic ones. And for all the ones we lost, we gained some fantastic new ones: Barber-Surgeon, Bailiff, Camp Follower, plus a whole host targeted for specific races (like the elven Kithband Warrior) or nations (like the Kislevite Kossar). Yes, the balancing of careers sucks some of the atmosphere out, but as you can still get something depressingly dull or lower class or simply miles from where you want to be, the cruel vagaries of fate are well preserved. And when it comes to atmosphere, the new list is just bursting with it, and without having to use annoyingly disbalanced mechanics to do it.
Previously, Careers were broken down into very general classes (fighting, academic, rogue, ranger) but no longer. You can now move into any beginning Career you wish, regardless of type, assuming you don’t like any of the proscribed Career Exits. Of course, doing that will prevent you from getting into the Advanced Careers, which is where the real power lies. Assassin is no longer quite the munch-out it once was, but again, the new list is full of atmosphere and cool options. So not only do I want to play every one of the sixty Basic Careers, I want to try out all fifty of the Advanced ones too.
The other new twist to the Career system is that all stat increases are now in 5% increments rather than 10. This slows down progression, meaning you’ll end up with fewer career changes over a campaign, but it also means you’ll get more increases out of each career. It doesn’t change the fact that the real virtue is in acquiring new skills and talents.
In the old game, these were just skills, which made it sound like you could go to school to learn how to have Excellent Vision. Now, these have been split into Skills and Talents, which removes all confusion - except for the fact that you can become Warrior-Born at any point in your life, or go to school to learn better Perception. But I think it just wouldn’t be Warhammer if the Skills and Talents made perfect sense.
The Skills/Talents split is more than just cosmetic. Skills, as with the old game, are binary: if you have them, you can perform appropriate tasks with a successful attribute roll. Talents simply modify those attribute rolls in some or all situations. So instead of Silent Move (Rural) and Silent Move (Urban), we have the Skill Silent Move, and the Talents Rover (+10% to Silent Move in the wild) and Alley Cat (+10% Silent Move in cities). This is a wonderfully elegant approach.
Other changes to the skill system are equally elegant touches. To avoid the problem of doctors with low intelligence scores, when you acquire a skill a second or third time, you can raise your attribute tests for that skill. To remove the whole issue of “Risk tests”, there is now a list of Basic and Advanced skills, and those without a skill can still attempt Basic ones. With these simple rules, the binary skill system is retained, preserving the heart of the careers system, but now it all works – and works elegantly to boot.
The first few chapters detail chargen, the careers and the skills and talents. As the careers cover over 60 pages in a 250 page book, you can see that the rules are presented fairly economically – they are direct and to the point, and make getting into the game very easy. Indeed, although the back of the book says that chargen takes “under half an hour”, I found it extremely difficult to make it take less than five minutes.
After this beginning we get an equally economical chapter on weapons, armour and equipment. A good range of stuff is listed, including many day to day items that don’t have much to do with adventuring. This is good because it gives a glimpse of the day to day workings of the empire, and a sense of its economics, which is vital in a game where making a crust is often as important as making a saving throw – yet it again, it is economical, listing a few examples of things instead of every single type of hat you might buy.
Weapons remain as they did in the old edition, only now damage is d10 plus strength bonus instead of d6, with Wounds (the game’s hit points) being approximately doubled to take account for this. Specialist weapons have been reorganised and streamlined too. Armour now stacks and is thus improved – leather gives you 1 point of protection, chainmail 3 and plate 5. You can use these generalisations for simplicity, or go back to the old style of piecemeal armour, which is far more fitting to the setting. Expect warriors to wear leather jerkins, platemail greaves and a saucepan on the head – if they know what’s good for them, that is. And find some rich corpses to loot, of course. Saucepans are very hard to come by.
Next we have the combat chapter. Combat is the second most altered portion of the game, after magic – but again, the elegant core of the first edition is thoroughly preserved.
For the newbies, combat works as follows: if your attack hits (roll under your Weapon Skill or Ballistic Skill to find out), you roll a d10 and add your Strength Bonus (usually 2-4). Your opponent subtracts his Toughness (also 2-4) and any armour they are wearing, and any remainder reduces their Wounds (8-12 for starting characters). When your Wounds hit zero, all subsequent blows cause Critical Hits. Light critical blows can stun you, knock your weapon away or sprain your wrist. Hard blows can sever limbs, shatter bones and generally ruin your day. The stunning effect is that, thanks to the Wounds buffer, combat can go a few rounds without amputations, but any experienced WFRP warrior cannot help but end up with an eyepatch, or a dicky knee or a bloody stump for an arm – or maybe all three.
Which, in a nice side benefit, also makes this perhaps the greatest system ever for playing pirates.
So what’s new here? Chiefly, and in a nod to d20, every action is now classified as a free action, a half action or a full action. Your standard attack, moving, parrying, drawing a weapon, aiming and so on are all half actions. Effectively, you can attack and parry, but not move, or move then aim, but not shoot. More complicated actions take a full action. The most important example is the Swift Attack, wherein a character may make all the attacks he has listed under his Attacks attribute. This is the only way to get more than one attack in a round, thus removing the unbalancing effect of extra attacks (but still making them very useful!).
The intriguing part of the system is that there are lots of weapons, talents and conditions that change how long all these actions take. Having a shield or parrying weapon ready in your off hand turns parrying into a free action (shields no longer add to armour). Having a certain talent can speed up aiming, or reloading your bow. Players can play around with these before the game, seeking out the best combination of weapons to make the best use of their talents – and the best actions to take during actual combat. Much like d20, they provide tactical choices through limited options, without over-complicating or slowing down the game. Indeed, unless your players are humming and hahing over all the possible manoeuvres (and the game encourages GMs to punish those who do), combat runs thick, fast and brutal.
Yes, indeed, it is still brutal. Wounds still disappear at a frighteningly rapid rate, Fate points are still extremely precious and critical hits are still extremely nasty. Once again though, the critical hit table has been revised, re-organised and streamlined. Now, each type of injury has only ten possible results instead of sixteen, and unfortunately the last one is “make up something yourself”. However, they are now all standardised, so that the level of damage rolled always reflects the nature of the damage taken, and the effects of said damage are more standardised and clarified. Overall, criticals have lost a little of their edge – but not a great deal, and it is the only thing in the game to have done so.
Fate Points can prevent a critical hit, and now PCs also have Fortune Points to allow them to re-roll one attribute test (in or out of combat) or to gain an extra dodge or parry. I haven’t tested these yet but remembering some moments from my first edition games, they seem like a useful inclusion.
The combat chapter ends with details on jumping, leaping and even flying – the latter mostly for mages, it seems. Which is appropriate, because that’s the very next chapter.
Magic was easily the most broken part of first edition. While some of the spells were cool and the structure was interesting, it was mechanically flawed: mages had to spend XP just to have a chance to learn a spell, assuming they ever found a spell book in their adventures. Luckily, none of the old system remains but unluckily, while the new one seems to work fine, it isn’t much to write home about either.
As with the old system, mages begin by learning petty magic, and many of the old favourites remain in these: marsh lights, sleep, protection from rain. Now, however, petty magic is split into Arcane, Hedge and Divine. Hedge Mage is a new Basic Career, for those mages who learn their trade in the wild, as opposed to at a Wizard College like the Arcane mages. Divine spellcasting now works almost identically to arcane, so they get petty magic too, but these spells are less arcane effects and more orisons and boons.
Next comes Lesser Magic. These are supposed to represent spells that most students learn at some point in their careers, and each one must be bought as a separate talent, for 100 XP. These cover the basics of battle magic (magical weapons and armour) and a few other powers but there’s only eight of them so it’s really hard to see why they are here. Especially since most mages acquire Lore Magic at the same time as they acquire Lesser.
Lore Magic is the biggest part of the system, and is available to any magic user rising to an advanced career (typically Journeyman Wizard). This isn’t focussed on learning spells from tomes but rather mastering the art of controlling one of the eight winds of magic. You have animal spells, death spells, fire spells, sky/fate spells, nature spells, light spells, shadow spells and metal spells. Some of these are a little strange, like the Lore of Metal also including any science, including medicine, and the Lore of the Heavens combining lightning summoning with seeing the future, but it’s not a bad spread. And once a wizard masters a Lore, they get access to all the spells in that Lore.
This kind of removes the whole “dusty tome and library” aspect of the system, with mages turning more into elemental channelers rather than eager students. However, you can still study your Lores, and the new system does set up the rather nasty and brilliantly Faustian casting system. Each spell has a number, ranging from 3 (create a glowing light) to more than 30 (create giant fire storms amongst your enemies). You roll your magic dice and try to equal or beat that number. If you do, you have cast the spell successfully. The number of magic dice depends on your wizardly rank – apprentices and hedge mages have 1, journeyman wizards 2, master wizards 3 and wizard lords 4 (the maximum seen in the game).
This number of dice is the only limit on spell-casters: they can cast all day and all night if they want, without getting tired or running out of points, or needing to memorise things again. Which is a nice twist from many games – although one wonders how, in play, this will gel with the idea of WFRP being relatively low magic.
But, as mentioned, this system is Faustian, and there are catches to stop you casting spells willy-nilly. If all the magic dice come up with ones, the spell automatically fails, and the caster may go insane from the uncontrolled magic winds. Thus, magic is very dangerous for novices. Having two or more dice makes this less likely, but here’s the second catch: if you roll doubles, there’s a weird side effect – like milk spoiling or having glowing red eyes. Roll triples, and there’s a painful or inconvenient side effect – a sudden wound, losing your magic power for a day. Roll four of the same number and you or someone you love is probably going to get killed or heavily messed with. Since more dice increases the probability of doubles sharply, players can elect to roll less than their maximum number. This presents second level mages with a choice: roll 2 dice and have a 10% chance of a nasty Chaotic side-effect, or roll 1 dice and have a 10% chance of going mad – and have less chance of the spell working as well.
So as with combat, the question is about what to do when. It is certainly possible for a mage to cast a spell every single round, but every time he does so, he risks some horrifying setback. There’s another choice too: a character can add one more dice of Dark Magic, if they have learnt its forbidden arts. They can then drop the lowest dice to calculate the casting roll, but all dice count towards the risk of a Chaos manifestation. Thanks to this, every roll becomes dramatic, and every spell cast makes disaster more and more likely…
At first glance, many of the low level side-effects aren’t particularly harsh – doubles are likely to make your hair stand on end, or cause strange sounds to echo about. These strike me as the kind of things you always expect to happen around magic, but not really a hindrance. Until, that is, you remember that magicians are only barely tolerated in the Old World, and they are the first target of any lynch mob looking for a scapegoat. So, sure, you might want to use Sounds to distract the crowd, but what if it causes your eyes to suddenly grow bright red, or every horse to shy away from you, or warts to cover your face? People have been burned for far, far less.
Divine spellcasters have less risk: if they roll doubles or triples, they simply anger their gods for a short period of time (and which can still get you killed if your roll badly enough). They also aren’t likely to be burned, and don’t have to pay their guild fees. Which is the way the game preserves the university feel of wizardry: those who attend the school must attend a certified school and pay for their licence to use magic; those who use magic unlicensed will be burnt at the stake. Each of the eight Winds of Magic has its own college, and endorsement from the emperor, allowing for plenty of politics and squabbling, both internally and externally - and the elemental nature of the winds only deepens the division between each group.
Divine spellcasters are, surprisingly, much more harmonious - apart from the inquisitions and fanatic splinter cults, of course. Instead of the Winds of Magic, each Divine Lore corresponds to a major God of the Empire: gods of the sea, death, strategy, battle, luck, healing, nature, wisdom and the empire itself. Again, a decent spread, providing a wide range of powers and rooting the magic into the setting. Religion is indeed an inescapable part of the Old World, and the subject of the next chapter, but first, I better explain what I said previously about spells.
The divine spells are interesting because they’re more about performing the duties of that God – the servants of the God of Death cast spells to preserve a corpse and destroy undead, those who follow the God of the Sea can bless a voyage, summon a waterspout or becalm a vessel. In contrast, the Arcane spells seem far more haphazard: the fire spells include a spell that produces a flaming crown on your head that gives you a leadership bonus. Each Lore seems to have at least one magic missile spell, at least one area effect spell, at least one “affect an individual” spells, and so on, and in order to make each Lore playable, they have sucked all the colour out of them, and nerfed some of their power. In the old system, it was damn tough to be a wizard but if you spent the XP, you had some serious – and reliable – power. Now, you gradually get access to some rather dull spells. Despite the Faustian system, I find little in the system to make being a mage attractive, so we haven’t come too far from the old edition.
There are some redeeming features: the spell which summons a flock of crows to attack your enemies is pretty cool, and teleporting by submerging into the earth and re-emerging elsewhere is neat. But they’re few and far between, and it’s a shame. I suppose this might be fixed with a supplement, but nothing has been announced yet.
Religion, however, IS cool, and has always been the backbone of WFRP, so it is nice to see a whole chapter devoted to it. And it’s not your standard religion chapter either: yes, it does list all the gods, their symbols, strictures and temples, but before it gets to that it spends a good chunk of text talking instead about the cultural impacts of religion. This includes important days of the year and events in a lifetime, how blessings and miracles are viewed, and how the penitent typically punish themselves. Best of all are the examples of how religion affects language, providing some common phrases that folk use involving Gods. These inclusions of argot and idiom pop up throughout the game, in fact, so that most aspects of the setting are illustrated with them. Which to my mind, is the best way to both explain a setting and make it come alive to the reader, and the best way to help the GM convey that to his players. For these alone, the game deserves riotous applause.
Unfortunately, this cultural section is smaller than the lists about each God, which is then followed by another list, only this time with details on each religion. Both types of information are important, but it seems overly expansive, even wasteful of space.
This is also a problem in the next chapter which deals with GMing. Obviously, we need to have some stuff about being fair and giving your players a chance, and how to adjudicate the rules. But do we really need five pages on adventure design when there’s a GM’s pack out there? And while the new insanity rules are inspired in their viciousness and realism, did they need ten whole pages describing all the possible syndromes? Especially since the next chapter, which covers the entire Empire, the game’s main setting, is only twelves pages long, including three pages of maps?
And those twelve pages feel pretty skimpy, and those maps almost useless (the whole Empire map is over the binding so you can’t see a huge chunk of it). We get the basics of the Empire’s history and political structure, a discussion of (most of) the major cities, and a look at the various neighbours of the Empire – Brettonia, Kislev, and so on. What’s strange is that Brettonia’s section is huge while Tilea gets half a column – probably because Brettonia is more present in the wargame than Tilea. The rest of this chapter is filled up with discussions of the empire’s enemies: the rat-men skaven, zombies, vampires and the various forms of Chaos (which is the over-arching, Cthulhu-esque enemy of the setting’s universe).
This sounds fine until you turn to the Bestiary, which features ten monsters, and not one of them is a vampire, despite the huge section earlier discussing this threat. Nor are there any chaos warriors, of which there was a picture. Nor are there any trolls or giants. So what we have is a game where characters can play troll slayers and vampire hunters, in a world where these things are both mentioned in the text and shown in the pictures to be important enemies…but it spent so long telling us that they were enemies that it couldn’t fit in the actual stats for these creatures?
That’s not just a slapdash oversight, nor is it just bizarre page distribution – it’s outright lousy design. A game about troll slayers that doesn’t let you slay trolls is inherently incomplete. And it is not something that would be difficult to fix, or would increase page count – a simple reduction of the more expansive sections could have allowed for two or three more pages of monsters. Indeed, just two pages would have solved this problem. Instead, Black Industries would rather you just bought the Old World Bestiary supplement - which may indeed be fair enough, depending on your point of view.
WFRP does compensate for this incompleteness by providing monster careers (Brutes, Sneaks and Chiefs) to up the ante. Then there’s a section on common animals, including wild dogs and war dogs, which is extremely useful, as my entire Enemy Within campaign with first edition hinged on one savage encounter with an angry guard dog. Even better, we have three pages on that most dangerous of denizens of the Old World – human beings. These make two very nice and very useful inclusions, and ones that almost compensate for the skimpy bestiary. So I can forgive this skimpiness, but I can’t forget, which is why this exquisite RPG is only receiving a four in substance.
And that pains me deeply, especially since the game includes that most sweetest – and rarest - of wonders: an introductory adventure, and a good one to boot. Through the Drakwald is basically a travelling adventure, as the players help escort Storm of Chaos survivors to travel to Middenheim for protection. It’s an episodic tale, but it teaches combat, provides a few interesting NPCs, and tells an interesting tale about one of them, which comes out very naturally as the players go along. Very well done all round.
The book closes with those designer notes mentioned at the start of the review, where Mr Pramas takes us through the steps he used to work out the new rules. It’s nothing particularly enlightening, but it is heartfelt, and it shows exactly why this game is the masterpiece we have in our hands: it was created by a designer with both an incredible fondness for and deep understanding of the game and what it represented to so many, as well as a great gift for game design, which allowed him to preserve all that wonder and charm, yet also fully fix all its problems and inconsistencies.
Which is exactly what he did, and the result is a gorgeous roleplaying game. A game that perfectly captures everything so unique and fun about the old version and makes it all come together into a far more playable whole. A game that bubbles over with cool ideas and cool mechanics, that grabs your frontal lobe and demands to be played. A game that is a joy to read and a delight to use. A game that delivers everything it promises – a very fun time using elegant and inspired mechanics to tell great stories in a fantastically rich gaming world that is every bit as grim and perilous as it should be.
Yes, you have to buy the bestiary. But unlike with the old edition, this supplement won’t be 17 years late – it’s already out, and the support is continuing in a big way. At the end of his designer’s notes, Mr Pramas says they aim to produce eight supplements a year, which is more than the old edition had in its entire lifetime. And thus, he continues, there has never been a better time to be a WFRP fan.
And he is so, so right. The old guard has returned, as strong as if it was just born anew, and ready to finally take its true and rightful place among the gaming ascendancy. We kept the faith, and it came back to us, better and brighter than ever.
Welcome back, old friend. We’ve missed you.
