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Evan Sass, who edited the book, had a much less difficult task. He had to bring in contributions from Ragan and three further authors of "additional material", make sure that there were no howling contradictions, that everything read smoothly and that tricky words were spelt correctly. He fell down miserably on each of these. In the age of spellcheck I'd have thought that even the most negligent or hurried editor might see his job as making sure that setting-specific terminology and words are spelt consistently; Sass couldn't even achieve that.
Since layout and editing were what soured this purchase for me I will at least take you through the first four pages before I break down the chapters (and who knows, they may end by breaking me). The first page gives us the credits, which round up the usual suspects in the history of WFRP writing and GW art and also identify the guilty party; in case you've forgotten, it's Sass. Next comes a table of contents, and across the double-spread from this is a page of Introduction, telling you How To Use This Book. So far, ho-hum, and it's a shame that a sharper editor (or author-designer) didn't say to himself, "Hold on, these two pages do exactly the same thing, why don't we simply cut one or the other?"
Take another look at the How To Use paragraph though, and take good note of the promise that with the help of the book's seven chapters you and your players can make a story that "lives happily in their memmories for long after the game play is done." That's right; "memmories" with three m's. Not even the boring boiler-plate phrases are done competently.
The crying shame is that overleaf on page four there is a superb one-page piece of short fiction that shows us exactly how this writing team can get things right, if they're allowed. Called "Aftermath", it tells us about a group of desperate refugees struggling to recover from the Storm of Chaos; it brings the war right into the thick of daily life, without compromising either the blood-and-guts that has made the war-game so successful or the mud-and-grime that gives the role-playing version its own appeal.
If only this had been moved forward a page or two, I'd probably have forgiven the crappy editing just next to it; hell, I wouldn't even have demanded that one of those two humdrum pages be cut, the fiction piece is that good. It's exhilarating, but coming where it does, only makes us see how boring the preceding pages were and how badly they were done.
Also exhilarating is the River of Echoes. This is a three-hundred mile long river that flows beneath the mountains in the south, to Tilea (pseudo-Italy in this world's vaguely European continent). This is a new bit of Warhammer world fluff to me and it immediately made me want to know more, to read the story where it first appeared, to ride one of the trade barges that bring silks and rice up from Tilea into the Empire, bowing my head in fear and amazement as the river first passes beneath the rock, wondering who could have built it and when - the Dwarfs? the hated, semi-mythical Skaven? some race even more ancient and now forgotten?
The River is grandiose, weird and full of story potential: it's also badly botched. When I say that I "immediately" wanted to unfold its stories and plumb its potential, I have to add the caveat that this was only on page 95, when we learn that the river does indeed run underground for its whole course - which wasn't mentioned when it first appeared on page 6 (by the way, it's only one-hundred fifty miles long on the later page, having dribbled away half its length somewhere in the intervening chapters: but never mind). Not only has lousy, lazy editing held me up for nearly ninety pages in my quest for adventure, but the writing team themselves never seem to have realised what a great idea they have under their hands here.
Another example is the Hochland College of Sorcery. A feature of the Warhammer world (and rules) is that magic is dangerous because it's linked to the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, and its use has only recently become legal in the Empire. On page 26 we are very firmly told that all of the Arcane Colleges are in the capital, Altdorf, and that this is a bone of contention between the Emperor and the Electors of the provinces, who would like to have their own wizarding schools. On page 52 however we learn that there is indeed a College in one of the provincial capitals.
True, it's described as "licensed by the Emperor for the academic study of magic and its theory" so by cricking your neck and squinting, you can make this look consistent, but the Hochland College magicians are explicitly described as spell-slingers - they're not solely theoreticians, and even if they were, wouldn't you love to have heard the argument when the Emperor told his Electors that none of them were allowed Colleges, except for this one guy, who is trusted to have a gun because he's promised not to look for gunpowder? Again, a setting feature that could have been ripe with juicy political and arcane intrigue actually falls apart into an unpleasant pulp.
I'd like to be not entirely negative in this review, even if that's difficult. The chapter on Law, Justice and Criminals is kind of cool, though when I looked at the preview on the Black Industries website I did notice a split infinitive on those pages, and really should have taken that as indicative of the book as a whole. The chapter on Cults is sterling stuff, full of evocative detail and new information on what the cults of the gods do and how they work. Taken together with the Religion chapter in the main rulebook, it covers most of what you need to know in play. Some things are missing, such as more on how the pantheon is inter-related, representative myths and the stories behind feast-days, but these are extraneous details for most actual play. I was impressed by how little waffle or repetition this chapter holds.
The chief offender is the chapter on the Provinces, which disappoints in several ways. Most obviously it offers no maps of the indiviual provinces, just another big one of the Empire as a whole. It's nicer than either of the two maps in the corebook, but not much more use in itself that the earlier map in this here book (can't agree with it on how to spell Drakwald). The big problem with the chapter are the Gazetteers, which are just big tables-for-the-sake-of-tables giving population, form of government et cetera for each province. They are enormously space-hungry, taking up layout which could have been devoted to the maps, and don't actually offer anything in the way of gameable information. I even suspect that the Gazetteers are not complete listings of towns and settlements, because I learnt earlier in the Government chapter that a lot of land is held by the religious cults, but every darn landowner listed here is a nobleman or -woman. So that's incomplete or contradictory, again.
Often the Gazetteer crowds Adventure Hooks off the pages and overleaf, which is a shame because these are beautifully written and deserve more space. There are only two such Hooks for each province, where there could easily have been four or five if filler text such as the Sayings had been cut away. These are proverbs or turns of phrase used by locals, half-a-dozen at most for each province: in play, I suspect the GM will ignore most of them and then be forced to make up lots more for the regions where his story is playing, for fear of making the populace sound like inbred hillbillies with less a handful of phrases. A single-page spread of general Sayings of the Empire would have been much more useful.
Similarly, descriptions of regional accents are awkward to fit into actual play unless the GM is an extremely talented mimic; they also become rather tedious to read by the time you hit the fifth or sixth province. I could also have done without the character stereotypes and the quotes by outside observers for each province, a format which has calqued into RPG supplements from the White Wolf splatbooks and is applied with little thought as to what it really brings to the game in hand.
The Provinces chapter also gives a sample citizen for each, though at least four (out of eleven) actually come from somewhere other than the province under which they are listed. This might be wonderful for illustrating the upheaval of an Empire settling down from a major war, but doesn't actually achieve what it purports to do and does make me ask why these NPCs couldn't have been collected into a different chapter or appendix. There are two appendices, one giving new careers (three Basic, five Advanced) and another giving regional variations for character generation (it tweaks the random Talents for human character).
There is also a chapter on Forbidden Cults and an adventure, which pointlessly reproduces the sewers map from the old "Shadows over Bögenhafen" supplement, even though there is nothing in this new yarn that might send adventurers down there. "Ill met in Bögenhafen" is actually rather a good adventure, but it was irksome to see half a page filled up with a junk map when even a random rumour table would have been a better use of space. Given how much space and how many opportunities were wasted elsewhere in the book though, none of us should be surprised: I just hope that the authors feel at least a little let down.
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