I've been sent issue 24 of what I expected to be a little fanzine, but which is most certainly anything but. This is no hand folded affair of A4 photocopies and token fees to cover the use of someone’s brother's inkjet. Issue one, as their website (www.warpstone.darcore.net) will tell you, may have been "A5 size and put together on the kitchen table", but things have changed since 1996. This is 80 pages of serious, nigh academic attention to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, with many of the production values you'd expect from an enthusiast's magazine in a much less specialised arena. Warpstone swims in a small pond, all genres considered, but it's a shiny fish.
The artwork is simply great, inside and out; ink and line, faithful to the established style of the original books. Superior, arguably, to the illustrations of the new corebook this bumper issue celebrates, the pages are full of lovingly realised faces; Richard Martin's raw pencils in particular make you stop and take time over each. And the wider presentation doesn't disappoint either– a supplement style that gamers can be instantly at home with. The backgrounds, scenarios, cameos and rule additions that follow, sit nicely in this setting.
Issue 24 opens with a weighty, multi-voiced review of the newly published WFRP2 that, although very complete and worthy, would have been a lot more interesting if the various reviewers had actually been in conversation with each other, as the format of the review first suggested. Laid out in script format, like the example session one finds at the beginning of many rulebooks, it suggests an image of these expert eyes huddled side by side around a kitchen table, one hand turning the pages for all while they rant and rave over one another. I read enthusiastically, expecting a considered debate– the back-and-forth banter which would really expose the game, its gems and junk, as it is torn apart by pack-hound rhetoric. But the opinions, though grouped together by context, were garnered in isolation from one another which, unfortunately, allows Wim van Gruisen to say "the book looks stunning... [the] images are just perfect" while editor John Foody contends "the art is a mixed bunch...some illustrations are amongst the worst in WFRP" in the same section with no qualification on either’s part, leaving the reader essentially no better informed than they were. That aside, every inch of the game is examined– though sometimes incongruously– in serious detail by our team of experts. Very serious.
These guys take this game desperately seriously, and it shows in nearly every word you'll read in this whole magazine. The sundry reviews that follow the one for WFRP2 are similarly full bodied and meticulously undertaken by the reviewer in question; such that, while very informative, they are that little bit intimidating in their unfailing sobriety.
The gravitas develops further as you progress: useful articles on border campaigning along the River Lynsk and the career of the Rat Catcher are researched to within an inch of their lives, and make for pretty dry reading; practical, comprehensive, but aloof. They don’t inspire me that this stuff is going to be, well…fun. I mean Rat Catchers! There’s a wealth of chuckle material in that! Hot rat, guv’nor? It’s on a stick. But the only real witticism in a long dissertation comes in the Catcher Slang section, where Baldrick means “a fiendishly cunning plan”. Okay, this is a magazine for gamers, which is scrupulously aware of the sourcebook-lite model it’s gone for and, as such, shouldn’t be driven by gags, but it should still convey…relish. Plus, it’s the gritty humour of WFRP that gives it unique life and energy; by contrast, the majority of materials presented in Warpstone 24 are curiously flat and ponderous for all their painstaking breadth of coverage.
There are livelier pieces; Spies in Marienburg is written with a much lighter hand, driven by human qualities and clothed in wry commentary and was genuinely enjoyable reading for all its encyclopaedic length. The out-and-out Bond spoofing at the end was genius.
“Do you expect me to talk, Geldig? No, Herr Bund. I expect you to die!”
The Gibbet of Diedenhoff is a cameo that is all atmosphere and genuinely evokes the horror of its central image, in its time and in its place and in the most economical of prose.
However, there’s also the much, much less lively. A single short story is included, called Among the Lowest of the Dead– which is still a full six feet short of the depth it needs burying in, quite frankly. A cliché-bloated narrative with tired, stilted dialogue and a genuine lack of mystery or plot. Fiction is an area where sourcebooks themselves must show restraint, and consequently where magazines can make genuinely original contribution to the gameworld they support without interfering with the canon. In a regular periodical it can flow like lifeblood to a setting, so it needs to be A-grade, and this isn’t. (Disturbingly, Warpstone’s contributors’ note says they aren’t looking for any new fiction submissions at the moment– I hope whatever they’ve got squirreled away for future issues has more life in it than this corpse had.)
In the main, though, the majority of the content is tremendously professional; published supplement quality fare, well researched, tried and tested. But it’s still somewhat cold and lifeless. It’s a chill that seeps through the whole magazine and it comes from a slightly skewed editorial focus. There’s too much supplement here. Too much game, not enough gamer – there’s just not much evidence of the community of players that are actually buying the magazine.
Fragments – the section dealing with news from the “world of Warhammer” – is exactly that; small, broken pieces, blown adrift that really should have been given a great deal more attention and coverage. Where are the faces of the fans in this magazine? Their groups, their con stories and anecdotes? Warpstone comes across as being much too serious and mature for such childish content, but without acknowledging its community it does nothing to make a new reader like me want to join it. WFRP itself has had a second coming, and you'd imagine that most of its true devotees would be celebrating and welcoming new acolytes to the fold. In fact they probably were, but Warpstone doesn't seem to have been there to see it, judging from issue 24. Were they invited?
John’s editorial does give mention to this strong community presence in the online forums, so it may be that Warpstone feels pre-empted by this immediacy of communication between WFRP players, removing the impetus for the magazine to publish what might be thought of as old news to the folks on the boards. If so, I think they’re all short sighted. The magazine of one’s hobby should be the highest forum in which to immortalise the events in one’s gaming history; making the reader wish they’d been there and intent on being there next time.
Dwarf Women Have Beards Too, another WFRP fanzine reviewed in Warpstone 24, is quoted as saying of Messrs. Foody, Keane, Oliver and Oldfield’s fine publication that “Inside they still carry on with the same drivel. Foody and the others completely miss the point of what WFRP is about.” I disagree utterly. Warpstone has, at the very least, made me keen to revisit Warhammer Fantasy RolePlay, with top class materials and the necessary hooks to use them. Contrary to missing the point, it has a focussed, almost laser-like understanding of WFRP and, should anybody doubt that, Warpstone can draw you any technical diagram you might like to prove it. But it’s this mechanical, ‘sources-without-faces’ way that it goes about it that I can’t fully connect with. Warpstone has the brains, the looks, and most importantly it has the passion, it just needs a bit more personality to turn it from the stiff and unyielding Kislevian cavalry officer it is now, to the charming, but deadly, Marienburg Mata Hari it could be.
