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When Warhammer FRP first appeared in 1984, it provided a darker, grittier game than Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Instead of the middle-ages, Warhammer was set in a vaguely Germanic rennaisance-era world. The standard dwarfs and elves were present but rare. Few characters wore armor because gunpowder weapons had made them obsolete. Characters progressed through “careers” instead of levels. Combat featured extremely gory critical hit charts which left characters missing eyes and limbs. Magic items? None to speak of. Ground-breaking adventures such as “Shadows Over Bogenhaffen” and “Power Behind the Throne” focused on mystery solving and role-playing over combat.
The new iteration of Warhammer is a dazzling achievement in terms of its presentation. The artwork which graces the cards and books is simply stunning. The custom dice are intriguing and the system for task resolution is very original.
Sadly, that’s where my praise has to end. Like a summer Hollywood blockbuster, Warhammer looks great but contains little in the way of substance. It’s an expensive, beautiful redesign of something that worked well in the first place.
This review is not the most timely but I wanted to take my time getting to know the game and its system before passing judgement. Although I did not personally play-test the game, some members of my regular Warhammer group did on our “off” weeks. Much of their feedback is positive and I’ll include some of that feedback here. Taken as a whole, however, Warhammer is a resounding disappointment.
Overview of the Componants
The game costs $100. This is what you get: 1. Core rulebook. 2. “Tome of Blessings”: a book about priests and their spells. 3. “Tome Mysteries” : A book about wizards and their spells. 4. “Tome of Adventure”: A book about how to design scenarios, including a sample. 5. Lots of Custom Dice 6. Characters cards. 7. Action cards 8. A pile of custom dice. 9. Lots of little cardboard doodads (tokens, mostly) to keep track of stuff.
The art and presentation are undeniably terrific. For $100 you’re getting a lot of stuff. If you bought every D&D book they’d cost you way more, so you get lots in terms of value. That is, if you value stuff. But I’m not sure that stuff will help you run a better game.
The Task Resolution System
Warhammer’s innovation is custom dice. Instead of rolling weird looking 10 sided dice, new Warhammer has us rolling weird-looking picture dice. Whole handfuls of them. These include:
Purple “Challenge” Dice: Represent how hard stuff is to do. Blue “Characteristic” Dice: Represent how Green “Conservative” Dice: represent “low risk, low reward” situations> Yellow “Expertise” Dice: How good you are at a particular skill. White “Fortune” Dice: Good luck. Black “Misfortune” Dice: bad luck. Red “Reckless” Dice: represent “high risk, high reward” actions.
The dice work like this: you use strategy and your characters’ stats to build your “pool” of dice. The GM adjusts the difficulty by tossing “challenge dice” into the pile. Then you roll, count up and compare all the pictures. If you get enough “successes” you succeed.
My initial impression was that while the custom dice are cool-looking, they do the same thing traditional percentiles or a single 20 sided die will do. The dice, no matter that is printed on them, tell you only two things: 1. Did your character succeed or fail? 2. How well/badly?
So the question is, do the picture dice do those things better than traditional dice? It seems to me that scooping up handfuls of dice and then sorting through them would be a bit time-consuming. So I turned to my play testers. Their thoughts: (GM) “I like the dice. If the GM is organized it’s quick and eliminates the need to constantly refer to charts.” (Player) “They’re OK. I’m indifferent.” (Player) “They do the same thing a 20 sided does, only it takes longer.”
So my impressions were confirmed. While reaction to the new dice is not negative, I’m not sure it’s worth the $100.00 it will take to convert your Warhammer 2nd Edition game to 3rd edition. The custom dice remind me of the Castle Falkenstein RPG, which used a deck of cards to adjudicate combat instead of dice. It was different, but not necessarily better.
Characters
Many of the traditional Warhammer anti-hero character archetypes are preserved. You can still be a trollslayer or a bounty hunter but many of the non-combat oriented careers such as “beggar” are omitted. This isn’t a flogging offense but demonstrates how this version of Warhammer is geared more towards combat than talking to people. Again, the artwork which accompanies the characters cards is outstanding.
The Tome of Adventure
3 of the books are dedicated to rules. Book 4 is the "Tome of Adventure" which tells us how to design scenarios and gives us monster stats. It also features a sample scenario called "An Eye for and Eye" which illustrates Warhammer's continuing problem: lack of good, original, support material.
"Eye" is set in a remote hunting lodge. The nobleman who owns it hires the characters to spy on and investigate his staff. The scenario is indicative of modern scenario design: lots of background and expositional material the players will never learn, to wit: --the owner’s brother in law is mentioned by name but he’s not in the scenario. --the wine cellar contains reisling, presumably in case the characters want to know what vintage best compliments their venison. --we learn the entire life story of a guy who’s trapped in a magic painting, but who has no chance of him ever getting out!
What could have been cut down to a 3 page scenario is stretched out to 30 pages, which will take 4 hours to play, max.
The mystery features such heavy-handed contrivances as a note being passed and dropped by an NPC so the PCs can find it (this, mind you, is happening in a world where servants are typically illiterate). Since the note is only three words long, I don’t know why it needed to be written and not simply whispered into the servant’s ear. Then there’s the bad guy with the mysterious, unexplained head bandage. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I ever ran this scenario my PC group would have that guy pinned down and his bandages ripped off within 5 minutes of meeting him, quickly solving the “mystery“.
“Eye” relies on old warhammer tropes such as marauding beastmen and a chaos cult who want to complete a (surprise!) heinous ritual. If successful, the cultists summon a demon which will eat everyone, including the cultists themselves. This raises an important question: Why? Why does anyone want to worship a dark god that will destroy them? What do the get out of it? Old school warhammer scenarios like "Shadows Over Bogenhaffen" explained that stuff but subsequent scenarios have failed to do so. Cultists now have rituals just because...well...because they're, cultists that's why! And every time the character show up…wouldn’t you know it?…coincidentally the cultists are on the verge of summoning something! Yet again.
Warhammer 2nd Edition suffered from the same lack of support/ originality problem. The subsequent Ashes of Middenheim was a lackluster affair, a trend the designers of this new addition seem determined to follow. It’s amazing to me that the best Warhammer adventures to come out since the original “Enemy Within” Campaign have been written by amateurs for contests (search out Noblesse Oblige--one of the best RPG scenarios I’ve ever read, for any game). The pros seem to re-hash, reprint and re-package the same 10 Warhammer scenarios (please…please don’t print another version of A Rough Night at the Three Feathers. I beg you in the name of all that’s holy.)
In an interview for RPG.net Warhammer head designer Jay Little remarked that his first introduction to RPGs was the 1981 “Red Box” Edition of D&D. Me too. That version included a basic scenario called "Keep on the Borderlands" which comprised enough material for at least a dozen play sessions. I don't know why Mr. Little and Fantasy Flight didn’t follow that model for success: give consumers several short, high-quality scenarios to get them hooked. That will fuel future sales. Warhammer, like most RPGs today, spends 90% of the text describing a system instead of scenarios. Big mistake.
A Shift in Tone
Finally, this new Warhammer seems to be a departure in tone from the old. It’s more similar in tone to Warhammer Fantasy Battle than Renaissance-era Germany. Example: here Emperor Karl Franz is described as riding into battle riding his mighty war griffon. The original Enemy Within Campaign depicted Karl Franz as an ineffectual leader in poor health, struggling to hold his rapidly deteriorating empire together. Old Warhammer featured gritty anti-heroes struggling to survive a grim world of perilous adventure. New Warhammer features powerful heroes in an epic fantasy setting resembling a slightly darker version of D&D.
Even players who like this game would be hard pressed to say that it feels like the original.
Bottom Line
I'm not out to bash Warhammer because it's new. The 2nd Editon had flaws. I’m not opposed to the concept of an overhaul. I'm not opposed to the picture dice. As a matter of fact, I’ve used location dice (arms, torso, head, etc.) in my Warhammer game for years. But the 2nd edition system worked fairly well and I don’t see what a GM has to gain by paying $100 for a newer system that doesn’t measurably improve play.
Sure, Warhammer gives you lots of cards, tokens and custom dice. But are these things neccessary for a good game? I think not. Warhammer is beautfiul looking but short on substance. It's the trophy-wife of RPGs. Now, if you’re bored by your old weird-looking dice and want to swap them for new weird-looking dice that do the exact same thing and you have $100 to blow, go buy Warhammer 3rd Edition. If you like a “grim world of perilous adventure”… well, there’s always the 2nd edition (and it may be on sale!).
A sad thumbs down.
