This is all Solomon VK's fault. In a comment on my previous post he challenged me to imagine Warhammer armies for three British authors - Belloc, Waugh, and Greene - and now I can't stop doing it. So now you all get to suffer the consequences.
The Medievals: Geoffrey Chaucer plays a Bretonnian army heavy on peasants. Thomas Mallory also plays Bretonnians, but his army is mostly knights, and he spends a lot of time trying to reconcile different versions of the game's lore. The Gawain poet plays a weird Bretonnian - Wood Elf allied army which he insists is rules-legal in some edition or other. William Langland plays dwarves, who he says are much better than humans because they're harder workers. The Beowulf poet plays Space Wolves, but it's OK because he only plays 40K first edition, and back then the rules and armies were Warhammer compatible. The whole group sometimes organises tournaments with their rivals, the Welsh Bards, who mostly play armies of Wood Elves and Beastmen and place a premium on freakish and spectacular conversions.
The Renaissance: Phillip Sidney plays Empire. Edmund Spenser plays Empire too, but squanders all his points on knightly orders and High Elf allies, and had to be banned from trying to include a 40K Necron in his Warhammer army list. Shakespeare prefers historical wargaming, with Imperial Rome and the War of the Roses as his favourite periods, but he's got a pretty good Dogs of War army going on the side. Thomas Middleton plays ludicrously murder-happy Dark Elves. John Webster plays Undead.
The Seventeenth Century: Rochester plays Slaanesh. John Donne used to play Slaanesh as well, but then got really serious and switched to Dark Angels. George Herbert has an Ecclesiarchy army. George Etherege has an army of beautifully-dressed High Elves. Herrick collects Halflings. John Aubrey mostly just writes anecdote-heavy blog posts about the good old days of first edition.
John Milton has two collections - Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines. He claims that the Space Marines are his 'real' army and the Chaos Marines are just there to give them someone to fight against, but it's obvious that the Chaos Marines have been painted with vastly greater skill and care than their loyalist counterparts.
The Augustans: Jonathan Swift plays Orcs, carefully converted to look like caricatures of various political figures. John Gay plays Skaven with a heavy emphasis on gutter runners. John Dryden and Alexander Pope only play historical games set during the Classical era: Pope used to play fantasy as well, but ragequit after one too many dwarf jokes. Henry Fielding plays Empire. Thomas Grey plays Halflings. Horace Walpole plays Undead.
The Romantics: Jane Austen has a custom Imperial Guard army, with dashing red uniforms and far too many officers. Mary Wollstonecraft plays Sisters of Battle. William Wordsworth used to play Wood Elves but switched to Imperial Guard after the war started. William Blake plays Chaos Daemons, and sculpts all his own miniatures. Walter Scott used to play Undead, but then switched to historicals, and now spends most of his time obsessively refighting the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge keeps buying new armies and then changing his mind about who he wants to play, leaving behind a couple of half-painted figures and a stack of unassembled models. Percy Shelley plays Slaanesh, and keeps writing interminable blog posts about why they're actually the real good guys. John Keats plays Eldar aspect warriors. Lord Byron plays Vampire Counts. Thomas De Quincey plays Chaos Undivided.
The Early Victorians: Elizabeth Barrett Browning plays Sisters of Silence. Robert Browning plays Dogs of War. Christina Rossetti plays Sisters of Battle, but maintains a secret collection of painstakingly converted goblins and beastmen. Charles Dickens plays Goblins and Skaven, because he can paint twice as fast as anyone else and thus has time to maintain two collections. Alfred Tennyson plays Stormcast Eternals. Lewis Carroll plays Tzeench.
Ann Brontë plays High Elves. Emily Brontë plays Dark Elves. Charlotte Brontë plays Wood Elves. Bramwell Brontë used to play Vampire Counts, but sold all his models on ebay to buy more gin.
The Late Victorians: Thomas Hardy plays Imperial Guard. Algernon Swinburne plays a Dark Eldar army heavy on sexy dominatrices with whips, and makes everyone a bit uncomfortable with just how into it he is. Bram Stoker plays Vampire Counts. M.R. James plays Nighthaunts. Lionel Johnson plays Dark Angels (obviously). Oscar Wilde plays Eldar Harlequins.
The Modernists: Virginia Woolf plays Tzeench. W.B. Yeats plays Wood Elves. Henry James plays High Elves. D.H. Lawrence plays Beastmen.
Ezra Pound plays Space Marines, and obviously loves the Imperium for all the wrong reasons. T.S. Eliot also plays Space Marines, but he always loses on purpose in order to make some kind of obscure moral point.
Showing posts with label Warhammer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Warhammer. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 June 2019
Sunday, 24 March 2019
Echoes and Reverberations 6: Zweihänder
This is the sixth in a series of posts on the various 'dark Eurofantasy' RPGs that appeared in the wake of the abrupt demise of WFRP 2nd edition. Like Shadow of the Demon Lord, Zweihänder started life as someone's attempt to write their own personal 'WFRP 2.5', pointedly taking a completely different direction to the one chosen by FFG for the official WFRP 3rd edition. (The game's author, Daniel Fox, described WFRP 3 as 'sugar-coated' and 'too much like D&D'.) It began back in 2013, as an attempt to create a WFRP retroclone called 'Project COREhammer' on the Strike to Stun forum - but swiftly grew into a game in its own right, boosted by a successful kickstarter campaign in 2016, and in 2018 it won the Best Game award at the Ennies. You used to be able to get a free no-art version of the game from Drivethrurpg, but that seems to have vanished now. I've only read the 688-page (!) free version, so it's possible that some changes have been made between this and the latest (674-page) version of the game.
Zweihänder is basically what happens when someone's document of house rules for WFRP 2 gets so big that it turns into its own game. It addresses all the standard complaints that people have been making (and house-ruling) about WFRP since the 1980s, like 'why are some careers so much better than others?', 'how come a naked dwarf can ignore getting hit in the face with a battleaxe?', 'why does the game have all these stats that barely ever get used?', and the ever-popular 'why do I miss so fucking much in combat'?
In Zweihänder, every career offers the same number of skill and stat increases. The number of ability scores has been condensed down to seven. Numbers are higher across the board, making PCs more likely to succeed at whatever they're currently attempting. The combat and damage system has been rewritten: WFRP's system of wound points and critical hits has been replaced with a series of damage thresholds that forces players to roll on ever-more severe injury tables depending on how much damage they've taken, while combat now involves each character receiving three 'action points' per round, which they can choose to use to move, attack, perform special manoeuvres, and so on. Every monster comes with a sheaf of special rules, D&D 4 style, to make sure that fights will play out differently depending on the specific combatants involved. It all looks like a lot of work to me, but I'm very lazy about these things, and tend to lose patience with combat systems more complex than 'roll WS or under on 1d100 to stab the goblin in the face'. The same 'rules for everything' approach can be seen in the game's rules for social interactions, chases, wilderness travel, and just about everything else. A game that actually used all these rules would be far too heavy for my tastes, but I suspect that most groups will just mix and match, just like in every other RPG.
All of these are the kind of WFRP house rules that I can imagine a group making in the late 1980s, probably shortly after being exposed to GURPS, and represent a continuation of the changes that WFRP 2 made to WFRP 1. However, Zweihänder also includes some more 'modern' elements of game design. The four most important of these are Peril, Corruption, Fortune, and Professional Traits.
Peril is the way that the game tracks stress, fatigue, and all those other negative effects that fall short of actual injury. As you gain more Peril, your skills become less effective; if the Peril just keeps coming, then eventually you reach the point where you're so wrecked that you automatically fail at everything you attempt. I like the idea of this: I've written before about how I wish D&D had better ways of modelling the impact of hunger, exhaustion, cold, fear, and all the other cumulative stresses of the adventuring life, and I like the elegance of rolling them all together into a single mechanic that can cover everything from choking a guy out to someone being so terrified that they become totally non-functional, rather than trying to model them all separately.
What I'm less convinced by is the specific effects of Peril, namely disabling your skill ranks and pushing everyone steadily towards the level of untrained amateurs. If anything, I'd expect the reverse: the guy who's performed a task a thousand times before is precisely the one who's going to be able to perform it under crisis conditions, because even if his mind is currently blank with panic his hands are still going to remember what to do, whereas the half-trained amateur who relies on conscious knowledge rather than muscle memory might manage just fine under normal conditions, but is likely to be useless under pressure. It'd be easy to flip this, though, so that skill ranks were the last thing rather than the first thing to go as the Peril piles on.
Corruption seems to have grown out of WFRP's insanity point system. Anything likely to cause trauma - suffering serious injuries, witnessing horrible events, channeling weird magic, collapsing under a huge mass of Peril, etc - inflicts Corruption points. Using drugs and alcohol to temporarily blunt the effects of injuries, Peril, madness, or diseases also inflicts Corruption, as your short-term remedies exert a long-term toll on your mind and body: a brilliant bit of game design that I wish I'd thought of myself. At the end of every session you roll 1d10 and compare it to your Corruption score: equal or less means you gain 1 'chaos rank', higher means you gain one 'order rank'. (If you gained more than 10 in a single session, you get one chaos rank automatically for each ten points and then roll again against whatever's left.) Ten chaos ranks earns you a disorder. Ten order ranks earns you a fate point.
Where it gets weird is that Corruption also serves as the game's morality system. Corruption points are given out for evil actions, meaning that a PC who keeps being bad will go crazy just as fast as one who keeps getting traumatised, and a PC who does both will go mad twice as fast as either. This really does strike me as an attempt to make the same mechanic do two not-very-compatible things at once: and if I were using the system I'd be very tempted to decouple Corruption from fate points, and to reserve it for actions and experiences that caused mental strain, regardless of their moral status.
Fortune points are just reroll tokens. You can use them whenever you want, but then you have to hand them to the GM to use against you whenever they want. I'm really not sure about this: when I GM, it's very important to me that I try to run the world impartially. I think you'd need a very clear 'gentleman's agreement' between players and GM about whether the GM's tokens were to be used to make the game more interesting or more deadly, as otherwise I can imagine a lot of bad feeling being generated the first time the GM uses a bunch of fortune tokens to turn a trivial injury into a mortal wound.
Professional Traits are unique abilities that each career - sorry, 'profession' - grants to its members. Each profession grants exactly one special ability, and everyone who joins that profession gets it: so all Footpads can sneak attack, all Ratcatchers can speak to rats (yes, really), and so on. Some of these are really, really specific: Investigators, for example, get an ability called 'True Detective' that allows you to have visions, granting you extra clues 'when Intoxicated or under the effects of Deliriants', i.e. you are Rust Cohle. (Hope you didn't want to play any other sort of investigator instead!) I understand the desire to give the professions a bit more mechanical differentiation, but these traits strike me as needlessly narrow, and I probably wouldn't use them myself. I'm quite happy for each profession to just serve as a bundle of skill and stat increases.
Zweihänder's attitude towards its setting is a bit perplexing. It presents itself as a setting-agnostic toolkit suitable for use in any kind of low fantasy early modern setting, including seventeenth-century Earth, but its gods, monsters, and magic system have all been straightforwardly borrowed from WFRP. They're all here: orcs, skaven, Sigmar, Ulric, daemonettes, fimir, zoats, dragon ogres, slann, bog octopi, chaos dwarves, the chaos gods, the winds of magic... the entire Warhammer bestiary and cosmology, just with changed names and slightly modified descriptions. (Even mostly-forgotten oddities like WFRP's gnomes make the cut - as a PC race, no less!) Some of the changes are quite inventive, like the idea that goblins started out as chaos-tainted human children, but mostly they just look as though they've been subjected to tokenistic rewrites for copyright purposes. The bestiary gets most interesting when it goes furthest off-script: I liked its various giant intelligent animals, and I loved the idea of an order of jackal-headed vampire knights who use their long, forked tongues to drink the blood of their enemies. The vast majority of it, however, consists of straightforward Warhammer expies, clearly intended to allow published WFRP adventures to be run using Zweihänder with a minimum of fuss.
The Zweihänder core rulebook also includes an adventure, called 'A Bitter Harvest', which is essentially a rather grim historical adventure in flimsy fantasy drag. (The author even notes that it was inspired by an incident from the Baltic Crusades.) The PCs find themselves stuck in a village as raiders approach: the same raiders who attacked the village years before, abducting all the women and children who were hiding in a cave nearby, and carrying them off as slaves. But all is not as it seems: the leading men of the village actually sold the location of the cave to the raiders in exchange for being left alone, and one of the captured women - who was enslaved by the raider's leader, but has since come to effectively control the warband - now leads the raiders back towards the village in search of revenge on the men who sold them out. The roads have been cut, so the PCs need to find some way of resolving the situation, probably by uncovering the village's true past and leveraging what they've learned in order to buy it some kind of future.
This is a good adventure, filled with a rich tangle of interpersonal relationships, and the moment when the PCs discover what the 'heroes' of the previous battle actually did in order to get rid of the raiders should come as a genuine shock. The parts leading up to the siege are very linear, but the way in which the PCs resolve the main situation is left completely open, accommodating everything from the PCs assassinating the woman leading the raiders to them joining her in her search for revenge. (How often do you see that in published adventures?) That said, I had two issues with it. The first is that this is heavy stuff, much heavier than the standard-issue cultist-whacking that makes up most WFRP adventures. Not all groups are going to be comfortable unravelling a community's history of trauma and sexual violence, especially when there's no cathartic moment where you stab the bad people and make all the problems go away. The second is that, as I've indicated, this is barely a fantasy scenario at all. Supposedly the raiders are orcs (although they don't really act like it), and supposedly the woman has established control over them by dosing their food with alchemical potions, but this is little more than fancy dress, largely irrelevant to the real story. If your group plays fantasy RPGs for stories of magic and monsters, rather than sad stories of human weakness, then this might not quite fit the bill.
Overall, while I quite liked Zweihänder, I felt that it was aiming at a terribly small target market: people who had enough issues with WFRP that they weren't happy to just carry on playing WFRP 2, but who still liked it enough that they weren't prepared to abandon it for Shadow of the Demon Lord or D&D 5 or OSR D&D instead. That seems an awfully specific demographic of players... but, then again, Zweihänder is now an 'adamantium bestseller' on DrivethruRPG, so maybe there are a lot more of them than I thought. If you like the core ideas behind WFRP but want a more balanced career system and more options in combat, then give it a look. But main takeaways from it was that any WFRP-style system would probably benefit from some kind of 'peril track' to record just how tired, hungry, cold, sick, scared, and miserable everyone currently is, and that the world needs more jackal-headed vampire knights with serpentine tongues.
Zweihänder is basically what happens when someone's document of house rules for WFRP 2 gets so big that it turns into its own game. It addresses all the standard complaints that people have been making (and house-ruling) about WFRP since the 1980s, like 'why are some careers so much better than others?', 'how come a naked dwarf can ignore getting hit in the face with a battleaxe?', 'why does the game have all these stats that barely ever get used?', and the ever-popular 'why do I miss so fucking much in combat'?
In Zweihänder, every career offers the same number of skill and stat increases. The number of ability scores has been condensed down to seven. Numbers are higher across the board, making PCs more likely to succeed at whatever they're currently attempting. The combat and damage system has been rewritten: WFRP's system of wound points and critical hits has been replaced with a series of damage thresholds that forces players to roll on ever-more severe injury tables depending on how much damage they've taken, while combat now involves each character receiving three 'action points' per round, which they can choose to use to move, attack, perform special manoeuvres, and so on. Every monster comes with a sheaf of special rules, D&D 4 style, to make sure that fights will play out differently depending on the specific combatants involved. It all looks like a lot of work to me, but I'm very lazy about these things, and tend to lose patience with combat systems more complex than 'roll WS or under on 1d100 to stab the goblin in the face'. The same 'rules for everything' approach can be seen in the game's rules for social interactions, chases, wilderness travel, and just about everything else. A game that actually used all these rules would be far too heavy for my tastes, but I suspect that most groups will just mix and match, just like in every other RPG.
All of these are the kind of WFRP house rules that I can imagine a group making in the late 1980s, probably shortly after being exposed to GURPS, and represent a continuation of the changes that WFRP 2 made to WFRP 1. However, Zweihänder also includes some more 'modern' elements of game design. The four most important of these are Peril, Corruption, Fortune, and Professional Traits.
Peril is the way that the game tracks stress, fatigue, and all those other negative effects that fall short of actual injury. As you gain more Peril, your skills become less effective; if the Peril just keeps coming, then eventually you reach the point where you're so wrecked that you automatically fail at everything you attempt. I like the idea of this: I've written before about how I wish D&D had better ways of modelling the impact of hunger, exhaustion, cold, fear, and all the other cumulative stresses of the adventuring life, and I like the elegance of rolling them all together into a single mechanic that can cover everything from choking a guy out to someone being so terrified that they become totally non-functional, rather than trying to model them all separately.
What I'm less convinced by is the specific effects of Peril, namely disabling your skill ranks and pushing everyone steadily towards the level of untrained amateurs. If anything, I'd expect the reverse: the guy who's performed a task a thousand times before is precisely the one who's going to be able to perform it under crisis conditions, because even if his mind is currently blank with panic his hands are still going to remember what to do, whereas the half-trained amateur who relies on conscious knowledge rather than muscle memory might manage just fine under normal conditions, but is likely to be useless under pressure. It'd be easy to flip this, though, so that skill ranks were the last thing rather than the first thing to go as the Peril piles on.
Corruption seems to have grown out of WFRP's insanity point system. Anything likely to cause trauma - suffering serious injuries, witnessing horrible events, channeling weird magic, collapsing under a huge mass of Peril, etc - inflicts Corruption points. Using drugs and alcohol to temporarily blunt the effects of injuries, Peril, madness, or diseases also inflicts Corruption, as your short-term remedies exert a long-term toll on your mind and body: a brilliant bit of game design that I wish I'd thought of myself. At the end of every session you roll 1d10 and compare it to your Corruption score: equal or less means you gain 1 'chaos rank', higher means you gain one 'order rank'. (If you gained more than 10 in a single session, you get one chaos rank automatically for each ten points and then roll again against whatever's left.) Ten chaos ranks earns you a disorder. Ten order ranks earns you a fate point.
Where it gets weird is that Corruption also serves as the game's morality system. Corruption points are given out for evil actions, meaning that a PC who keeps being bad will go crazy just as fast as one who keeps getting traumatised, and a PC who does both will go mad twice as fast as either. This really does strike me as an attempt to make the same mechanic do two not-very-compatible things at once: and if I were using the system I'd be very tempted to decouple Corruption from fate points, and to reserve it for actions and experiences that caused mental strain, regardless of their moral status.
Fortune points are just reroll tokens. You can use them whenever you want, but then you have to hand them to the GM to use against you whenever they want. I'm really not sure about this: when I GM, it's very important to me that I try to run the world impartially. I think you'd need a very clear 'gentleman's agreement' between players and GM about whether the GM's tokens were to be used to make the game more interesting or more deadly, as otherwise I can imagine a lot of bad feeling being generated the first time the GM uses a bunch of fortune tokens to turn a trivial injury into a mortal wound.
Professional Traits are unique abilities that each career - sorry, 'profession' - grants to its members. Each profession grants exactly one special ability, and everyone who joins that profession gets it: so all Footpads can sneak attack, all Ratcatchers can speak to rats (yes, really), and so on. Some of these are really, really specific: Investigators, for example, get an ability called 'True Detective' that allows you to have visions, granting you extra clues 'when Intoxicated or under the effects of Deliriants', i.e. you are Rust Cohle. (Hope you didn't want to play any other sort of investigator instead!) I understand the desire to give the professions a bit more mechanical differentiation, but these traits strike me as needlessly narrow, and I probably wouldn't use them myself. I'm quite happy for each profession to just serve as a bundle of skill and stat increases.
Zweihänder's attitude towards its setting is a bit perplexing. It presents itself as a setting-agnostic toolkit suitable for use in any kind of low fantasy early modern setting, including seventeenth-century Earth, but its gods, monsters, and magic system have all been straightforwardly borrowed from WFRP. They're all here: orcs, skaven, Sigmar, Ulric, daemonettes, fimir, zoats, dragon ogres, slann, bog octopi, chaos dwarves, the chaos gods, the winds of magic... the entire Warhammer bestiary and cosmology, just with changed names and slightly modified descriptions. (Even mostly-forgotten oddities like WFRP's gnomes make the cut - as a PC race, no less!) Some of the changes are quite inventive, like the idea that goblins started out as chaos-tainted human children, but mostly they just look as though they've been subjected to tokenistic rewrites for copyright purposes. The bestiary gets most interesting when it goes furthest off-script: I liked its various giant intelligent animals, and I loved the idea of an order of jackal-headed vampire knights who use their long, forked tongues to drink the blood of their enemies. The vast majority of it, however, consists of straightforward Warhammer expies, clearly intended to allow published WFRP adventures to be run using Zweihänder with a minimum of fuss.
The Zweihänder core rulebook also includes an adventure, called 'A Bitter Harvest', which is essentially a rather grim historical adventure in flimsy fantasy drag. (The author even notes that it was inspired by an incident from the Baltic Crusades.) The PCs find themselves stuck in a village as raiders approach: the same raiders who attacked the village years before, abducting all the women and children who were hiding in a cave nearby, and carrying them off as slaves. But all is not as it seems: the leading men of the village actually sold the location of the cave to the raiders in exchange for being left alone, and one of the captured women - who was enslaved by the raider's leader, but has since come to effectively control the warband - now leads the raiders back towards the village in search of revenge on the men who sold them out. The roads have been cut, so the PCs need to find some way of resolving the situation, probably by uncovering the village's true past and leveraging what they've learned in order to buy it some kind of future.
This is a good adventure, filled with a rich tangle of interpersonal relationships, and the moment when the PCs discover what the 'heroes' of the previous battle actually did in order to get rid of the raiders should come as a genuine shock. The parts leading up to the siege are very linear, but the way in which the PCs resolve the main situation is left completely open, accommodating everything from the PCs assassinating the woman leading the raiders to them joining her in her search for revenge. (How often do you see that in published adventures?) That said, I had two issues with it. The first is that this is heavy stuff, much heavier than the standard-issue cultist-whacking that makes up most WFRP adventures. Not all groups are going to be comfortable unravelling a community's history of trauma and sexual violence, especially when there's no cathartic moment where you stab the bad people and make all the problems go away. The second is that, as I've indicated, this is barely a fantasy scenario at all. Supposedly the raiders are orcs (although they don't really act like it), and supposedly the woman has established control over them by dosing their food with alchemical potions, but this is little more than fancy dress, largely irrelevant to the real story. If your group plays fantasy RPGs for stories of magic and monsters, rather than sad stories of human weakness, then this might not quite fit the bill.
Overall, while I quite liked Zweihänder, I felt that it was aiming at a terribly small target market: people who had enough issues with WFRP that they weren't happy to just carry on playing WFRP 2, but who still liked it enough that they weren't prepared to abandon it for Shadow of the Demon Lord or D&D 5 or OSR D&D instead. That seems an awfully specific demographic of players... but, then again, Zweihänder is now an 'adamantium bestseller' on DrivethruRPG, so maybe there are a lot more of them than I thought. If you like the core ideas behind WFRP but want a more balanced career system and more options in combat, then give it a look. But main takeaways from it was that any WFRP-style system would probably benefit from some kind of 'peril track' to record just how tired, hungry, cold, sick, scared, and miserable everyone currently is, and that the world needs more jackal-headed vampire knights with serpentine tongues.
Wednesday, 13 February 2019
Echoes and Reverberations 5: Small But Vicious Dog
Back in 2011, Chris Hogan - author of the OSR blog Vaults of Nagoh - wrote a hilarious 36-page free RPG called Small But Vicious Dog, with the aim of combining 1st edition WFRP with B/X D&D. Like many 1st edition WFRP fans, Hogan was openly contemptuous of WFRP 3rd edition, and SBVD plunged defiantly back in the opposite direction to WFRP 3's more new-school, high-fantasy take on the setting. In Hogan's own words:
SBVD is, essentially, a collection of rules hacks for making B/X D&D look more like WFRP. Some parts of it are just B/X in WFRP drag: so Constitution is called 'Toughness', melee attack bonus is renamed 'Weapon Skill', hit points become 'wounds', and so on. The four base classes are Academics (who get magic), Rangers (who can shoot people), Warriors (who can hit people), and Thieves (who can sneak attack people). Each character also gets a Career, which in turn grants them some Trappings and a Career Skill. The combat-oriented career skills, like Dodge Blow, have specific rules effects. The rest just give you a thing that you can do by rolling equal to or less than your relevant ability score.
PCs start with 6 'wounds' (i.e. hit points) plus their initial hit dice, and they also get 'fate points' which act as 'get out of death free' cards, just like in WFRP. They also get one more fate point and the ability to increase one ability score by one point each time they level up, to mimic the way that the stats of WFRP characters rise as they progress through their careers. Hogan writes a lot about how doomed and miserable the PCs should be in SBVD, claiming at one point that 'Nothing better evokes the spirit of the source material that inspired SBVD than making the PCs suffer', but between their fate points and their increasing ability scores and their extra HP (sorry, 'wounds'), SBVD PCs are actually much tougher than their B/X D&D counterparts.
Other parts of the game have also been modified to make them a bit more WFRP-y. Falling to 0 HP - sorry, 'wounds' - means a roll on the critical hit table rather than automatic death. There are some rather clever rules to differentiate weapons from one another, making them more like their WFRP equivalents: so two-handed weapons make you attack last but let you roll damage twice and keep the better option, daggers can be drawn as a free action, firearms ignore armour at close range but may misfire, and so on. There are rules for the various psychology effects from Warhammer, like Frenzy, Stupidity, Fear, Terror, etc. The biggest change is the magic system, which ditches spells per day in favour of a WFRP 2 style system where you can cast as many spells as you like, but each casting carries a risk of (possibly catastrophic) side effects. Further rules cover social status, drugs, disease, medicine, insanity, and hirelings, which gives a clear sense of the kind of material that the game is intended to focus on. The rules only cover characters of levels 1-3, but it would be easy to extend them into higher levels.
The bestiary for SBVD is a bit of a treasure trove, featuring all kinds of mostly-forgotten weirdness from the early days of WFRP, and rejoicing in the now deliberately-forgotten fact that the Warhammer world was once overrun by killer puffins, 'carnivorous laser slugs', and other nonsense. The write-ups of these creatures are often accompanied by jokes about how poorly they've fared in subsequent editions of the game:
Welcome to a fantasy world where the men are Baldrick, the dwarves are punk, and the dogs are small but vicious. Welcome to a world of bawds, grave robbers, excisemen and witch hunters; a place where “Blather”, “Flee!” and “Mime” are legitimate skill choices; and where all material on the insidious threat of Chaos is officially interchangeable between settings.
Hogan's blog hasn't been updated since 2013, but Small But Vicious Dog lives on. You can download it here for free.
SBVD is, essentially, a collection of rules hacks for making B/X D&D look more like WFRP. Some parts of it are just B/X in WFRP drag: so Constitution is called 'Toughness', melee attack bonus is renamed 'Weapon Skill', hit points become 'wounds', and so on. The four base classes are Academics (who get magic), Rangers (who can shoot people), Warriors (who can hit people), and Thieves (who can sneak attack people). Each character also gets a Career, which in turn grants them some Trappings and a Career Skill. The combat-oriented career skills, like Dodge Blow, have specific rules effects. The rest just give you a thing that you can do by rolling equal to or less than your relevant ability score.
PCs start with 6 'wounds' (i.e. hit points) plus their initial hit dice, and they also get 'fate points' which act as 'get out of death free' cards, just like in WFRP. They also get one more fate point and the ability to increase one ability score by one point each time they level up, to mimic the way that the stats of WFRP characters rise as they progress through their careers. Hogan writes a lot about how doomed and miserable the PCs should be in SBVD, claiming at one point that 'Nothing better evokes the spirit of the source material that inspired SBVD than making the PCs suffer', but between their fate points and their increasing ability scores and their extra HP (sorry, 'wounds'), SBVD PCs are actually much tougher than their B/X D&D counterparts.
Other parts of the game have also been modified to make them a bit more WFRP-y. Falling to 0 HP - sorry, 'wounds' - means a roll on the critical hit table rather than automatic death. There are some rather clever rules to differentiate weapons from one another, making them more like their WFRP equivalents: so two-handed weapons make you attack last but let you roll damage twice and keep the better option, daggers can be drawn as a free action, firearms ignore armour at close range but may misfire, and so on. There are rules for the various psychology effects from Warhammer, like Frenzy, Stupidity, Fear, Terror, etc. The biggest change is the magic system, which ditches spells per day in favour of a WFRP 2 style system where you can cast as many spells as you like, but each casting carries a risk of (possibly catastrophic) side effects. Further rules cover social status, drugs, disease, medicine, insanity, and hirelings, which gives a clear sense of the kind of material that the game is intended to focus on. The rules only cover characters of levels 1-3, but it would be easy to extend them into higher levels.
This is all well and good: but at the end of the day, SBVD is very much D&D rather than WFRP. The careers system is a superficial varnish over the class system, rather than being integral to the game as it is in WFRP, and nonhuman PCs don't even get to have careers (or classes). Advancement is still mostly a matter of getting more hit points (as in B/X D&D) rather than improving across the board (as in WFRP). XP also comes from finding treasure rather than completing scenarios, which is a big change from WFRP, and likely to motivate very different player behaviour.
The best thing about SBVD is its gleefully demented take on the Warhammer setting. At the very moment when FFG were trying to convince people to take WFRP seriously as High Fantasy Drama, Hogan was writing things like this:
All dwarves are beer-soaked beards on legs who stop mining only to fight, drink heavily and/or sing about mining. They consider everything they say and do to be SRS BZNZ and nurse a grudge like a Bretonnian nurtures a fine vintage wine. All perceived similarities between Dwarves and Yorkshiremen are coincidental.If you only know Warhammer from its later, more serious incarnations, then this will read like parodic caricature. But here are some extracts from the actual (real, official, canonical) description of the Lothern Sea Guard from 1985:
There’s a 10% chance that any dwarf character created is a Troll Slayer, a kamikaze no-pants dwarf with a big orange mohawk, prison tats, a two-handed axe and a burning desire to ragequit life as violently as possible.
All elves are metrosexual minstrels and archers who fly into fey rages when provoked. The elven ability to lose it in spectacularly violent fashion has been clocked at “Nought to Feanor in 4.2 seconds”. Most PC elves are filthy tree-hugging pseudo-Celtic Wood Elves, although the Sea Elves who hang out in coastal cities seem to be a kind of Elven gap year backpacker.
Rumour has it that the Elven homelands are contested in an endless war between two mighty and ancient factions: the louche-and-arty vs. the darker-and-edgier. The origin of their interminable strife is unknown, although it probably began as a spat over the relative aesthetic merits of art nouveau and gothic revival styles.
The job of Captain of the Guard of Lothern is not a popular one. Few jobs are popular in the Elf Kingdoms, as Elves despise all forms of work. Perhaps it is because of this that important or responsible positions tend to fall to eccentrics. D'roi Haisplinn, Captain of the Guard of Lothern, is a case in point; a neurotic, homicidal maniac. At dusk he can be seen pacing the battlements of the great lighthouse of Lothern, cackling madly and, perhaps, torturing an underling.Hogan's interpretation of WFRP as absurdist black comedy, concerned exclusively with the miserable lives of the poor, mad, and desperate and their comically doomed attempts to get rich quick, very much emphasises one aspect of the Warhammer world over others - after all, high fantasy elements have also been present in the setting from the very start. It does, however, neatly summarise what many people find most distinctive and appealing about WFRP, and acts as a welcome reminder of just how crazy the setting used to be, back before everyone started trying to take it so damn seriously.
The battlecry of this regiment is based up the age old tradition of challenging strangers during the hours of darkness. In Elvish the cry is 'Elo Cailor Gotda Liet', which is popularly supposed to translate as 'Hello, Hello. What's going on here then?'
Amongst Haisplinn's many deeds of infamy the destruction of the 'Halfling House' Inn and rest home, must be one of the basest. Many Halflings were slain, or suffered horrible and embarrassing torture at the hands of the Guards. Haisplinn's only motivation seems to have been that Halflings are short, ugly and have very poor dress sense.
The bestiary for SBVD is a bit of a treasure trove, featuring all kinds of mostly-forgotten weirdness from the early days of WFRP, and rejoicing in the now deliberately-forgotten fact that the Warhammer world was once overrun by killer puffins, 'carnivorous laser slugs', and other nonsense. The write-ups of these creatures are often accompanied by jokes about how poorly they've fared in subsequent editions of the game:
The Bog Devils are monocular amphibian humanoids of evil aspect. These ancient terrors of the wetlands have been driven to the verge of extinction by divisions among their creator gods, and by the inexorable expansion of Ratmen and Dark Elves into theirconceptual nicheterritory
[Zoats] have a long and convoluted history. They originated as druidic defenders of the forest, and then went into space as the shock troops and diplomats of an alien hive race before disappearing entirely. They appear to have vanished into a combined time travel/ret-con portal, returning as fearsome lightning-powered Dragon Ogres. Suffice it to say these guys are weird, a bit confused and not to all tastes.
There's a lot to like, here, but at the end of the day I'm not sure how useful SBVD actually is. As Hogan himself repeatedly points out, B/X D&D and WFRP 1st edition are already pretty similar, which makes it easy to adapt material for one game for use in the other even without a halfway house ruleset such as this one. Rather than an actual game to be played as-written, it's probably best viewed as a collection of suggested house rules and monster write-ups, which people who want to make their D&D games a bit more WFRP-esque can borrow from as best suits the needs of their individual campaigns.
I'll end by quoting Hogan's own list of things to remember about SBVD, which serve as a useful manifesto for the kind of black comedy WFRP spirit that the game embodies:
I'll end by quoting Hogan's own list of things to remember about SBVD, which serve as a useful manifesto for the kind of black comedy WFRP spirit that the game embodies:
1. The world is not fair.
2. The gods hate you, and your suffering amuses them.
3. 90% of people are corrupt, greedy scum. The remainder are vicious fanatics.
4. Everyone has an agenda, sometimes several.
5. It can always get worse, and generally should.
6. If in doubt, Chaos did it!
7. If it appears that Chaos didn’t do it, check harder.
8. Glowing green rocks = bad.
9. There are no such things as Skaven.
Monday, 28 January 2019
Echoes and Reverberations 4: Lamentations of the Flame Princess
If Shadow of the Demon Lord positions itself halfway between WFRP 2 and D&D 3rd edition, then Lamentations of the Flame Princess stands between WFRP 1 and B/X D&D. Its kinship with WFRP is obvious from its seventeenth-century Northern European setting, its fantasy-horror themes, and its focus on PCs as doomed, crazy low-lives rather than epic heroes of legend. WFRP and Lamentations share a common language of evil cults, body horror, and black humour, and many Lamentations adventures could easily be repurposed as WFRP scenarios, or vice versa.
There are, however, important tonal differences between the two games, as Lamentations is much more nihilistic than WFRP ever was. The Warhammer chaos gods are sometimes described as a form of 'cosmic horror', but a comparison with Lamentations shows just how humanistic they really are: they're all rooted in richly human feelings of lust and rage and disgust and ambition, whereas Lamentations mostly deals with completely impersonal cosmic forces that inflict death and suffering either by accident or just because. Chaos is all about the dark side of humanity, and confronting it is about confronting our own willingness to see other people as things to be sacrificed in the service of our own bloodlust (Khorne), pleasure (Slaanesh), survival (Nurgle), or lust for power (Tzeench). The antagonists in Lamentations, by contrast, tend to see people as just so much interchangeable meat. The chaos gods love us: Khorne loves killing us, Tzeench loves fucking with us, Slaanesh loves actually fucking us, and so on. But the beings in Lamentations just really don't care. (Do U?)
This tonal difference has some important knock-on consequences. The default Lamentations adventure pitch is 'get rich or die trying' rather than 'save the innocent from evil'. WFRP characters are plugged into the society around them by their careers: Lamentations characters are mostly assumed to be rootless wandering killers, with few if any connections to other people. WFRP scenarios tend to be human-scale, all about protecting individuals or communities, whereas Lamentations scenarios often include situations that can casually destroy the world, or at least depopulate large parts of it, in order to emphasise just how small and insignificant human lives are compared to the forces they depict. WFRP adventures are often very social affairs, all about understanding the relationships at work within settlements and organisations, whereas Lamentations adventures are usually much lonelier, set in desolated spaces where virtually everyone is already dead or worse. WFRP cultists tend to be driven by warped ambition, whereas Lamentations cultists usually just hate everyone and want us all to die, which makes their scenarios much more chilly and alienated than most WFRP adventures. Whether you view this tonal shift as an improvement or a weakness is going to come down to personal preference, but it means that several Lamentations adventures which seem on the surface as though they would be ideal WFRP fodder - No Salvation for Witches, for example, with its seventeenth-century setting and its demon-summoning coven - actually turn out, on closer examination, to be driven by very different themes.
Lamentations has been around for a decade, now, which is a long time in RPG terms, and its most WFRP-esque material was mostly released during its earlier years. Since 2016 it has increasingly focused on more experimental material, rather than on the early modern fantasy-horror that characterised its earlier output - and much as I love books like Veins of the Earth or Broodmother Skyfortress, I think you'd struggle to find a place for them in most WFRP campaigns. So what follows is a few notes on some LOTFP adventures that could be easily adapted for use as WFRP adventures, instead, insofar as they are fantasy-horror scenarios that should still work if the PCs are WFRP-style vagabonds rather than D&D-style 'adventurers'.
(I should note before I begin that I'm a year behind with LOTFP, and have yet to read any of their 2018 books, which are thus not included in this survey.)
Death Frost Doom (2009, revised 2014): This is one of the all-time great 'evil temple' adventures, and perfectly suited to games about bands of adventurous misfits getting in way over their heads. The antagonists here exemplify my point about the tonal differences between Lamentations and WFRP: they revere death and pain in an abstract, almost clinical fashion, far removed from the red-blooded messiness of the chaos gods. It could still probably be used in a WFRP game with some minor rewrites: you could swap the ice for bloodstains and use it as a Khornate temple, or else rewrite it as the base of a necromantic cult who revere Nagash as a god. Probably best to leave out the mountain-sized giant underneath it, though.
No Dignity in Death (2009): This odd little adventure from the early days of Lamentations is a pretty minor work. It is, however, very WFRP-esque in tone, being set in an isolated little town full of self-righteous nobodies, brutal authority figures, weird customs, and dark secrets. Could be used almost as written as a refreshingly non-chaos-based interlude in an ongoing WFRP campaign.
Tower of the Stargazer (2010): This adventure is very D&D-ish in its assumption that 'the wizard's tower might have treasure in it, let's go and loot it' will be a sufficient hook to set the PCs into motion. It's a good wizard's tower, though: it could easily serve as the home of some batshit insane Celestial wizard in the depths of the Empire, and the emphasis on exploration and investigation rather than monster-hacking means that it would be much easier to translate into WFRP than most traditional D&D dungeons. Just put something the PCs need inside it and point them at the door...
The God That Crawls (2012): An anonymous commentator suggested this one in the comments thread. I felt that all the ultra-weird and world-destroying artifacts in the catacombs weren't a very good fit for WFRP, and that if you took them out then all you'd be left with was a blob in a labyrinth, but Anonymous points out that the basic set-up of a Sigmarite cult guarding a maze full of relics they'd rather keep hidden would be a perfectly viable basis for a WFRP adventure, even if none of those relics actually have the power to destroy the world. And I have to admit that getting chased around a maze by a giant slime-monster is a very WFRP-y concept for an adventure!
Death Love Doom (2012): Fair warning: the body horror in this adventure is more extreme than in any other Lamentations book, which is really saying something. It's much, much more horrible than anything that's ever appeared in a published WFRP adventure, and not at all recommended if you or your group are likely to be disturbed by scenes of appalling physical suffering inflicted upon innocent victims, including children. That said, the structure of this adventure is pure WFRP, with the house of a wealthy merchant declining into horror under the influence of a cursed artifact. Most of it could easily be adapted for use by any WFRP group with sufficiently strong stomachs.
Better Than Any Man (2013): This adventure is very WFRP-esque insofar as it's about cults and witches in the middle of the Thirty Years War, but as with Death Frost Doom the specifics are actually quite different: the anti-human omnivorousness of the insect cultists here is quite unlike that of any WFRP chaos god, and one important part of the storyline revolves around an ancient empire of evil halflings, who have no obvious WFRP equivalent. Still, a bit of work could probably turn this into an adventure about a witch re-establishing an ancient cult devoted to the worship of a bound demon prince of Nurgle who happens to be really, really fond of flies and maggots, against the backdrop of a civil war between two Imperial provinces. I'd probably remove the time travel elements if I was running it in WFRP - I'm fine with my level 1 magic-users getting bounced into the last ice age, but I prefer my artisan's apprentices to stay a bit more grounded in reality - but YMMV.
Scenic Dunnsmouth (2014): This isn't a traditional adventure: instead, it's a mechanism for using a deck of playing cards to randomly generate an awful little village in the swamps, complete with a lurking monster and an evil cult. The tone of wretched rural deprivation is very WFRP-esque, and whether you actually follow the instructions in the book or just go through picking out all the bits you like best you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with the kind of blighted, squalid little community that would fit perfectly into any backwater region of the Empire. Once again the cultists are death-worshippers rather than chaos-worshippers, but this would be an easy change to make.
Forgive Us (2014): I suspect this actually was a WFRP adventure, or at least an adventure by someone who had played an awful lot of WFRP. Thieves in an early modern city accidentally steal the wrong treasure, which ends up unleashing a magical disease that causes horrible mutations. Just add the word 'Nurgle' in a couple of places and you should be good to go.
The Idea From Space (2014): This adventure deals with an aristocrat whose ship is stranded on a remote island, where the passengers and crew swiftly fall under the sway of the feuding supernatural forces that reside there. I think this could be run in WFRP as easily as in D&D, and would resist the temptation to replace one or both of the supernatural beings on the island with chaos gods: they can just be weird things in a weird place. The New World is an under-utilised region in WFRP, and this adventure is the sort of thing that could easily fit into it.
A Single, Small Cut (2014): Theo suggested this one in the comments thread - I somehow hadn't read it before. A crazy wizard and his hired bandits murder a priest and his congregation in order to steal a demon-summoning artifact from the crypt, only to discover that they have no way of controlling the resulting beast. The PCs arrive just as the carnage starts. It's more of an encounter than an adventure, but would be very easy indeed to translate to WFRP.
England Upturn'd (2016): Stephen and Jon suggested this one in the comments thread. It's set in a seventeenth-century marshland region, complete with witch-hunters and swamp-monsters, which could very easily be used as the backdrop to a WFRP adventure. I initially left it off the list because the main story is a bit big - flipping a whole chunk of the world upside down, creating a massive tidal wave in the process, in order to unleash the evil elves of the Hollow Earth just isn't the sort of thing that happens in WFRP. But a scaled-down version, built around (say) flipping over a single hill in order to release some medium-sized threat from the underworld, could probably work pretty well.
The Cursed Chateau (2016): Stuart suggested this one in the comments thread. This adventure depicts a haunted mansion, complete with undead servants and hidden sacrificial chambers in the caves below, all of which could easily be adapted for use in WFRP. The only way out, however, is to sufficiently entertain the ghost of the sadistic aristocrat who once lived there, which seems to me to cut directly against WFRP's themes of class struggle. Add some way for the PCs to turn the tables and send the fucker straight to hell and you should be fine.
There are, however, important tonal differences between the two games, as Lamentations is much more nihilistic than WFRP ever was. The Warhammer chaos gods are sometimes described as a form of 'cosmic horror', but a comparison with Lamentations shows just how humanistic they really are: they're all rooted in richly human feelings of lust and rage and disgust and ambition, whereas Lamentations mostly deals with completely impersonal cosmic forces that inflict death and suffering either by accident or just because. Chaos is all about the dark side of humanity, and confronting it is about confronting our own willingness to see other people as things to be sacrificed in the service of our own bloodlust (Khorne), pleasure (Slaanesh), survival (Nurgle), or lust for power (Tzeench). The antagonists in Lamentations, by contrast, tend to see people as just so much interchangeable meat. The chaos gods love us: Khorne loves killing us, Tzeench loves fucking with us, Slaanesh loves actually fucking us, and so on. But the beings in Lamentations just really don't care. (Do U?)
This tonal difference has some important knock-on consequences. The default Lamentations adventure pitch is 'get rich or die trying' rather than 'save the innocent from evil'. WFRP characters are plugged into the society around them by their careers: Lamentations characters are mostly assumed to be rootless wandering killers, with few if any connections to other people. WFRP scenarios tend to be human-scale, all about protecting individuals or communities, whereas Lamentations scenarios often include situations that can casually destroy the world, or at least depopulate large parts of it, in order to emphasise just how small and insignificant human lives are compared to the forces they depict. WFRP adventures are often very social affairs, all about understanding the relationships at work within settlements and organisations, whereas Lamentations adventures are usually much lonelier, set in desolated spaces where virtually everyone is already dead or worse. WFRP cultists tend to be driven by warped ambition, whereas Lamentations cultists usually just hate everyone and want us all to die, which makes their scenarios much more chilly and alienated than most WFRP adventures. Whether you view this tonal shift as an improvement or a weakness is going to come down to personal preference, but it means that several Lamentations adventures which seem on the surface as though they would be ideal WFRP fodder - No Salvation for Witches, for example, with its seventeenth-century setting and its demon-summoning coven - actually turn out, on closer examination, to be driven by very different themes.
Lamentations has been around for a decade, now, which is a long time in RPG terms, and its most WFRP-esque material was mostly released during its earlier years. Since 2016 it has increasingly focused on more experimental material, rather than on the early modern fantasy-horror that characterised its earlier output - and much as I love books like Veins of the Earth or Broodmother Skyfortress, I think you'd struggle to find a place for them in most WFRP campaigns. So what follows is a few notes on some LOTFP adventures that could be easily adapted for use as WFRP adventures, instead, insofar as they are fantasy-horror scenarios that should still work if the PCs are WFRP-style vagabonds rather than D&D-style 'adventurers'.
(I should note before I begin that I'm a year behind with LOTFP, and have yet to read any of their 2018 books, which are thus not included in this survey.)
No Dignity in Death (2009): This odd little adventure from the early days of Lamentations is a pretty minor work. It is, however, very WFRP-esque in tone, being set in an isolated little town full of self-righteous nobodies, brutal authority figures, weird customs, and dark secrets. Could be used almost as written as a refreshingly non-chaos-based interlude in an ongoing WFRP campaign.
Tower of the Stargazer (2010): This adventure is very D&D-ish in its assumption that 'the wizard's tower might have treasure in it, let's go and loot it' will be a sufficient hook to set the PCs into motion. It's a good wizard's tower, though: it could easily serve as the home of some batshit insane Celestial wizard in the depths of the Empire, and the emphasis on exploration and investigation rather than monster-hacking means that it would be much easier to translate into WFRP than most traditional D&D dungeons. Just put something the PCs need inside it and point them at the door...
The God That Crawls (2012): An anonymous commentator suggested this one in the comments thread. I felt that all the ultra-weird and world-destroying artifacts in the catacombs weren't a very good fit for WFRP, and that if you took them out then all you'd be left with was a blob in a labyrinth, but Anonymous points out that the basic set-up of a Sigmarite cult guarding a maze full of relics they'd rather keep hidden would be a perfectly viable basis for a WFRP adventure, even if none of those relics actually have the power to destroy the world. And I have to admit that getting chased around a maze by a giant slime-monster is a very WFRP-y concept for an adventure!
Death Love Doom (2012): Fair warning: the body horror in this adventure is more extreme than in any other Lamentations book, which is really saying something. It's much, much more horrible than anything that's ever appeared in a published WFRP adventure, and not at all recommended if you or your group are likely to be disturbed by scenes of appalling physical suffering inflicted upon innocent victims, including children. That said, the structure of this adventure is pure WFRP, with the house of a wealthy merchant declining into horror under the influence of a cursed artifact. Most of it could easily be adapted for use by any WFRP group with sufficiently strong stomachs.
Better Than Any Man (2013): This adventure is very WFRP-esque insofar as it's about cults and witches in the middle of the Thirty Years War, but as with Death Frost Doom the specifics are actually quite different: the anti-human omnivorousness of the insect cultists here is quite unlike that of any WFRP chaos god, and one important part of the storyline revolves around an ancient empire of evil halflings, who have no obvious WFRP equivalent. Still, a bit of work could probably turn this into an adventure about a witch re-establishing an ancient cult devoted to the worship of a bound demon prince of Nurgle who happens to be really, really fond of flies and maggots, against the backdrop of a civil war between two Imperial provinces. I'd probably remove the time travel elements if I was running it in WFRP - I'm fine with my level 1 magic-users getting bounced into the last ice age, but I prefer my artisan's apprentices to stay a bit more grounded in reality - but YMMV.
Scenic Dunnsmouth (2014): This isn't a traditional adventure: instead, it's a mechanism for using a deck of playing cards to randomly generate an awful little village in the swamps, complete with a lurking monster and an evil cult. The tone of wretched rural deprivation is very WFRP-esque, and whether you actually follow the instructions in the book or just go through picking out all the bits you like best you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with the kind of blighted, squalid little community that would fit perfectly into any backwater region of the Empire. Once again the cultists are death-worshippers rather than chaos-worshippers, but this would be an easy change to make.
Forgive Us (2014): I suspect this actually was a WFRP adventure, or at least an adventure by someone who had played an awful lot of WFRP. Thieves in an early modern city accidentally steal the wrong treasure, which ends up unleashing a magical disease that causes horrible mutations. Just add the word 'Nurgle' in a couple of places and you should be good to go.
The Idea From Space (2014): This adventure deals with an aristocrat whose ship is stranded on a remote island, where the passengers and crew swiftly fall under the sway of the feuding supernatural forces that reside there. I think this could be run in WFRP as easily as in D&D, and would resist the temptation to replace one or both of the supernatural beings on the island with chaos gods: they can just be weird things in a weird place. The New World is an under-utilised region in WFRP, and this adventure is the sort of thing that could easily fit into it.
A Single, Small Cut (2014): Theo suggested this one in the comments thread - I somehow hadn't read it before. A crazy wizard and his hired bandits murder a priest and his congregation in order to steal a demon-summoning artifact from the crypt, only to discover that they have no way of controlling the resulting beast. The PCs arrive just as the carnage starts. It's more of an encounter than an adventure, but would be very easy indeed to translate to WFRP.
England Upturn'd (2016): Stephen and Jon suggested this one in the comments thread. It's set in a seventeenth-century marshland region, complete with witch-hunters and swamp-monsters, which could very easily be used as the backdrop to a WFRP adventure. I initially left it off the list because the main story is a bit big - flipping a whole chunk of the world upside down, creating a massive tidal wave in the process, in order to unleash the evil elves of the Hollow Earth just isn't the sort of thing that happens in WFRP. But a scaled-down version, built around (say) flipping over a single hill in order to release some medium-sized threat from the underworld, could probably work pretty well.
The Cursed Chateau (2016): Stuart suggested this one in the comments thread. This adventure depicts a haunted mansion, complete with undead servants and hidden sacrificial chambers in the caves below, all of which could easily be adapted for use in WFRP. The only way out, however, is to sufficiently entertain the ghost of the sadistic aristocrat who once lived there, which seems to me to cut directly against WFRP's themes of class struggle. Add some way for the PCs to turn the tables and send the fucker straight to hell and you should be fine.
Sunday, 20 January 2019
Echoes and Reverberations part 3: Shadow of the Demon Lord
Happy new year, everyone! The last of the Christmas brandy has now been drunk, so I guess it's time I got back into the habit of blogging...
This is the third in a series of posts about what happened to WFRP after the demise of 2nd edition. The first two covered the official third edition. The next few will deal with the various other systems which, directly or indirectly, tried to carry on the WFRP legacy.
In the case of Shadow of the Demon Lord, the connection was a pretty direct one. Robert Schwalb had been the developer for WFRP 2nd edition, and was one of its lead writers, but seems to have had nothing to do with 3rd edition. (Possibly there was some bitterness between him and FFG over their decision to kill off 'his' edition of the game.) He spent the 3rd edition years (2009-13) writing D&D books for WOTC: but in early 2014, perhaps as a response to the final decline of WFRP 3rd edition, he began work on a game of his own, called Shadow of the Demon Lord, which went on to be successfully funded via Kickstarter in 2015. Schwalb has always been pretty open about the fact that Shadow was, effectively, his own personal 'WFRP 2.5', and the game has never made much effort to conceal its Warhammer influences. But by stepping away from the actual Games Workshop brand, Schwalb gained the freedom to develop the same core concept in some rather interesting ways.
In many ways, I think that Shadow is WFRP 3 done right. Like WFRP 3, it aimed to marry together the old-school low-fantasy grimness of WFRP with both storygame-inspired mechanics and D&D-style fantasy heroics: but, unlike WFRP 3, the resulting mix actually worked. Let me explain:
This is the third in a series of posts about what happened to WFRP after the demise of 2nd edition. The first two covered the official third edition. The next few will deal with the various other systems which, directly or indirectly, tried to carry on the WFRP legacy.
In the case of Shadow of the Demon Lord, the connection was a pretty direct one. Robert Schwalb had been the developer for WFRP 2nd edition, and was one of its lead writers, but seems to have had nothing to do with 3rd edition. (Possibly there was some bitterness between him and FFG over their decision to kill off 'his' edition of the game.) He spent the 3rd edition years (2009-13) writing D&D books for WOTC: but in early 2014, perhaps as a response to the final decline of WFRP 3rd edition, he began work on a game of his own, called Shadow of the Demon Lord, which went on to be successfully funded via Kickstarter in 2015. Schwalb has always been pretty open about the fact that Shadow was, effectively, his own personal 'WFRP 2.5', and the game has never made much effort to conceal its Warhammer influences. But by stepping away from the actual Games Workshop brand, Schwalb gained the freedom to develop the same core concept in some rather interesting ways.
In many ways, I think that Shadow is WFRP 3 done right. Like WFRP 3, it aimed to marry together the old-school low-fantasy grimness of WFRP with both storygame-inspired mechanics and D&D-style fantasy heroics: but, unlike WFRP 3, the resulting mix actually worked. Let me explain:
- From WFRP, Shadow took its early modern setting, its fantasy-horror themes and aesthetics, its focus upon cults, demons, and beast-men as the default antagonists, and its preoccupation with physical, mental, and magical corruption.
- From D&D - more specifically D&D 3rd edition - Shadow took its class-and-level based system and its emphasis on PCs whose rapidly increasing power was modelled via a la carte multiclassing.
- From storygames, Shadow took the idea of the campaign as a scripted arc lasting a determinate number of sessions.
That third one looks small, but it's a real game-changer. For those of you unfamiliar with Shadow, this is how it works: a Shadow campaign lasts exactly 11 sessions. At the start of session 1, you pick an 'ancestry' (i.e. a race) and pick or roll for one or two 'professions' (i.e. a job): the professions are pretty WFRP-esque, so you might find yourself playing a human agitator, or an orc prostitute, or a goblin constable, or whatever. The titular Shadow of the Demon Lord is just starting to fall across the land, so you find yourself caught up in some kind of horrific one-session adventure, and hopefully survive. At the start of session 2, you advance to level 1 and pick a 'novice path' (i.e. a basic character class): there are four of these, and the choice of Magician, Priest, Rogue or Warrior should be familiar to anyone who has ever played any version of D&D. You're a bit tougher, now, a bit more of a D&D character and a bit less of a WFRP character - but the shadow is growing darker and the world is becoming more threatening, so your next one-session adventure will be more dangerous than the last one, and the one after that will be even worse.
Survive three one-session adventures and you can pick an 'expert path' like Ranger or Assassin. Survive seven and you can pick a 'master path' like Beastmaster or Inquisitor. All the ancestries, professions, and paths stack with one another, so that by level 7 you might be a Dwarf Charlatan Priest Scout Engineer, or a Changeling Murderer Warrior Witch Technomancer, or whatever. (The D&D 3rd edition influence is very clear, here.) One session = one adventure, surviving one adventure earns you one level, and gaining one level earns you exactly one new ability, so the power and complexity of the characters increases in a very straightforward and predictable way, and you only have one new thing to remember in each session. As the characters grow in power, however, so does the Shadow of the Demon Lord, so that in session 1 they are ordinary people in a world where some spooky things are starting to happen, but by session 10 they are full-blown fantasy heroes in a world rapidly collapsing into a full-scale apocalypse. At the start of session 11 the PCs unlock their final and most powerful abilities, the Shadow of the Demon Lord reaches its fullest extent, and the stage is set for one final, epic showdown with the forces of darkness. Then you turn the clock back to session 1 and do it all over again.
This is a very clever bit of design, for a number of reasons. It acknowledges that while gamers love daydreaming about epic, years-long campaigns, they seldom manage to actually play them, and so condensing your entire arc into 11 sessions means that you have a much better chance of creating a campaign which functions as one massive crescendo and goes out with a bang, rather than one that just kind of wanders around for a while and then peters out. It means that the adventures have to be punchy, tightly-designed affairs, a few pages long at most, because every adventure has to be something that can be played through in a single session. (This protects Shadow adventures from the bloat that plagued WFRP 2 and 3.) It means that you can invoke apocalyptic threats and actually follow through, trashing your whole campaign setting every eleven sessions and allowing the PCs to play roles of world-historical importance - unlike in, say, WFRP 2, where the big threat has already been and gone, and all the really important stuff was done offstage by NPCs. And it means that you can have the 'shopping list' mentality of a crunch-heavy game like D&D3, where players can spend hours thinking about how this ability from this class could be combined with that ability from that race to do something spectacular... except, unlike D&D3, you can actually put your ideas into practise. Getting the combination of abilities you want will only ever take a few sessions at most, and you get to try out a different 'build' every eleven weeks, rather than being stuck with the same one for years on end.
As with most storygame-inspired design, however, its specificity is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. There's no room here for the kind of picaresque meandering that formed such an important part of both WFRP 1 and old-school D&D, for stories about mercenary adventurers exploring the wilderness in search of treasure, or about semi-criminal vagabonds roaming around the Empire on a barge. There isn't even room for big adventures like B4 The Lost City or Power Behind the Throne, neither of which could possibly be run in a single session. The hardwired zero-to-hero character progression means that campaigns will move swiftly from grimy low fantasy to something far more heroic and high-powered, which is great if you like both of those equally, but might be a turn-off if you'd prefer to linger at one end of the scale rather than having the system force-march you through it and out the other side. Players looking for a more traditional fantasy RPG experience, with longer campaigns, slower level progression, and large, sprawling adventures rather than a staccato rattle of one-shots, would probably be better off house-ruling advancement to one level every 3-4 sessions and slowing the spread of the Shadow to match.
The setting is a combination of WFRP and modern D&D fantasy. The main setting is a grimy early modern empire full of crime and corruption, very much in the vein of WFRP, with beastmen lurking in the woods and cults gathering in the shadows - but magic is commonplace, and orcs and goblins and changelings and clockwork robots are all playable races. There's less leftover Tolkien material than in Warhammer: Shadow uses creepy fae changelings instead of Tolkien-style elves, while its goblins are a disgusting race of fallen faeries rather than comedy cannon-fodder, and its orcs are a race of magically-created slave-soldiers who have just rebelled and deposed the emperor. (This last bit is a good example of the way that Shadow places the PCs right at the moment of crisis, rather than before it, as in WFRP 3, or after it, as in WFRP 2.) The titular Demon Lord is a bit of a let-down, being little more than a cosmic force of destruction who wrecks everything for no real reason. It's obviously Shadow's stand-in for WFRP's Chaos, but it feels rather flat and impersonal compared to the florid weirdness of the chaos gods.
The setting is very lightly sketched in, and large chunks of the map are given over to an evil desert full of undead, a frozen wasteland full of frost giants, an archipelago full of pirates, and other cliched CRPG-style adventure zones. In a nice OSR-style touch, however, Shadow communicates a lot of information about the tone of its setting via random tables in character generation. The fact that the dice can inform you that your changeling's current legal identity is that of someone they have murdered and replaced, for example, or that the soul animating your clockwork robot came from hell, or that your dwarf pounds nails into his own skull, or that your goblin has 'all the warts' and saves their bodily secretions in small bottles to give to people as gifts, tells you a lot about the the kind of world in which the game is set.
Schwalb Entertainment has adopted an interesting hybrid strategy in relation to supplements for Shadow of the Demon Lord. The game has seven traditional supplements which are available as physical books, as follows:
Shadow also has three 'campaign books':
Taken on its own terms, I think Shadow is a fine and functional dark fantasy RPG. The system looks much better-designed than that of either WFRP 2 or D&D 3, and I'm sure I'd enjoy running or playing it. For me, however, it never quite managed to have the same bite as WFRP: it all just felt a bit too placeholderish, a bit too generic. It's not that it's sanitised, exactly: indeed, coming loose from the Warhammer franchise has allowed Schwalb to fill his game with all the sex and shit and horribleness that Games Workshop would never want to have associated with their IP. It's more that it feels... sort of... assembled by checklist, I guess? It felt to me as though it featured torture-demons and amoral faeries and murder-cultists because those are the sorts of things that you're supposed to have in a dark fantasy RPG, rather than because the authors had any especially compelling ideas about how to make their demons and faeries and cultists different from everyone else's. It's the opposite of the early GW approach, where they mostly seem to have started from art and ideas - 'Evil Assyrian dwarves with blunderbusses!' - and worked backwards from there. I read nine books worth of material for Shadow, looking for stuff worth borrowing for my own games, and at the end of the day all I'd come away with was one monster, a couple of ideas for cults, and a few set-pieces from the adventures in Tales of the Demon Lord. The rest is all just one big sub-WFRP blur.
If you're looking for something midway between modern D&D and WFRP (but more logically designed than either of them), or if you like the sound of its 'eleven sessions and done' campaign structure, then Shadow is probably the game for you. If neither of those applies, though, you might be better off just getting Tales of the Demon Lord and adapting the adventures for use in WFRP 1/2 instead.
The setting is a combination of WFRP and modern D&D fantasy. The main setting is a grimy early modern empire full of crime and corruption, very much in the vein of WFRP, with beastmen lurking in the woods and cults gathering in the shadows - but magic is commonplace, and orcs and goblins and changelings and clockwork robots are all playable races. There's less leftover Tolkien material than in Warhammer: Shadow uses creepy fae changelings instead of Tolkien-style elves, while its goblins are a disgusting race of fallen faeries rather than comedy cannon-fodder, and its orcs are a race of magically-created slave-soldiers who have just rebelled and deposed the emperor. (This last bit is a good example of the way that Shadow places the PCs right at the moment of crisis, rather than before it, as in WFRP 3, or after it, as in WFRP 2.) The titular Demon Lord is a bit of a let-down, being little more than a cosmic force of destruction who wrecks everything for no real reason. It's obviously Shadow's stand-in for WFRP's Chaos, but it feels rather flat and impersonal compared to the florid weirdness of the chaos gods.
The setting is very lightly sketched in, and large chunks of the map are given over to an evil desert full of undead, a frozen wasteland full of frost giants, an archipelago full of pirates, and other cliched CRPG-style adventure zones. In a nice OSR-style touch, however, Shadow communicates a lot of information about the tone of its setting via random tables in character generation. The fact that the dice can inform you that your changeling's current legal identity is that of someone they have murdered and replaced, for example, or that the soul animating your clockwork robot came from hell, or that your dwarf pounds nails into his own skull, or that your goblin has 'all the warts' and saves their bodily secretions in small bottles to give to people as gifts, tells you a lot about the the kind of world in which the game is set.
Schwalb Entertainment has adopted an interesting hybrid strategy in relation to supplements for Shadow of the Demon Lord. The game has seven traditional supplements which are available as physical books, as follows:
- The Demon Lord's Companion: introduces new races, monsters, items, paths, etc.
- Tombs of the Desolation: details the setting's 'undead desert' region. Includes rules for undead PCs, if you like that sort of thing.
- Terrible Beauty: describes the setting's horrible, amoral faeries. Includes rules for fae PCs other than changelings.
- Exquisite Agony: details the setting's version of hell. (The twist here is that hell may be evil, but it's just as committed to fighting the Demon Lord as everyone else, because the Demon Lord brings not wickedness but annihilation.)
- Uncertain Faith: describes the setting's religions. Contains some good, weird cults and sects that could easily be adapted for use in other dark fantasy games.
- A Glorious Death: details the setting's 'ice waste of the frost giant vikings' region.
- Hunger in the Void: describes the cults and beastmen that serve the demon lord, although my favourite bit in this book was actually the discussion of the various mostly-but-not-quite-annihilated worlds which have continued to drift around in the Void after being eaten by the Demon Lord, and the weird things that inhabit them.
Shadow also has three 'campaign books':
- Tales of the Demon Lord: A book containing 11 short adventures, intended for use as a complete 11-session SotDL campaign.
- Queen of Gold: Another 11-adventure book.
- Tales of the Desolation: Only 4 adventures in this one. You'll have to get the other seven from somewhere else.
Taken on its own terms, I think Shadow is a fine and functional dark fantasy RPG. The system looks much better-designed than that of either WFRP 2 or D&D 3, and I'm sure I'd enjoy running or playing it. For me, however, it never quite managed to have the same bite as WFRP: it all just felt a bit too placeholderish, a bit too generic. It's not that it's sanitised, exactly: indeed, coming loose from the Warhammer franchise has allowed Schwalb to fill his game with all the sex and shit and horribleness that Games Workshop would never want to have associated with their IP. It's more that it feels... sort of... assembled by checklist, I guess? It felt to me as though it featured torture-demons and amoral faeries and murder-cultists because those are the sorts of things that you're supposed to have in a dark fantasy RPG, rather than because the authors had any especially compelling ideas about how to make their demons and faeries and cultists different from everyone else's. It's the opposite of the early GW approach, where they mostly seem to have started from art and ideas - 'Evil Assyrian dwarves with blunderbusses!' - and worked backwards from there. I read nine books worth of material for Shadow, looking for stuff worth borrowing for my own games, and at the end of the day all I'd come away with was one monster, a couple of ideas for cults, and a few set-pieces from the adventures in Tales of the Demon Lord. The rest is all just one big sub-WFRP blur.
If you're looking for something midway between modern D&D and WFRP (but more logically designed than either of them), or if you like the sound of its 'eleven sessions and done' campaign structure, then Shadow is probably the game for you. If neither of those applies, though, you might be better off just getting Tales of the Demon Lord and adapting the adventures for use in WFRP 1/2 instead.
Monday, 10 December 2018
Echoes and Reverberations part 2: the WFRP 3rd edition adventures
So, um, yeah. A huge pile-up of work wiped out all my evenings for a couple of weeks and meant that this took a lot longer than anticipated. But it's finished now. Many thanks to the anonymous benefactor who provided me with copies of all of these for review purposes.
Following on from my last post, I'm going to briefly discuss the various adventures that FFG released for WFRP 3, with a focus on which of them might be worth borrowing for use in games run using the WFRP 1 or WFRP 2 settings and rules. They're all full of nonsense about progress trackers and whatnot, but their 'clever' mechanics can almost always be stripped out with no real loss, which highlights how superfluous most of the mechanical innovations of WFRP 3 really were. Run them as traditional adventure scenarios and you should be fine.
Tl;dr version: The best ones here are 'An Eye For An Eye', The Witch's Song, and The Art of Waaagh!, although I'd run the third one in D&D rather than WFRP. The rest can be skipped.
A Day Late and a Shilling Short (demo adventure): This isn't really an adventure at all, just a demonstration of the game mechanics. The PCs fight some beastmen in order to learn the combat rules, persuade a merchant to give them a package in order to learn the social rules, and then that's the end. Skip.
An Eye For An Eye (from the core set): This is a rather good investigation scenario, set in a hunting lodge whose staff have been infiltrated by chaos cultists. I'm not fond of 'suddenly, beastmen attack!' as the opening to a WFRP adventure, but aside from that this looks like it could be a good, creepy adventure to play through, with plenty of scope for the PCs to unravel the lodge's mysteries in different ways. It's a bit 'WFRP by numbers', but I think that's forgivable in an introductory scenario. The climactic scene, in which beastmen storm the lodge from all sides while the cultists try to summon a demon in the basement, looks like it could make for an especially memorable episode. Worth a look.
The Gathering Storm: I'd describe this adventure as (1) basic, (2) solid, and (3) probably better-suited to D&D than WFRP. It's set in a little town with big problems: there are beastmen in the marshes, goblins in the hills, a wizard looking for the fragments of a magic item from a nearby ruin, and a local necromancer who isn't nearly as dead as the townsfolk think he is. Each problem comes with a twist that makes it more than just a straightforward stab-fest: the beastman shaman is actually trying to restrain his herd out of sympathy for his human mother, the necromancer's spirit is not entirely in control of the corpse he's hijacked, the goblins have a captive troll which is itching for a chance to break out and eat them, and so on. There's nothing bad here, either in terms of content or scenario design, and it would probably be fun to play. But there's also nothing very conceptually interesting, and I suspect that any GM who has internalised the relevant design philosophies could probably come up with something just as good on their own if given a few hours of planning time.
Winds of Change (from Liber Mutatis): This is a very lazily-written scenario. An apprentice at one of the colleges of magic has gone missing during a visit to a run-down area of Altdorf - so, naturally, rather than looking for him themselves or calling in the authorities, the college hires the PCs to find him, the only clue being the square he was in when he went missing. Fortunately, he's been kidnapped by the world's laziest chaos cultists, who have sold his wizardly regalia to a pawn shop in the very same square they abducted him in, thus allowing their whole diabolical plan to be unravelled in an afternoon. He turns out to be only one of eight apprentices, one from each college, whom they've abducted for sacrifice in a ritual that can only be performed once per year, the dreadful result of which will be to... um... turn eight mutants into eight slightly more powerful mutants. Honestly, it all hardly seems worth the effort, and no explanation is ever provided as to why the PCs have to handle the whole situation themselves even after it turns out that eight apprentice wizards are being held captive by chaos cultists just down the road from the Colleges of Magic. That's not worth the Colleges sending a single wizard out for? Not even worth involving the city watch?
There's some good local colour here, and the square and its inhabitants are worthy of a better adventure, but this scenario feels too slight to be worth bothering with. Either skip it, or write your own mystery and use the location and NPCs as a ready-made supporting cast.
Journey to Black Fire Pass: This is another introductory adventure, designed for a party of dwarf PCs. The PCs are sent to find a ceremonial shield and bring it to a dwarf king. It's much more of an actual adventure than 'A Day Late and a Shilling Short', featuring battles with greenskins, negotiations with other dwarves, and a rather nice bit in which the PCs have a chance to work out that the town they're staying in is built over an old dwarven ruin, and descend into the vaults to protect it from being looted by humans. (Normally the PCs would be the looters!) So as an introductory adventure it's a fairly good one, although it's obviously not a very representative example of what most WFRP adventures tend to be like...
The Edge of Night: I have very mixed feelings about this adventure. The key scene it's built around, in which a bunch of feuding nobles make fools of themselves at a masquerade ball while skaven infiltrators make increasingly unsubtle attempts to spike the food and drink with warpstone dust, is great. The trouble is that virtually everything else is hugely bloated and, frankly, a bit rubbish. (Everything before the masquerade could easily have been cut by 75% without meaningful losses.) The write-up of the ball itself has a detailed timetable for what's supposed to happen when, clearly inspired by the one in 'Rough Night at the Three Feathers', but the number of NPCs involved looks overwhelming: I'm a pretty experienced GM, and I'm not at all sure I could run a complex scene involving twenty-seven different named NPCs all bouncing off the PCs and each other in the middle of a crisis situation. The final battle also expects the PCs to be able to take on eight skaven, a grey seer, and a rat ogre in a straight fight, which seems a bit heavy for WFRP. (Presumably WFRP 3 PCs are tougher than those in earlier editions?) The basic 'skaven at a masquerade' set-up might be worth stealing, though.
Horror of Hugeldal (from Liber Infectus): This is a decent investigation set in a small, plague-ridden village: the kind of miserable, isolated settings that WFRP tends to shine in. It's very slight, though: the investigation leads to some travelling Nurgle cultists whose entire plan amounts to 'drop a disease bomb down the village well and run away', which feels more like an entry on a WFRP-themed random encounter table than the climax of an entire adventure. Skippable.
The Witch's Song: I liked this adventure a lot, and I felt that it really played to WFRP's strengths. It's set in an isolated run-down fishing village in the swamp, where the locals hunt bog octopi for food and whisper stories about the one-eyed demons in the marshes. The central conflict revolves around a witch hiding in the swamps and a witch hunter determined to track him down, but the real situation is much more complicated than it first appears. (I especially appreciated the fact that neither the witch nor the witch hunter is straightforwardly 'good' or 'evil' - they're just two damaged individuals who happen to be set on a collision course.) Everyone in the village has secrets, and for once the secret isn't just 'we're all chaos cultists': instead they stem from much more human motivations of remorse, resentment, and grief. It's all very vivid and atmospheric, and the PCs are permitted a lot of freedom in who they side with and how they deal with the situations that arise. The later sections of the adventure are a bit heavy-handed in their attempts to force the PCs to arrive just in time for various climactic events, but it would be easy to ignore them and run the whole thing as a genuine sandbox / powderkeg instead.
My one concern is with the finale, in which all this dense, character-driven tragedy suddenly gives way to a climactic action sequence in which the PCs have to blow up a tunnel in order to stop a Dark Elf fleet sailing through it. I found the sudden shift of tone and scale a bit jarring, especially as it only works if the GM rigs events to ensure that the PCs arrive at just the right time. Scaling it down a bit - replacing the looming invasion fleet with a single Dark Elf slaving vessel that's been moving back and forth through the tunnel, for example - might help to mitigate this.
Crimson Rain (from Liber Carnagia): I thought this adventure was interesting, if not entirely successful. It revolves around the PCs pursuing a band of chaos-worshipping Norscans, who have stolen a spear which has a demon of Khorne bound within it: the twist is that the demon is now reaching out and seeking a new host, and the more blood the PCs shed while in pursuit of it, the more likely they are to be targeted for possession. This kind of material is under-explored territory in WFRP, which usually assumes that the lure of chaos is something that happens to other people rather than the PCs; but the way in which it's handled here is rather clumsy, with the PCs racking up arbitrary bloodthirstiness points for the kind of random violence that would otherwise be ordinary PC behaviour. Still, there's probably enough here to form a salvageable adventure if one was willing to put in a bit of work.
Harrower of Thrones (from Black Fire Pass): A wilderness- and dungeon-based scenario in which the PCs must return a sacred dwarf hammer to its proper resting place in a ruined dwarf hold, which is currently being occupied by a band of goblins and has an ancient Dragon Ogre sleeping at the bottom of it. There are some nice touches, here - the guides who turn out to be bandits, for example, or the giant monster that emerges after the main objective is fulfilled to block the way out - but I always feel that this sort of straightforward 'dwarves and goblins in dungeons' set-up is the sort of thing that D&D does much better than any edition of WFRP.
Mirror of Desire (from Liber Ecstatica): Like Edge of Night, this scenario is built around a promising set-up, in which a mirror containing a demon of Slaanesh makes its owner so desirable that her four aristocratic suitors start behaving in crazier and crazier ways in order to win her affections. The gradual ramp-up of weirdness looks as though it could be a lot of fun: so the athletic suitor starts off just showing off his muscles and ends up grabbing and bench pressing passing PCs right in front of her, the rich suitor starts off buying her jewellery and ends up buying random houses so he can tie giant bows around them and present them to her as gifts, and so on. The rest of the scenario, however, is very contrived: it's all supposed to end up with the PCs getting trapped inside the mirror and having to find their way out, but it looks to me as though even moderately proactive players would find this very easy to derail. I'd suggest just borrowing the whole 'girl with demon-mirror and four enchanted suitors' set-up as a comedy B-plot for use with some other scenario.
The Art of Waaagh! (from Hero's Call): I love this adventure. An orc army is marching down the valley, and a dilapidated castle is all that stands in its way. They're much more tactically acute than orcs normally are, though, because they're being secretly guided by a vampire trapped under the castle, who wants them to tear it down so that they can free him from his tomb. (He's also got a minion on the castle staff, whose manipulations have ensured that the current commanders are totally unequal to the task of holding off the orcs.) So first the PCs have to sort out the castle itself; then they have to roam around the valley, recruiting the assorted misfits who live there - knights, dwarves, ogres, killer schoolgirls - into a force capable of holding the castle against the greenskins; and then they have to endure the siege itself, fighting off various orc stratagems (rock lobbers, goblin infiltrators, etc) while trying to work out what the deal is with these unusually-clever orcs, hopefully ultimately discovering and destroying the vampire before the castle falls. It's written as an adventure for very powerful characters, but I don't think it needs to be: what the PCs really need to succeed here is intelligence and charisma, not the ability to personally sally forth and bash the heads off black orcs. It's also a rare example of an adventure where the 'progress tracker' is actually doing something useful, because given the set-up of course you need a way to measure how close the orcs are to the castle, and then of course you need a way to measure how close the castle is to falling. It's all rather more heroic and cinematic than the default WFRP norm, but I'd happily run it as written in D&D.
The Enemy Within: This is much the biggest of the WFRP3 adventures, though it's still tiny compared to such behemoths as The Thousand Thrones or the original Enemy Within campaign. Its gimmick is that the main villain, the Black Cowl, could be any one of three different NPCs. The GM can either play fair and pick who it is right from the start, or go all Quantum Ogre and leave it undefined until much later, thus ensuring that the true villain is whomever the PCs least (or most) expect. Not that it makes much difference, honestly. Power Behind the Throne this is not.
Anyway. The Black Cowl has learned about a recently-discovered warpstone idol, and has come up with a simple plan. Step one: help the skaven to steal it, in exchange for them making half of it into a cursed bell clapper like the ones they use in screaming bells. (Why the skaven don't just run off with it, I've no idea. I guess they view the Black Cowl as a valued customer.) Step two: swap the cursed clapper with the one in the bell of the Temple of Sigmar at Altdorf just before a state service, thus hopefully taking out the Emperor and a large chunk of the Imperial elite. Unfortunately, he's also come down with a bad case of Evil Mastermind syndrome, so he's massively over-complicated it with all kinds of nonsense about elf-murder, gunpowder smuggling, fake purification rituals, exploding theatres, and manipulating cultists into manipulating beastmen into attacking the Empire, thus providing plenty of opportunities for the PCs to discover and thwart his unnecessarily convoluted plans.
The campaign has four parts:
Following on from my last post, I'm going to briefly discuss the various adventures that FFG released for WFRP 3, with a focus on which of them might be worth borrowing for use in games run using the WFRP 1 or WFRP 2 settings and rules. They're all full of nonsense about progress trackers and whatnot, but their 'clever' mechanics can almost always be stripped out with no real loss, which highlights how superfluous most of the mechanical innovations of WFRP 3 really were. Run them as traditional adventure scenarios and you should be fine.
Tl;dr version: The best ones here are 'An Eye For An Eye', The Witch's Song, and The Art of Waaagh!, although I'd run the third one in D&D rather than WFRP. The rest can be skipped.
A Day Late and a Shilling Short (demo adventure): This isn't really an adventure at all, just a demonstration of the game mechanics. The PCs fight some beastmen in order to learn the combat rules, persuade a merchant to give them a package in order to learn the social rules, and then that's the end. Skip.
An Eye For An Eye (from the core set): This is a rather good investigation scenario, set in a hunting lodge whose staff have been infiltrated by chaos cultists. I'm not fond of 'suddenly, beastmen attack!' as the opening to a WFRP adventure, but aside from that this looks like it could be a good, creepy adventure to play through, with plenty of scope for the PCs to unravel the lodge's mysteries in different ways. It's a bit 'WFRP by numbers', but I think that's forgivable in an introductory scenario. The climactic scene, in which beastmen storm the lodge from all sides while the cultists try to summon a demon in the basement, looks like it could make for an especially memorable episode. Worth a look.
The Gathering Storm: I'd describe this adventure as (1) basic, (2) solid, and (3) probably better-suited to D&D than WFRP. It's set in a little town with big problems: there are beastmen in the marshes, goblins in the hills, a wizard looking for the fragments of a magic item from a nearby ruin, and a local necromancer who isn't nearly as dead as the townsfolk think he is. Each problem comes with a twist that makes it more than just a straightforward stab-fest: the beastman shaman is actually trying to restrain his herd out of sympathy for his human mother, the necromancer's spirit is not entirely in control of the corpse he's hijacked, the goblins have a captive troll which is itching for a chance to break out and eat them, and so on. There's nothing bad here, either in terms of content or scenario design, and it would probably be fun to play. But there's also nothing very conceptually interesting, and I suspect that any GM who has internalised the relevant design philosophies could probably come up with something just as good on their own if given a few hours of planning time.
Winds of Change (from Liber Mutatis): This is a very lazily-written scenario. An apprentice at one of the colleges of magic has gone missing during a visit to a run-down area of Altdorf - so, naturally, rather than looking for him themselves or calling in the authorities, the college hires the PCs to find him, the only clue being the square he was in when he went missing. Fortunately, he's been kidnapped by the world's laziest chaos cultists, who have sold his wizardly regalia to a pawn shop in the very same square they abducted him in, thus allowing their whole diabolical plan to be unravelled in an afternoon. He turns out to be only one of eight apprentices, one from each college, whom they've abducted for sacrifice in a ritual that can only be performed once per year, the dreadful result of which will be to... um... turn eight mutants into eight slightly more powerful mutants. Honestly, it all hardly seems worth the effort, and no explanation is ever provided as to why the PCs have to handle the whole situation themselves even after it turns out that eight apprentice wizards are being held captive by chaos cultists just down the road from the Colleges of Magic. That's not worth the Colleges sending a single wizard out for? Not even worth involving the city watch?
There's some good local colour here, and the square and its inhabitants are worthy of a better adventure, but this scenario feels too slight to be worth bothering with. Either skip it, or write your own mystery and use the location and NPCs as a ready-made supporting cast.
Journey to Black Fire Pass: This is another introductory adventure, designed for a party of dwarf PCs. The PCs are sent to find a ceremonial shield and bring it to a dwarf king. It's much more of an actual adventure than 'A Day Late and a Shilling Short', featuring battles with greenskins, negotiations with other dwarves, and a rather nice bit in which the PCs have a chance to work out that the town they're staying in is built over an old dwarven ruin, and descend into the vaults to protect it from being looted by humans. (Normally the PCs would be the looters!) So as an introductory adventure it's a fairly good one, although it's obviously not a very representative example of what most WFRP adventures tend to be like...
The Edge of Night: I have very mixed feelings about this adventure. The key scene it's built around, in which a bunch of feuding nobles make fools of themselves at a masquerade ball while skaven infiltrators make increasingly unsubtle attempts to spike the food and drink with warpstone dust, is great. The trouble is that virtually everything else is hugely bloated and, frankly, a bit rubbish. (Everything before the masquerade could easily have been cut by 75% without meaningful losses.) The write-up of the ball itself has a detailed timetable for what's supposed to happen when, clearly inspired by the one in 'Rough Night at the Three Feathers', but the number of NPCs involved looks overwhelming: I'm a pretty experienced GM, and I'm not at all sure I could run a complex scene involving twenty-seven different named NPCs all bouncing off the PCs and each other in the middle of a crisis situation. The final battle also expects the PCs to be able to take on eight skaven, a grey seer, and a rat ogre in a straight fight, which seems a bit heavy for WFRP. (Presumably WFRP 3 PCs are tougher than those in earlier editions?) The basic 'skaven at a masquerade' set-up might be worth stealing, though.
Horror of Hugeldal (from Liber Infectus): This is a decent investigation set in a small, plague-ridden village: the kind of miserable, isolated settings that WFRP tends to shine in. It's very slight, though: the investigation leads to some travelling Nurgle cultists whose entire plan amounts to 'drop a disease bomb down the village well and run away', which feels more like an entry on a WFRP-themed random encounter table than the climax of an entire adventure. Skippable.
The Witch's Song: I liked this adventure a lot, and I felt that it really played to WFRP's strengths. It's set in an isolated run-down fishing village in the swamp, where the locals hunt bog octopi for food and whisper stories about the one-eyed demons in the marshes. The central conflict revolves around a witch hiding in the swamps and a witch hunter determined to track him down, but the real situation is much more complicated than it first appears. (I especially appreciated the fact that neither the witch nor the witch hunter is straightforwardly 'good' or 'evil' - they're just two damaged individuals who happen to be set on a collision course.) Everyone in the village has secrets, and for once the secret isn't just 'we're all chaos cultists': instead they stem from much more human motivations of remorse, resentment, and grief. It's all very vivid and atmospheric, and the PCs are permitted a lot of freedom in who they side with and how they deal with the situations that arise. The later sections of the adventure are a bit heavy-handed in their attempts to force the PCs to arrive just in time for various climactic events, but it would be easy to ignore them and run the whole thing as a genuine sandbox / powderkeg instead.
My one concern is with the finale, in which all this dense, character-driven tragedy suddenly gives way to a climactic action sequence in which the PCs have to blow up a tunnel in order to stop a Dark Elf fleet sailing through it. I found the sudden shift of tone and scale a bit jarring, especially as it only works if the GM rigs events to ensure that the PCs arrive at just the right time. Scaling it down a bit - replacing the looming invasion fleet with a single Dark Elf slaving vessel that's been moving back and forth through the tunnel, for example - might help to mitigate this.
Crimson Rain (from Liber Carnagia): I thought this adventure was interesting, if not entirely successful. It revolves around the PCs pursuing a band of chaos-worshipping Norscans, who have stolen a spear which has a demon of Khorne bound within it: the twist is that the demon is now reaching out and seeking a new host, and the more blood the PCs shed while in pursuit of it, the more likely they are to be targeted for possession. This kind of material is under-explored territory in WFRP, which usually assumes that the lure of chaos is something that happens to other people rather than the PCs; but the way in which it's handled here is rather clumsy, with the PCs racking up arbitrary bloodthirstiness points for the kind of random violence that would otherwise be ordinary PC behaviour. Still, there's probably enough here to form a salvageable adventure if one was willing to put in a bit of work.
Harrower of Thrones (from Black Fire Pass): A wilderness- and dungeon-based scenario in which the PCs must return a sacred dwarf hammer to its proper resting place in a ruined dwarf hold, which is currently being occupied by a band of goblins and has an ancient Dragon Ogre sleeping at the bottom of it. There are some nice touches, here - the guides who turn out to be bandits, for example, or the giant monster that emerges after the main objective is fulfilled to block the way out - but I always feel that this sort of straightforward 'dwarves and goblins in dungeons' set-up is the sort of thing that D&D does much better than any edition of WFRP.
Mirror of Desire (from Liber Ecstatica): Like Edge of Night, this scenario is built around a promising set-up, in which a mirror containing a demon of Slaanesh makes its owner so desirable that her four aristocratic suitors start behaving in crazier and crazier ways in order to win her affections. The gradual ramp-up of weirdness looks as though it could be a lot of fun: so the athletic suitor starts off just showing off his muscles and ends up grabbing and bench pressing passing PCs right in front of her, the rich suitor starts off buying her jewellery and ends up buying random houses so he can tie giant bows around them and present them to her as gifts, and so on. The rest of the scenario, however, is very contrived: it's all supposed to end up with the PCs getting trapped inside the mirror and having to find their way out, but it looks to me as though even moderately proactive players would find this very easy to derail. I'd suggest just borrowing the whole 'girl with demon-mirror and four enchanted suitors' set-up as a comedy B-plot for use with some other scenario.
The Art of Waaagh! (from Hero's Call): I love this adventure. An orc army is marching down the valley, and a dilapidated castle is all that stands in its way. They're much more tactically acute than orcs normally are, though, because they're being secretly guided by a vampire trapped under the castle, who wants them to tear it down so that they can free him from his tomb. (He's also got a minion on the castle staff, whose manipulations have ensured that the current commanders are totally unequal to the task of holding off the orcs.) So first the PCs have to sort out the castle itself; then they have to roam around the valley, recruiting the assorted misfits who live there - knights, dwarves, ogres, killer schoolgirls - into a force capable of holding the castle against the greenskins; and then they have to endure the siege itself, fighting off various orc stratagems (rock lobbers, goblin infiltrators, etc) while trying to work out what the deal is with these unusually-clever orcs, hopefully ultimately discovering and destroying the vampire before the castle falls. It's written as an adventure for very powerful characters, but I don't think it needs to be: what the PCs really need to succeed here is intelligence and charisma, not the ability to personally sally forth and bash the heads off black orcs. It's also a rare example of an adventure where the 'progress tracker' is actually doing something useful, because given the set-up of course you need a way to measure how close the orcs are to the castle, and then of course you need a way to measure how close the castle is to falling. It's all rather more heroic and cinematic than the default WFRP norm, but I'd happily run it as written in D&D.
The Enemy Within: This is much the biggest of the WFRP3 adventures, though it's still tiny compared to such behemoths as The Thousand Thrones or the original Enemy Within campaign. Its gimmick is that the main villain, the Black Cowl, could be any one of three different NPCs. The GM can either play fair and pick who it is right from the start, or go all Quantum Ogre and leave it undefined until much later, thus ensuring that the true villain is whomever the PCs least (or most) expect. Not that it makes much difference, honestly. Power Behind the Throne this is not.
Anyway. The Black Cowl has learned about a recently-discovered warpstone idol, and has come up with a simple plan. Step one: help the skaven to steal it, in exchange for them making half of it into a cursed bell clapper like the ones they use in screaming bells. (Why the skaven don't just run off with it, I've no idea. I guess they view the Black Cowl as a valued customer.) Step two: swap the cursed clapper with the one in the bell of the Temple of Sigmar at Altdorf just before a state service, thus hopefully taking out the Emperor and a large chunk of the Imperial elite. Unfortunately, he's also come down with a bad case of Evil Mastermind syndrome, so he's massively over-complicated it with all kinds of nonsense about elf-murder, gunpowder smuggling, fake purification rituals, exploding theatres, and manipulating cultists into manipulating beastmen into attacking the Empire, thus providing plenty of opportunities for the PCs to discover and thwart his unnecessarily convoluted plans.
The campaign has four parts:
- In part one, the PCs have to investigate a bunch of disappearances and other bizarre events in Averheim, as the skaven carry out the thefts and murders needed to create the clapper. This is well-handled, with plenty of colourful NPCs, and lots of apparently disconnected events that should effectively communicate to the PCs the sense that they are brushing against the edges of something large and complicated and dangerous. (It also has a much more credible take on 'skaven denialism' than most WFRP books.)
- In part two, they have to take the clapper to Middenheim to be purged in a ritual. This section is much weaker than the first one, with little for the PCs to do except follow the trail of breadcrumbs through the plot and occasionally butcher some very stupid chaos cultists. (If you were a Witch Hunter / Slaanesh cultist double agent, would you leave your chaos cult books and robes in the room you just hired at the local inn? And then wander off and leave them there unattended?)
- Things look up again in part three, a 'Rough Night at the Three Feathers' style tangle in which a whole bunch of events, each individually trivial, are made much more compelling by all happening at the same time. This section looks like it could be challenging to run, but potentially rewarding if you could get it right. Nothing the PCs do actually matters, though, because at the end the clapper gets stolen, the bell gets rung, and the PCs have to help save the Emperor from demons while the Black Cowl jumps through a portal to the Realm of Chaos. I'll take genuine player agency over a 'cinematic climax' any day.
- In part four, the PCs have to pursue the Black Cowl by jumping through the portal. This is new territory for WFRP, which has never used the Realm of Chaos as an actual adventure location before, but it gets handled in a very tokenistic fashion here: fight some Khornites, get tempted by some daemonettes, chat with a Great Unclean One, navigate a Tzeenchian castle full of traps, and then have a big battle with a Changer of Ways. The clever bit comes afterwards, when the PCs think they've returned home to Altdorf, only to discover that they're actually in a Tzeenchian illusion... and then a Slaaneshi illusion... and then a Nurgle illusion... and then, just at the point when they think they've got this all figured out, they find themselves back in the real Altdorf being attacked by real demons of Khorne, who they'll probably assume are yet more illusions until halfway through the fight. Then they kill all the demons and get rewarded, except for any of them who picked up mutations in the Realm of Chaos, who get handed over for execution instead. Sucks to be them!
Overall, it's not that great, especially compared to the original Enemy Within campaign. I'd suggest using a slightly-expanded version of part 1 as a stand-alone scenario, and stealing the twist at the end of part 4 for use in another adventure.
Coming next: Shadow of the Demon Lord!
Coming next: Shadow of the Demon Lord!
Tuesday, 20 November 2018
Echoes and Reverberations part 1: WFRP 3rd edition - the setting
My overview of WFRP 2nd edition may be finished, but the work goes on. So many different people made so many different requests during the last series of posts that I've decided to do a second series, albeit hopefully a shorter one, which covers what happened to WFRP and its spiritual successors after 2nd edition came to an end. Material I propose to cover includes WFRP 3rd edition, WFRP 2nd edition fan-content, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Zweihander, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and Small But Vicious Dog. There's a lot to cover, though, so these will be much more 'zoomed out' than the previous series.
First up: WFRP 3rd edition.
As I discussed here, Fantasy Flight Games acquired the WFRP license in 2008, and promptly killed off WFRP 2nd edition in favour of their own WFRP 3rd edition in 2009. This edition represented a major departure from tradition. Instead of WFRP being sold as a book, it was now marketed as a boxed set, which contained multiple books, special dice, and lots and lots of fiddly little components. It looked like... well... this:
In retrospect, I can understand FFG's decision to go with this kind of hybrid RPG / board game setup. The third edition of Dungeons and Dragons had demonstrated that it was possible to market RPG books in the same way that one might market board game expansion sets, with people buying books like Races of the Dragon simply in order to get the rules for that one prestige class they were itching to try out. D&D 4th edition, which came out in 2008, took this even further, with ultra-codified spells and powers that worked pretty much exactly like action cards used in many board games - spend this resource to inflict this much damage on this number of squares on the board, and so on. WOTC even brought out decks of power cards for players to use, and supplements which were little more than shopping lists of new powers for them to choose from. FFG were board game manufacturers before they were RPG publishers: they had the resources they needed to produce high-quality components, and they understood that you could charge a lot more money for a big box of shiny objects than for a single softcover book. Black Industries had given up on WFRP precisely because the old supplement treadmill business model for RPGs had proven to be insufficiently profitable - so why not abandon the old approach entirely, and replace it with boxed sets of cards and components that could be sold like board game expansions, instead?
The logic must have seemed compelling at the time, but it soon became apparent that FFG had badly misjudged their audience. The core player base for WFRP didn't want 'chrome': they were attached to grimy minimalism, to a game that could be played out of a single book, to character sheets scribbled on bits of paper and rules that you could still mostly remember even when drunk. They didn't want clever, fiddly mechanics, where you moved a token on a character dashboard to modify the type of dice you rolled when you played your next action card. They just wanted big books filled with long lists of crap jobs, horrible mutations, and hilariously violent critical hit tables. They treasured their memories of sitting around a big table with six of their mates, taking turns to narrate their attempts to brutalise some unfortunate clanrat in a sewer someplace, and they did not take kindly to discovering that the big, expensive core box for WFRP 3 only included enough components for one GM and three PCs.
As a result, WFRP 3rd edition seems to have been a commercial failure. A glance at the 'Strike to Stun' forum archives for 2009-13 demonstrates that the players there were much more interested in discussing WFRP 2 than WFRP 3 even during the years in which the latter was the official edition. The rate at which FFG released material for the game during 2010 implied that they hoped WFRP might become a product like their Game of Thrones LCG, with players buying boxed expansion sets every month or two; but the regular release of new boxed sets really only lasted two years, from November 2009 to November 2011. After that came two 2012 boxed sets, a dribble of print-on-demand card sets, and then nothing. FFG claimed that this was because they had 'delivered a complete game experience', but given how little of the Old World they'd actually covered in the course of their run, I don't think that anyone actually believed them.
I haven't played WFRP 3, but I have read the rulebooks, and it looks like a very cleverly-designed game. I like the way that the special dice cram lots of information into a single dice roll, for example, allowing you to tell at a glance not only whether you've succeeded or failed, but also whether you've exhausted yourself, whether there have been additional complications, and so on. But it looks like a very poor fit for what I - and, I suspect, many other people - want from WFRP. When I'm playing a scruffy grave robber engaged in a frantic back-alley knife fight with a chaos cultist, I don't want to be thinking about building dice pools and selecting action cards and moving stance tokens, as though I was playing some kind of martial arts master coolly contemplating which technique to use. I just want to roll some dice, and have the GM roll some more dice, and then listen while the GM tells me that I've just taken a knife in the face and that, furthermore, death from shock and blood loss are instantaneous.
It probably didn't help that the mechanics are often oddly disassociated. First aid, for example, can be used once per scene - but how long is a scene? Is a five day journey five scenes, or one? Can I keep starting new scenes by doing random things along the way, simply in order to give me more chances to use my first aid skill? Insanities have formal game effects, which is fair enough: I can understand why working with someone suffering from paranoia, for example, would be stressful for everyone involved, and having it add tension tokens is a perfectly reasonable way of representing that. But am I also expected to actually roleplay the insanity, by saying and doing paranoid things, or are the effects of my paranoia simply assumed to be abstractly modelled by the increasing number of tension tokens accumulated by the group? Locations have special rules, which are sometimes perfectly reasonable - taking physical actions in a crumbling building means a chance of injuring yourself - but at other times feel more like things I'd expect to see written on a square in a board game. ('Ballroom: whenever you regain stress, regain 1 extra stress.') The 'progress tracker' makes sense for some situations - whittling away at the morale of an attacking force until they give up and retreat, for example - but is simply bizarre for others, such as investigations. In the starter adventure, for example, the GM is told to 'direct the party towards an as-yet undiscovered overt clue' once they've moved five spaces along the progress tracker by uncovering five unrelated pieces of suspicious information. But why should noticing that someone is behaving suspiciously suddenly mean that I also notice the blasphemous books in the library? Once again, this feels more like a board game mechanism - 'trade in five minor clue tokens for a major clue card' - than an attempt to simulate a fictional world.
Setting-wise, WFRP 3 dialled the timeline back to just before the Storm of Chaos: but if you think that means a return to the low-fantasy setting of WFRP 1, then you'd be sorely mistaken, because WFRP 3 offered the most D&D-ified version of the Old World yet. Wood elves, dwarves, humans, and high elves - high elves! - are all given equal amounts of attention in the corebook as possible PC races, and there's a lot of emphasis on the fact that the characters are heroes, with the expected party composition clearly closer to the 'elf, dwarf, and wizard' mix of traditional D&D than the 'boatman, agitator, ratcatcher' mix of classic WFRP. The careers list is weighted towards traditional 'adventurer' careers like Witch Hunter rather than 'scum' careers like Bonepicker, and it is apparently possible to buy 'healing draughts' - basically D&D healing potions - in any Old World settlement. And as for the setting... well... I'll let the book speak for itself:
First up: WFRP 3rd edition.
As I discussed here, Fantasy Flight Games acquired the WFRP license in 2008, and promptly killed off WFRP 2nd edition in favour of their own WFRP 3rd edition in 2009. This edition represented a major departure from tradition. Instead of WFRP being sold as a book, it was now marketed as a boxed set, which contained multiple books, special dice, and lots and lots of fiddly little components. It looked like... well... this:
In retrospect, I can understand FFG's decision to go with this kind of hybrid RPG / board game setup. The third edition of Dungeons and Dragons had demonstrated that it was possible to market RPG books in the same way that one might market board game expansion sets, with people buying books like Races of the Dragon simply in order to get the rules for that one prestige class they were itching to try out. D&D 4th edition, which came out in 2008, took this even further, with ultra-codified spells and powers that worked pretty much exactly like action cards used in many board games - spend this resource to inflict this much damage on this number of squares on the board, and so on. WOTC even brought out decks of power cards for players to use, and supplements which were little more than shopping lists of new powers for them to choose from. FFG were board game manufacturers before they were RPG publishers: they had the resources they needed to produce high-quality components, and they understood that you could charge a lot more money for a big box of shiny objects than for a single softcover book. Black Industries had given up on WFRP precisely because the old supplement treadmill business model for RPGs had proven to be insufficiently profitable - so why not abandon the old approach entirely, and replace it with boxed sets of cards and components that could be sold like board game expansions, instead?
The logic must have seemed compelling at the time, but it soon became apparent that FFG had badly misjudged their audience. The core player base for WFRP didn't want 'chrome': they were attached to grimy minimalism, to a game that could be played out of a single book, to character sheets scribbled on bits of paper and rules that you could still mostly remember even when drunk. They didn't want clever, fiddly mechanics, where you moved a token on a character dashboard to modify the type of dice you rolled when you played your next action card. They just wanted big books filled with long lists of crap jobs, horrible mutations, and hilariously violent critical hit tables. They treasured their memories of sitting around a big table with six of their mates, taking turns to narrate their attempts to brutalise some unfortunate clanrat in a sewer someplace, and they did not take kindly to discovering that the big, expensive core box for WFRP 3 only included enough components for one GM and three PCs.
As a result, WFRP 3rd edition seems to have been a commercial failure. A glance at the 'Strike to Stun' forum archives for 2009-13 demonstrates that the players there were much more interested in discussing WFRP 2 than WFRP 3 even during the years in which the latter was the official edition. The rate at which FFG released material for the game during 2010 implied that they hoped WFRP might become a product like their Game of Thrones LCG, with players buying boxed expansion sets every month or two; but the regular release of new boxed sets really only lasted two years, from November 2009 to November 2011. After that came two 2012 boxed sets, a dribble of print-on-demand card sets, and then nothing. FFG claimed that this was because they had 'delivered a complete game experience', but given how little of the Old World they'd actually covered in the course of their run, I don't think that anyone actually believed them.
I haven't played WFRP 3, but I have read the rulebooks, and it looks like a very cleverly-designed game. I like the way that the special dice cram lots of information into a single dice roll, for example, allowing you to tell at a glance not only whether you've succeeded or failed, but also whether you've exhausted yourself, whether there have been additional complications, and so on. But it looks like a very poor fit for what I - and, I suspect, many other people - want from WFRP. When I'm playing a scruffy grave robber engaged in a frantic back-alley knife fight with a chaos cultist, I don't want to be thinking about building dice pools and selecting action cards and moving stance tokens, as though I was playing some kind of martial arts master coolly contemplating which technique to use. I just want to roll some dice, and have the GM roll some more dice, and then listen while the GM tells me that I've just taken a knife in the face and that, furthermore, death from shock and blood loss are instantaneous.
It probably didn't help that the mechanics are often oddly disassociated. First aid, for example, can be used once per scene - but how long is a scene? Is a five day journey five scenes, or one? Can I keep starting new scenes by doing random things along the way, simply in order to give me more chances to use my first aid skill? Insanities have formal game effects, which is fair enough: I can understand why working with someone suffering from paranoia, for example, would be stressful for everyone involved, and having it add tension tokens is a perfectly reasonable way of representing that. But am I also expected to actually roleplay the insanity, by saying and doing paranoid things, or are the effects of my paranoia simply assumed to be abstractly modelled by the increasing number of tension tokens accumulated by the group? Locations have special rules, which are sometimes perfectly reasonable - taking physical actions in a crumbling building means a chance of injuring yourself - but at other times feel more like things I'd expect to see written on a square in a board game. ('Ballroom: whenever you regain stress, regain 1 extra stress.') The 'progress tracker' makes sense for some situations - whittling away at the morale of an attacking force until they give up and retreat, for example - but is simply bizarre for others, such as investigations. In the starter adventure, for example, the GM is told to 'direct the party towards an as-yet undiscovered overt clue' once they've moved five spaces along the progress tracker by uncovering five unrelated pieces of suspicious information. But why should noticing that someone is behaving suspiciously suddenly mean that I also notice the blasphemous books in the library? Once again, this feels more like a board game mechanism - 'trade in five minor clue tokens for a major clue card' - than an attempt to simulate a fictional world.
Setting-wise, WFRP 3 dialled the timeline back to just before the Storm of Chaos: but if you think that means a return to the low-fantasy setting of WFRP 1, then you'd be sorely mistaken, because WFRP 3 offered the most D&D-ified version of the Old World yet. Wood elves, dwarves, humans, and high elves - high elves! - are all given equal amounts of attention in the corebook as possible PC races, and there's a lot of emphasis on the fact that the characters are heroes, with the expected party composition clearly closer to the 'elf, dwarf, and wizard' mix of traditional D&D than the 'boatman, agitator, ratcatcher' mix of classic WFRP. The careers list is weighted towards traditional 'adventurer' careers like Witch Hunter rather than 'scum' careers like Bonepicker, and it is apparently possible to buy 'healing draughts' - basically D&D healing potions - in any Old World settlement. And as for the setting... well... I'll let the book speak for itself:
'The greatest realm of the Old World is the Empire, a land of courageous men ruled by a wise Emperor.'
'Those who serve the Empire strive to defend it against many enemies. The Imperial armies guard the borders against invaders. Witch hunters scour the land for witches, Chaos cults and mutants. Roadwardens and shipswords protect the Empire’s highways and riverways from bandits and beastmen. However, the Empire is a vast place, and the Emperor’s servants cannot be everywhere.'
'“On my first visit to Altdorf, I was surprised by the number of races rubbing shoulders with each other in the narrow streets: men of every nation, intractable dwarfs and portly halflings. I even met a few of my own kind, as well as a curious representative of those elves who remained in these parts after the exodus. What surprised me more was how they all seemed to get along... well, most of the time.” – Suriel Lianllach, High Elf envoy'
'Under the current Emperor, Karl Franz of Altdorf, elected in 2502, the Empire enjoys a renaissance of strength and prosperity. Karl Franz realised that the Empire could not stand alone against its many enemies. His ambassadors have secured alliances with the other nations of men, and rejuvenated the ancient friendship with the dwarf holds. Envoys sail between the Empire and Ulthuan, and high elf merchants are no longer an unusual sight in the markets of Altdorf or Nuln. The Emperor also strives to maintain the Empire’s unity. Relationships between provinces have always been fractious, but the Emperor rewards those Elector Counts who display loyalty. Those who do not receive a visit from his stern champion, Ludwig Schwarzhelm. They never stray again.'
A great realm of courageous men ruled by a wise emperor, whose stern champion ensures the unity and loyalty of the nobility. Armies, roadwardens, and witch hunters all working in unison against threats from within and without. Formal alliances with the High Elves. Humans, elves, dwarves and halflings all getting along happily together in the streets of Altdorf. The Emperor rides a griffon, and, according to Omens of War, he also has a pet dragon. It's not quite the way I remember the setting from 1st edition.
FFG's business model of releasing boxed sets rather than books had a number of knock-on consequences. Most boxed sets consisted of a box of cards and tokens, plus a book that told you how to use them; whatever pages that the book had left over then contained either some setting information, or an adventure, or both. Even when the new cards obviously represented the main purpose of the set, something had to go into the book, and this resulted in a proliferation of weird filler material. So Omens of War, the boxed set containing the cards and tokens for advanced combat styles, also contained an oddly superfluous book about the armies and military history of the Empire, while Black Fire Pass, the boxed set containing cards for advanced dwarf careers, contained a whole book about, um, Black Fire Pass. (It's not very interesting.) Perhaps the most extreme example of this was the decision to bring out one boxed set for each chaos god, each including a book containing an adventure, some new rules - the disease rules, for example, were in the Nurgle box - and then a heap of filler to round out the page count. Get ready to be told that Khorne likes blood and skulls and also violence over and over and over and over again.
The bestiary draws on the wargame, and it shows. Chaos marauders live only to fight and kill. Greenskins live only to fight and kill. Demons live only to fight and kill. Beastmen live only to fight and kill. Trolls and giants live only to fight and kill. Cultists are fanatics eager to kill and die for their dark masters. Undead tirelessly attack the living until hacked apart. It's little more than a parade of cannon fodder. Skaven are presented here as a race of sneaky, paranoid cowards, rather than as the apocalyptic threat they were described as in 2nd edition. Compared to previous editions, the published adventures make greater use of adversaries such as goblins, dark elves, trolls, and dragon ogres. Coupled with the much greater emphasis on non-human PCs - there are even rules for playing an ogre! - this further enhances the sense of WFRP 3 as the most 'high fantasy' version of the RPG to date.
In conclusion - if you're looking for setting or background material, then WFRP 3 offers very slim pickings. In quantity, it's inferior to WFRP 2; in quality, it's inferior to WFRP 1. The system looks clever, though I have my doubts about how well it would work in actual play, but seems a poor fit for the themes and setting of WFRP. For fans of WFRP 1 and 2, the most valuable thing about it is probably the adventures, some of which are rather good, and most of which could be very easily adapted to other editions of the game. I'll cover them in my next post.
FFG's business model of releasing boxed sets rather than books had a number of knock-on consequences. Most boxed sets consisted of a box of cards and tokens, plus a book that told you how to use them; whatever pages that the book had left over then contained either some setting information, or an adventure, or both. Even when the new cards obviously represented the main purpose of the set, something had to go into the book, and this resulted in a proliferation of weird filler material. So Omens of War, the boxed set containing the cards and tokens for advanced combat styles, also contained an oddly superfluous book about the armies and military history of the Empire, while Black Fire Pass, the boxed set containing cards for advanced dwarf careers, contained a whole book about, um, Black Fire Pass. (It's not very interesting.) Perhaps the most extreme example of this was the decision to bring out one boxed set for each chaos god, each including a book containing an adventure, some new rules - the disease rules, for example, were in the Nurgle box - and then a heap of filler to round out the page count. Get ready to be told that Khorne likes blood and skulls and also violence over and over and over and over again.
With so many of the books in the line devoted to trivia like the military history of the Empire, the edition was only ever able to present a very superficial version of the WFRP setting, with a heavy focus on the Reikland province and very little on the wider world. The presentations of religion and magic essentially recapitulate the 2nd edition versions in a more condensed form, though I was pleased to see a greater emphasis on the way in which the invention of the printing press is shaking up the religious hierarchies of the Old World, and on colour magic as a deliberately crippled form of sorcery taught to the humans by Teclis to limit their magical potential. The colleges of magic described here are less restrictive institutions than their 2nd edition counterparts, doubtless to make it easier to play as an adventuring wizard; unfortunately, they've also become even more boring. (The 2001 Realms of Sorcery interpretation of the colleges remains my favourite version.) The chaos books, as I've already mentioned, are huge disappointments - much weaker than the 2nd edition Tome of Corruption, which was itself already much weaker than the 1st edition originals. They repeatedly stress that there is no good reason to join a chaos cult and you'd have to be totally crazy to do so, and then go on to blithely assert that all four gods have loads of cults packed with fanatical cultists ready to devote their lives to them for no damn reason at all. The 2nd edition presentation, where most chaos cultists didn't actually know that they were chaos cultists, made a lot more sense.
The bestiary draws on the wargame, and it shows. Chaos marauders live only to fight and kill. Greenskins live only to fight and kill. Demons live only to fight and kill. Beastmen live only to fight and kill. Trolls and giants live only to fight and kill. Cultists are fanatics eager to kill and die for their dark masters. Undead tirelessly attack the living until hacked apart. It's little more than a parade of cannon fodder. Skaven are presented here as a race of sneaky, paranoid cowards, rather than as the apocalyptic threat they were described as in 2nd edition. Compared to previous editions, the published adventures make greater use of adversaries such as goblins, dark elves, trolls, and dragon ogres. Coupled with the much greater emphasis on non-human PCs - there are even rules for playing an ogre! - this further enhances the sense of WFRP 3 as the most 'high fantasy' version of the RPG to date.
In conclusion - if you're looking for setting or background material, then WFRP 3 offers very slim pickings. In quantity, it's inferior to WFRP 2; in quality, it's inferior to WFRP 1. The system looks clever, though I have my doubts about how well it would work in actual play, but seems a poor fit for the themes and setting of WFRP. For fans of WFRP 1 and 2, the most valuable thing about it is probably the adventures, some of which are rather good, and most of which could be very easily adapted to other editions of the game. I'll cover them in my next post.
Tuesday, 23 October 2018
Bringing Down the Hammer, part 12: my own private WFRP
This is a rather self-indulgent post, which serves as a kind of addendum to the last twelve, and won't necessarily be of much interest to anyone except myself. I'm just going to use it to sketch out how, if I were to run a WFRP campaign again, I might draw upon the collective resources of the game's first and second editions to do so.
My own personal vision of the WFRP world would be built around nine basic concepts:
1: From above, life in the Old World looks good.
This is an aspect of the setting which was present in the original corebook, but has been mostly neglected ever since. There's a Renaissance in progress! The cities are growing. The economy is booming. The tax receipts are up. Did you see the size of the cannon they wheeled out of the Artillery School the other week? Did you hear how much gold that Tilean treasure fleet carried back from Lustria the other year? (The natives? Who cares about the natives? Just a bunch of stupid lizard-men too dim to realise the value of their own treasure...) The colonies in the New World are multiplying. The land is just there for the taking. We're richer than our forefathers. We're less ignorant. We have printing presses and magnetic compasses and much, much bigger guns. The world is our oyster.
The social elite of the Old World is complacent, not because they're stupid, but because from their perspective everything is going great. They have no interest in hearing the complaints of some ignorant peasant about how bad things are. The ledgers of their bankers tell a very different story.
2: From below, life in the Old World looks terrifying.
Everything's changing. The old certainties are being questioned. The old order is falling apart. People are swarming together into filthy cities where they die in their thousands of waterbourne diseases. There are things lurking in the forests. One of the sewer workers swears he's seen rats down there that walk like men. Lustria is a green hell where the frog-men will shoot you full of poison darts and leave you to bleed out through your own eyeballs while your boss sails off with all the treasure. The New World is a brutal wilderness where half the settlers end up perishing of starvation. When the ships went out last year they found that one of the colonies had just flat-out vanished. The only sign of where everyone had gone was the word NAGGAROTH carved into the side of a tree.
The progress celebrated by the elites is real, but it has been purchased at a terrifying price in social dislocation and human suffering. The poor, unlike the rich, do not have the luxury of ignoring this fact.
3: The threat of chaos is systematically underestimated
The official narrative is that the forces of chaos were vanquished two hundred years ago by Magnus the Pious, and ever since then there's been nothing to worry about. Maybe the occasional cabal of delusional madmen still worships the old chaos gods, but the idea that chaos could still pose a serious threat to civilisation is ludicrous.
The fact is that chaos has seeped into all the cracks in the Old World's increasingly unstable social fabric. Deep in the woods, in the vast untravelled spaces between the new trade roads, the beastmen have been secretly multiplying for generations, their numbers supplemented by regular influxes of mutants driven out of human communities. In the boudoirs of the very rich, the jaded inheritors of wealth and luxury gather to enact the fashionable blasphemies of Slaanesh. Down in the slums, the truly desperate know that only Fat Father Nurgle can save you once the fevers start. The traumatised veterans of petty wars dream red dreams of a red god on a throne made of human skulls. They gather in psychopathic mercenary companies. They will work for anyone who gives them someone to kill.
'Chaos', in other words, serves as a metaphor for the costs of social change. The authorities ignore it because it suits them to ignore it, but the threat it poses is much greater than anyone recognises.
4: The social order is teetering on the edge of collapse
The Old World is a powderkeg. Think of France on the cusp of the Wars of Religion, or Germany just before the Thirty Years War. The whole society is a mass of barely contained contradictions - rich vs. poor, old vs. new, Ulrican vs. Sigmarite - and it won't take much of a spark to ignite a general conflagration. The feudal order of the Empire, Elector Counts and all, is hopelessly unequal to the task of actually governing the dynamic, rapidly-changing place that the Empire has become. They cling to their outmoded aristocratic trappings as though they still believed that all the world's problems can be solved by a man on a horse with a lance.
A game in this version of WFRP wouldn't have to involve an actual Empire civil war, Empire in Flames style. But the obvious fragility of the social order, and the ease with which acts of sabotage or provocation by the forces of chaos could lead to catastrophe, would be a major theme.
5: The PCs are the people on the margins who can see the world as it is
Rat catchers. Lamp lighters. Sewer jacks. Pamphlet sellers. Grave robbers. Bonepickers. Roadwardens. Bawds. Beggars. Agitators. Gamblers. Outlaws. These people are the protagonists, because they are the only ones in a position to see the truth.
The upper classes can't see it. They've insulated themselves from the world's unpleasant realities.
The lower classes can't see it. They keep to their shops, or their farms, or their workshops. They close the shutters after dark and make a virtue of incuriosity. Bad things happen to people who step out of line.
It's the marginal, semi-criminal classes, right on the edges of society, who are most likely to get glimpses of the truth. The skaven in the sewers. The beastmen in the woods. The ghouls burrowing under the old cemetery. The oddly-proportioned figures who squirm back into the darkness when the lamps are lit. The furtive men and women who gather at the old monolith whenever the moon is dark.
No-one ever wants to hear about what people like the PCs have discovered.
No-one ever wants to hear about what they had to do about it.
And yet, despised and disbelieved as they are, they are often all that stands between human society and the forces that would devour it from within.
6: Adventures take place in the shadows
Hooks are often a weakness in WFRP scenarios, with writers having to come up with all kinds of contrived reasons for why a boatman, a footpad, and a printer's apprentice would ever be picked as the people to deal with the current emergency. In this version, I envision the default adventure as being a bit like Shadowrun meets Call of Cthulhu, with PCs serving as deniable, disposable assets for people dealing with things that they cannot afford to either acknowledge or ignore. When a community leader is confronted with a string of disappearances that the authorities have no interest in solving, or when a cleric needs the disturbing irregularities of one of his colleagues investigated off the books, or when the roadwardens need to know what's eating all these travellers but can't possibly spare any manpower to go riding around in the woods... they reach out to the scum. People with broad minds, strong arms, and empty purses. People who won't scoff at stories of monsters in the sewers, and who won't flinch at risking their lives for a bag of gold and a bottle of rotgut whisky. People like the PCs.
The default PC party would be a friendship group: probably a gang of socially-marginal people who regularly meet up to drink at the same low tavern. They would have a local reputation, not as heroes, but as the sort of people who can get things done for the right price. That should suffice to get them entangled in all kinds of awfulness.
7: Superstition is sometimes right and sometimes wrong
The people used to have a densely-woven fabric of folk beliefs that helped them to survive in the world, but now that fabric lies in tatters, riven by religious reformation and social change. No-one is quite sure what to believe any more. The nobles and scholars may mock them for it, but the people, especially in rural areas, still cling to their beliefs about witches and mutants and the Evil Eye. The clergy bemoan the willingness of the peasantry to indulge the antics of the self-appointed witch hunters who plague the countryside. If only their ridiculous superstitions could be swept away once and for all!
Given the premises this version of WFRP is built around, I think it's really important that sometimes the crazy-looking guy ranting about witches is absolutely right, and sometimes he's just a delusional sadist itching to have the girl next door burned at the stake. The folk beliefs of the people are simultaneously a repository of ancient wisdom unjustly scorned by a complacent elite, and the product of countless generations of shocking ignorance and pointless cruelty, and from the perspective of the PCs it should never be too obvious which is which. The relative tolerance of the authorities towards mutants, for example, should be able to serve both be a metaphor for their increasingly enlightened attitudes towards the kind of people who had previously been the objects of unjust persecution, and for their contemptuous dismissal of the totally valid concerns of the poor. (After all, from the perspective of people like the PCs, why should it be easy to tell the two apart?) The game loses a lot of its bite if 'Burn the witch! Burn the mutant!' is either always right or always wrong.
8: The PCs may be scum, but they are socially mobile scum
This is where the careers system comes in. The world is changing. The old social hierarchies aren't as rigid as they used to be. Just because you're a rat-catcher today doesn't mean you'll be a rat-catcher forever. You just have to keep an eye out for opportunities and make sure you know when to jump ship.
I'd be inclined to couple regular career changes with campaigns that covered long stretches of game time, with months or years between adventures. I'd want the PCs to end up as the kind of people who could say: 'Well, as a kid I worked as a servant, but then in my early twenties I got really angry and became an agitator, except that after a few years things got too hot for me so I ran off into the woods and became an outlaw, but robbing people never really sat right with me so by the time I was thirty I was really more of a vagabond, and life on the road changed my perspective, so when I was thirty-two I took my vows as a friar...' I'd want a real sense that the characters were out there living a life, y'know?
9: The setting is low-fantasy and low-magic
Most people go their whole lives without seeing a non-human. Dark elves are a whispered horror story among New World colonists. High elves are a sailor's tale about an unreachable magical island with a tall white tower. Wood elves are a legend about fae enchanters in the forests. Goblins are a folk tale about the spiteful little creatures who live in caves beneath the hollow hills. Dwarves are proud and distant isolationists, utterly preoccupied with their own long and tragic history that no-one else knows or cares about. Chaos dwarves are a weird lost world civilisation somewhere over the mountains. Magic-using priests and magicians are rare and rather scary figures. (PC magic-users would be fine, but they'd be very much of the 'magical academy student drop-out' type rather than official magi.) Vampires are a horrible rumour in the eastern provinces, rather than the open rulers of Sylvania. Skaven officially don't exist. And so on.
The antagonists for almost all adventures would be criminals, cultists, magicians, religious fanatics, mutants, beastmen, skaven, and the undead. You could probably run a whole lengthy campaign without ever having to decide whether, say, ogres actually existed as anything more than a legend.
Other Miscellaneous bits and pieces
The setting as a whole would be pegged to the mid-seventeenth century, though with plenty of flexibility in either direction. In particular:
My own personal vision of the WFRP world would be built around nine basic concepts:
1: From above, life in the Old World looks good.
This is an aspect of the setting which was present in the original corebook, but has been mostly neglected ever since. There's a Renaissance in progress! The cities are growing. The economy is booming. The tax receipts are up. Did you see the size of the cannon they wheeled out of the Artillery School the other week? Did you hear how much gold that Tilean treasure fleet carried back from Lustria the other year? (The natives? Who cares about the natives? Just a bunch of stupid lizard-men too dim to realise the value of their own treasure...) The colonies in the New World are multiplying. The land is just there for the taking. We're richer than our forefathers. We're less ignorant. We have printing presses and magnetic compasses and much, much bigger guns. The world is our oyster.
The social elite of the Old World is complacent, not because they're stupid, but because from their perspective everything is going great. They have no interest in hearing the complaints of some ignorant peasant about how bad things are. The ledgers of their bankers tell a very different story.
2: From below, life in the Old World looks terrifying.
Everything's changing. The old certainties are being questioned. The old order is falling apart. People are swarming together into filthy cities where they die in their thousands of waterbourne diseases. There are things lurking in the forests. One of the sewer workers swears he's seen rats down there that walk like men. Lustria is a green hell where the frog-men will shoot you full of poison darts and leave you to bleed out through your own eyeballs while your boss sails off with all the treasure. The New World is a brutal wilderness where half the settlers end up perishing of starvation. When the ships went out last year they found that one of the colonies had just flat-out vanished. The only sign of where everyone had gone was the word NAGGAROTH carved into the side of a tree.
The progress celebrated by the elites is real, but it has been purchased at a terrifying price in social dislocation and human suffering. The poor, unlike the rich, do not have the luxury of ignoring this fact.
3: The threat of chaos is systematically underestimated
The official narrative is that the forces of chaos were vanquished two hundred years ago by Magnus the Pious, and ever since then there's been nothing to worry about. Maybe the occasional cabal of delusional madmen still worships the old chaos gods, but the idea that chaos could still pose a serious threat to civilisation is ludicrous.
The fact is that chaos has seeped into all the cracks in the Old World's increasingly unstable social fabric. Deep in the woods, in the vast untravelled spaces between the new trade roads, the beastmen have been secretly multiplying for generations, their numbers supplemented by regular influxes of mutants driven out of human communities. In the boudoirs of the very rich, the jaded inheritors of wealth and luxury gather to enact the fashionable blasphemies of Slaanesh. Down in the slums, the truly desperate know that only Fat Father Nurgle can save you once the fevers start. The traumatised veterans of petty wars dream red dreams of a red god on a throne made of human skulls. They gather in psychopathic mercenary companies. They will work for anyone who gives them someone to kill.
'Chaos', in other words, serves as a metaphor for the costs of social change. The authorities ignore it because it suits them to ignore it, but the threat it poses is much greater than anyone recognises.
4: The social order is teetering on the edge of collapse
The Old World is a powderkeg. Think of France on the cusp of the Wars of Religion, or Germany just before the Thirty Years War. The whole society is a mass of barely contained contradictions - rich vs. poor, old vs. new, Ulrican vs. Sigmarite - and it won't take much of a spark to ignite a general conflagration. The feudal order of the Empire, Elector Counts and all, is hopelessly unequal to the task of actually governing the dynamic, rapidly-changing place that the Empire has become. They cling to their outmoded aristocratic trappings as though they still believed that all the world's problems can be solved by a man on a horse with a lance.
A game in this version of WFRP wouldn't have to involve an actual Empire civil war, Empire in Flames style. But the obvious fragility of the social order, and the ease with which acts of sabotage or provocation by the forces of chaos could lead to catastrophe, would be a major theme.
5: The PCs are the people on the margins who can see the world as it is
Rat catchers. Lamp lighters. Sewer jacks. Pamphlet sellers. Grave robbers. Bonepickers. Roadwardens. Bawds. Beggars. Agitators. Gamblers. Outlaws. These people are the protagonists, because they are the only ones in a position to see the truth.
The upper classes can't see it. They've insulated themselves from the world's unpleasant realities.
The lower classes can't see it. They keep to their shops, or their farms, or their workshops. They close the shutters after dark and make a virtue of incuriosity. Bad things happen to people who step out of line.
It's the marginal, semi-criminal classes, right on the edges of society, who are most likely to get glimpses of the truth. The skaven in the sewers. The beastmen in the woods. The ghouls burrowing under the old cemetery. The oddly-proportioned figures who squirm back into the darkness when the lamps are lit. The furtive men and women who gather at the old monolith whenever the moon is dark.
No-one ever wants to hear about what people like the PCs have discovered.
No-one ever wants to hear about what they had to do about it.
And yet, despised and disbelieved as they are, they are often all that stands between human society and the forces that would devour it from within.
6: Adventures take place in the shadows
Hooks are often a weakness in WFRP scenarios, with writers having to come up with all kinds of contrived reasons for why a boatman, a footpad, and a printer's apprentice would ever be picked as the people to deal with the current emergency. In this version, I envision the default adventure as being a bit like Shadowrun meets Call of Cthulhu, with PCs serving as deniable, disposable assets for people dealing with things that they cannot afford to either acknowledge or ignore. When a community leader is confronted with a string of disappearances that the authorities have no interest in solving, or when a cleric needs the disturbing irregularities of one of his colleagues investigated off the books, or when the roadwardens need to know what's eating all these travellers but can't possibly spare any manpower to go riding around in the woods... they reach out to the scum. People with broad minds, strong arms, and empty purses. People who won't scoff at stories of monsters in the sewers, and who won't flinch at risking their lives for a bag of gold and a bottle of rotgut whisky. People like the PCs.
The default PC party would be a friendship group: probably a gang of socially-marginal people who regularly meet up to drink at the same low tavern. They would have a local reputation, not as heroes, but as the sort of people who can get things done for the right price. That should suffice to get them entangled in all kinds of awfulness.
7: Superstition is sometimes right and sometimes wrong
The people used to have a densely-woven fabric of folk beliefs that helped them to survive in the world, but now that fabric lies in tatters, riven by religious reformation and social change. No-one is quite sure what to believe any more. The nobles and scholars may mock them for it, but the people, especially in rural areas, still cling to their beliefs about witches and mutants and the Evil Eye. The clergy bemoan the willingness of the peasantry to indulge the antics of the self-appointed witch hunters who plague the countryside. If only their ridiculous superstitions could be swept away once and for all!
Given the premises this version of WFRP is built around, I think it's really important that sometimes the crazy-looking guy ranting about witches is absolutely right, and sometimes he's just a delusional sadist itching to have the girl next door burned at the stake. The folk beliefs of the people are simultaneously a repository of ancient wisdom unjustly scorned by a complacent elite, and the product of countless generations of shocking ignorance and pointless cruelty, and from the perspective of the PCs it should never be too obvious which is which. The relative tolerance of the authorities towards mutants, for example, should be able to serve both be a metaphor for their increasingly enlightened attitudes towards the kind of people who had previously been the objects of unjust persecution, and for their contemptuous dismissal of the totally valid concerns of the poor. (After all, from the perspective of people like the PCs, why should it be easy to tell the two apart?) The game loses a lot of its bite if 'Burn the witch! Burn the mutant!' is either always right or always wrong.
8: The PCs may be scum, but they are socially mobile scum
This is where the careers system comes in. The world is changing. The old social hierarchies aren't as rigid as they used to be. Just because you're a rat-catcher today doesn't mean you'll be a rat-catcher forever. You just have to keep an eye out for opportunities and make sure you know when to jump ship.
I'd be inclined to couple regular career changes with campaigns that covered long stretches of game time, with months or years between adventures. I'd want the PCs to end up as the kind of people who could say: 'Well, as a kid I worked as a servant, but then in my early twenties I got really angry and became an agitator, except that after a few years things got too hot for me so I ran off into the woods and became an outlaw, but robbing people never really sat right with me so by the time I was thirty I was really more of a vagabond, and life on the road changed my perspective, so when I was thirty-two I took my vows as a friar...' I'd want a real sense that the characters were out there living a life, y'know?
9: The setting is low-fantasy and low-magic
Most people go their whole lives without seeing a non-human. Dark elves are a whispered horror story among New World colonists. High elves are a sailor's tale about an unreachable magical island with a tall white tower. Wood elves are a legend about fae enchanters in the forests. Goblins are a folk tale about the spiteful little creatures who live in caves beneath the hollow hills. Dwarves are proud and distant isolationists, utterly preoccupied with their own long and tragic history that no-one else knows or cares about. Chaos dwarves are a weird lost world civilisation somewhere over the mountains. Magic-using priests and magicians are rare and rather scary figures. (PC magic-users would be fine, but they'd be very much of the 'magical academy student drop-out' type rather than official magi.) Vampires are a horrible rumour in the eastern provinces, rather than the open rulers of Sylvania. Skaven officially don't exist. And so on.
The antagonists for almost all adventures would be criminals, cultists, magicians, religious fanatics, mutants, beastmen, skaven, and the undead. You could probably run a whole lengthy campaign without ever having to decide whether, say, ogres actually existed as anything more than a legend.
Other Miscellaneous bits and pieces
The setting as a whole would be pegged to the mid-seventeenth century, though with plenty of flexibility in either direction. In particular:
- The Empire would be primarily based on Germany just before the Thirty Years War.
- Sylvania would be based on Transylvania during the unsettled years around 1600.
- Marienburg would be based on the Netherlands during its golden age in the mid-seventeenth century.
- Bretonnia would be based on France just before the beginning of the Fronde.
- Norsca would be based on Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus.
- Kislev would be based on Russia under Peter the Great.
- Albion would be based on Britain under James I.
- Estalia would be based on Spain in the early 16th century, in the age of Cortés and Pizarro.
- Tilea would be based on Italy in the early 16th century, in the age of the Medici popes.
I'd use the first edition version of the colleges of magic, with 'colour magic' being a specialised form of magic used by Imperial battle wizards rather than the only form of magic permitted in the Empire. (I'd stick with the second-edition idea of colour magic inducing physical changes in its practitioners, though, which would ensure that the populace at large saw college magicians as little more than state-sanctioned chaos cultists.)
I'd use the religions as detailed in the second edition Tome of Salvation, though with greater emphasis on the Sigmar / Ulric rivalry as the setting's equivalent of the split between Catholics and Protestants. I'd revert the four main chaos gods to their first edition status as 'four examples among many', rather than having them as the great powers of chaos. Malal would be back in. So would the gods of Law.
I'd primarily use the first edition version of Bretonnia, though a shrunken version of second-edition Bretonnia could be included as the setting's equivalent of Brittany. I'd use the second edition versions of Mousillon and Kislev. I'd use the second edition skaven, but I don't think I'd bother with the second edition vampire clans.
I'd keep 'dwarf trollslayer' as a default character type, but would dial back the presence of non-trollslayer dwarves in the setting. I might still have the sea elves hanging around in Marienburg for old time's sake, though. I find the idea of a bunch of elves lolling about in fantasy Amsterdam weirdly appealing.
It would rain all the time. 'Protection from rain' would be the most prized spell in the game.
All PCs would begin play as the owners of small but vicious dogs.
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