Beholder's RPGZone

Warhammer Fantasy Role play 2nd edition toughts.

Introduction: This is *not* a review, its more a personal opinion of Black industries' Warhammer fantasy role play 2nd edition.

Context: I had been reading and game mastering Vampire the Requiem for two years, from its release up to September of 2006, when some thoughts occurred to me. Last year I eventually realized that that game spawned no story/adventure ideas in my head for some unkown reason. I was always wondering what would happen next and had created a setting that was much more a sand box for my players to play in that anything else. I unfortunately eventually got bored of this and, strangely, didn't knew what to do with the setting (Which is very well written and very nicely done, it just doens't work for me). I'm sure that my players had countless ideas about what to do netx, but we never got to that point in details and since the setting was boring to me (again for some unknown reason), I never really pushed thing to move quickly and get exciting.

After that I got to read alternative fantasy settings, since I wanted to get back in that kind of environment, and read Talislanta. It was alternative allright, but not enough. I then read Exalted, the setting was wonderful, but when I got to the rules, it made me think of when I tried to get back to university to learn more about telecommunication and bailed out after a few months due to complexity of some wave signal calculations. Then I posted on forums to learn about the best alternative setting I could get since I really wanted something weird. I was suggested to look at quite a lot of games.

Here's a list for those who are interested to look at different games: Ars Magica, Artesia, Burning Wheel, Conan, Corum, Cthulhu Dark Ages, D6 Fantasy,Earthdawn, Epic RPG, Exalted, Fantasy Hero, Game of Thrones, Gods of Chaos, GURPS, HarnMaster, HARP, Hawkmoon, HeroQuest, Iron Gauntlets, Iron Heroes, Last Dominion for Hero 5th, Mechanical Dream, Riddle of Steel, RuneQuest, Secret of Zir'An, Stormbringer, Talislanta, Tekumel, The Black Company, The Shadow of Yesterday, Urseia for BESM 2ndedRev, Weapons of the Gods, Etherscope and WFRP2.

I have to say that Etherscope, Secret of Zir'An and Tekumel stood out as very interesting to me but learning that the last two no longer had support from developers and the first one was d20 based eventually forced me to look elsewhere. Then I looked at the last one on my list, WFRP2. I had bought that game when it came out but never ended up reading it.

This is when I started reading a few posts on that topic on rpg.net and suddenly had an urge to read it. I read the rules again, yes again, when reading I realized that I had read the rules already but didn't remember it and never ended up reading the setting at that time. So a quick overview of the rules later, I was in the setting. This is the first hunch I had that this might be a good game for me. Not alternative but the setting seems to be very deep and well thought out.

After that I bought Sigmar's heir and after reading that book, I was hooked. I decided while reading the last pages that I would run this with my friends.

I can't say what really got me so hooked up but surely it is a combination of many things. First of all, the dark setting, where the humans, halfling, dwarfs and elves are on a precarious situation, always on the verge of being obliterated by Chaos, The Green skins and the throng of Skavens in the under empire had a good attraction effect on me. Then, the rules are quick, dirty and dangerous which is something that was a requirement to me. Characters can loose arms, legs and head with a good combination of blows that can occur in a single round (for experienced characters).

Afterward I got to read the magic system which has a nice turn to it: the very interesting chance of causing insanities on the apprentice caster and outright Chaos Backlash on the more experienced ones. These chances has the caster weight in the always possible chance of impairing himself and his allies instead of helping them.

This also brings us to the insanities and diseases. This setting has a good discussion and rules to take care of these two all too common effect that can occur to a character in the world of warhammer, thanks to the Skavens for diseases, and which forces them to try to evade situation that could make them go mad or flee in terror (like senselessly fighting scary monster like in DnD for example).

Then there is the background. The books cover the history of the empire in a lot of details, and in different points of view (Sigmar's heir vs Children of the horned rat for example). This setting seems to be very rich and each page I read from the supplements is a good read and in some cases, drips with story lines possibilities to develop into adventures (Children of the horned rat and Tome of Chaos are two very good story hook books).

At this point, I was only considering this game in private, from what I had read. This is when I broke the news to my friends that I would game master WFRP. I had some different feedbacks. In a few cases, and from my point of view, it felt like a "not really interested" case, but since we have nothing else, why not. But, what was nice is that I asked to one of my old friend about joining us and the premises seemed to have interested him to at least try. So here I was with four players instead of the usual three I had in my V:tR game.

We created our characters and, instead of following the random rules, I let the players choose their starting career. I wanted to be sure that I would hook them quickly and felt that for a first try, it might be better like this. The entire process took approximately two hours for everyone to be outfitted and ready for action.

We started out with the first story at the end of the core rule book (as I intended to move on to Ashes over Middenheim (AoM)) and we go through in two game sessions. Then I started the players with AoM right after as is suggested in AoM.

What I can say is that my Mage player had to roll will power quite a few time to resist gaining insanity for failed spell casting rolls, one of the PCs gained an insanity point after seeing a carnage done by goblins, half of the group fled in terror when faced with ghouls in the sewers of Middenheim which also forced the elves to jump into the sewer water, to their utter disgust, to fight the undead due to the fact that the main warrior was running away in fear.

Furthermore, The roleplaying was very good from everyone and the classic reluctant relations between elf and dwarf got really well roleplayed from my players and it is very fun to see these unwilling allies work together. (I know i know this is really classic situation but in our case, this is the first time a player plays a dwarf and aside seeing it in LotR, it is a new role play situation for us old farts.)

In conclusion, I had comments on the part of one of my former unenthusiastic player at the end of the last game that WFRP was the game to play these days which was echoed by the others and that was quite nice to hear as I also felt the same. We are now at the stage where the PCs are about to enter the Skaven lair in the first chapter of AoM and I'm quite eager to continue.

WFRP seems to have blown away my feeling that I was going to stop game mastering due to boredom and got me excited for role play back once again.

On the downside, there are quite a lot of typos in those books. But considering the fierce situation that role playing editors and publisher have to go through to stay alive in this competitive situation, I think it's acceptable. Even though, I will remove half a star for this. Otherwise, this is as near perfection for my taste as it can get.


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