There is something to say about a game that inspires you to create great things. I don't get the same feeling with Warhammer FRP either. Low magic, rare monsters, sparse healing, and the ever-present force of corruption twisting souls and changing the land. Anytime I open the Zweihander book, I am in this game. The mood is there. It inspires me in a way very few games do.
It is a great death metal album that transports you to another world.
Warhammer FRP is well-made, but it has a different feel for me. The game feels silly in parts, and it panders to the self-insert crowd a little too much. The danger of "seeing yourself in the game" always leads the game down a path of player protection, since no one wants to see their alternate identity avatar die. We were warned against "putting ourselves in the game" in the 1980s, and that logic has not changed. It is dangerous, especially for those who need an excellent grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality.
Player protection is easy healing, abundant magic, and fast resource recovery. There is also an emphasis on "fun combat," like a video game, where the players are meant to win every fight. Once you get player protection, you get the strangely cute player races since no one wants to see their Pokemon-humanoid talking animal hybrid PC die.
And the entire game slips into this planar haze of the multiverse, and nothing is relatable or means anything anymore. Nothing seems grounded in reality. The game is a snarky young-adult cartoon, safe for everyone, and doesn't reflect anything relatable in reality.
You get JJ MacGuffin plots like, "The Planar Stone is missing!"
Who knows what it does, and who cares?
In ten years, all this cute-multiverse cartoon stuff will look dated, just like all the rule-of-cool stuff they made years ago looks dated. Time to rebuy a new edition.
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| AI Art by @nightcafestudio |
The classics will always look in style. Dark elves will always be extraordinary. Dwarves will always be themselves. High elves reflect a part of who we are. Halflings are always great. Evil humanoids are a symbol of hatred and violence. I don't need an alien fantasy race to express relatable traits; I have them all with the four or five classic fantasy staples - and the standard types of monsters.
The classics reflect our nature.
You can't escape that, no matter how cartoonish the facade becomes.
In fact, once you start embracing the cartoonish, the tremendous variety of human ancestries becomes less critical. In a way, the cartoonish erases cultural diversity. We no longer need to deal with human cultural differences with all these funny animal masks and pastel-skinned planar character options.
It is too easy to pick a cartoon and ignore something based on who we are as people.
I am moving away from the silly and into a more realistic and darker base for my creations. I don't want theme park worlds. I don't wish to equate magic with technology. A campaign world saves me no time if I don't use it. And I don't want cute and cartoony; there is almost too much of it nowadays.
With Zweihander, I don't have a campaign world; I make it all up myself. The world I like best? It is an everyday world with average run-of-the-mill places. Really an Anytown with little danger around.
One of the incredible suggestions in this game is to have corruption spread in the game world as it is accumulated by the PCs and NPCs of the game. In this world, no monsters exist. Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and others live in harmony.
But as different areas of the world gather corruption, evil crawls out of the depths of the earth. Goblins begin coming out of caves. More corruptive forces and dark cults emerge. Animals are twisted into horrible beasts. Even more and an army of orcs builds a fort. Elves fall to darkness and become dark elves. Where did they all come from? Do I need a map saying, "Orcs here, elves there?" No. They come from corruption and nightmares.
Fight the corruption, and you can stop the scourge before it consumes the land. You have a chance of saving a land falling to corruption, but it will take work, and sacrifices need to be made. Fail, and your game world has a new evil kingdom on the borders of others.
I only need some of this Warhammer FRP lore - it is excellent stuff, but I like making my own stories and worlds. Too many times, I will buy giant sandbox campaign worlds and have everything laid out, and I never use them. They feel static and set in stone. Everything has a place and can never really change (until the next edition, please buy so you can keep up).
Zweihander is DIY dark fantasy cool that keeps you on a low-power base. It is not a premade world and setting, it is an incredible set of rules used to craft your own worlds.
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