I have always been partial to Zweihänder, but WRFP is back on my table now that a few of my current 5E players have shown interest. It is harder to sell Zweihänder to people who have no idea what it is other than "like Warhammer."
And everyone knows what Warhammer is.
Why not just play Warhammer?
When you play these other adjacent games, normal people ask, "What is the problem?" And that becomes, "What is your problem?" When introducing normal, outside gaming people to the hobby, most people need to be taken in using the familiar things first. I have even seen them resist Shadowdark, when D&D seems like "the game everyone plays." Even though I know Shadowdark is the game they would enjoy more.
Getting "I know D&D" players into Warhammer and possibly Call of Cthulhu or Cyberpunk is easier than any other game. Warhammer is easy since everyone knows what it is, and it is a "brand" that strongly sells its assumptions and world-building. Warhammer is the Applebee's to D&D's McDonald's.
I can easily bring people to eat at either, given their mood.
I still like Zweihänder. It is a better game if you homebrew your setting since it hits the generic setting tones. Overall, it is a solid system and well-supported. Getting a group into Warhammer is far easier for me, and I am not explaining the theme while trying to convince them to play something else just like it. If Zweihänder were a restaurant, it would be a regional chain that was very good, but few people outside the area know what it is, like Chunky Jones' Chuckwagon, a name I just pulled out of my hat. This place has a giant glass-enclosed pie counter, chicken-fired steak, hot cinnamon apple side dishes, baked potatoes, and comfort food up and down the menu. You know the place.
Some people deride it as a copycat game, but they have an open license, and as a creator who supports open and free games, that means something. We need to support those who help indie creators and open gaming.
It is nice that they did not modernize the Warhammer world for D&D players. While there is diversity in the human races, no furry animals, dragon people, angels with wings, half-demons, or other silly animal-shaped cookie-cutter fantasy races are running around happy land. The world does not look like it is on psychedelic mushrooms with pseudo dragons hanging off blacksmith signs and angels smiling at devil people while happy cloud half-giants float overhead.
D&D species have become the same dough, new shape, and nothing special. Even humanoid races in the 2024 Monster Manual have been erased out of fear and replaced with generic stat blocks, where it is, "Who cares if you say orc or goblin? We are fighting the fighter template again."
And someone, somewhere, down the line, will Kickstarter a patch for that with "ultimate humanoid monsters" and bring back the Monster Manual orcs, goblins, and others, what we had, minus sixty to hundred dollars for the hardcovers. I am sick of relying on the community to patch a broken game or being intentionally limited by a design team that did not care about the game's history.
The new 2024 D&D with its fake diversity sucks. It is "anything-ism" and a flavorless slop of fantasy gruel art that looks like the happy AI remix machine made it. And it seems so dumb that it turns off some of my new players. One said, "D&D looks stupid now."
D&D 2024 is filled with corporate blandification.
People sit there and take what they are given to be a part of a group. Being a fan of something these days sucks. It means there will be an expiration date for your love for something. Instead of accepting the death of something you love, the profit-squeezing necromancers of Wall Street will keep it alive and torture your memories of it in an abusive relationship with an undead franchise.
D&D 2014 was that expiration date, and even then, the later parts of that game are dead on the vine. Some of the Open 5E alternatives are the true heirs to the legacy.
Warhammer sticks to its lore and guns, slightly updating the look, but keeping its heart. Orcs and goblins are evil, and that will never change. Chaos will corrupt your soul and turn you into a monster. Goblins, skaven, orcs, dark elves, chaos cultists, trolls, chaos dwarves, and other evil kin will never be player options. Good. I want clarity. If something has demon blood and is growing horns, it isn't a happy coffee shop owner who makes your latte. I want players to see a band of plague skaven, see the terror in their eyes, and sense their hearts dropping to the floor as they know what comes next.
This is Call of Cthulhu mixed with D&D.
Kill or be killed, with everything you know and love being destroyed if you fail.
Chaos will take it all.
That is Warhammer, and it won't change. The 4th Edition may look a little more diverse, but the same heart is in there, and the same blood runs through its veins. I see it as a later world, after trade and commerce have opened new lands, and the cities have become melting pots of cultures and people. The hinterlands and rural areas will still remain more homogenized and monocultural, as history teaches us, but that is good since, from a story perspective, that sets up clashes in cultures and kin.
Is this a chaos cult, or is it people getting used to new people setting down roots? That is good stuff—the real meat that means a lot to people today. Do you want to be the good guys and help people live together, or do you play into the hands of chaos and blame the innocent for acts they did not commit?
The game company does not try to hide that fact or make it impossible for you to tell these stories. Players sit there and don't see orcs and dwarves fighting; they just see a bunch of generic fighter templates on each side rolling meaningless dice, propped up by a DM trying to do their best with rules that hate creativity. The game seems embarrassed by the simple facts of history to the point that the writers would have panic attacks and feel they were personally attacked if someone pointed this out, or included enough cultural diversity that telling these stories feels easy and natural.
Warhammer is still worthy.
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