Warhammer FRP: Surprisingly Solid

Now that D&D 2024 is out, Warhammer FRP 4th Edition looks much better.

I used to be lukewarm about this edition, preferring the traditionalist 2nd Edition of the game and, by extension, Zweihänder. Now, Zweihänder does have a more open license (the product must require the use of the paid-for book), so it is the more community-friendly version of the rules.

But the 4th Edition Warhammer did not seem needed when it came out, and it felt a touch modernized for a game I played the original version of. I had Zweihänder, which was an OSR clone of 2nd Edition. I did not need much else.

In hindsight, the team at Crucible 7 did not turn the game into modern D&D 5E, as I had feared. The new edition is faithful to the original feeling, and they are not trying to modernize the game to the point where the Chaos factions are just misunderstood good-guys at heart.

If Wizards did it, I can see the game, happy Chaos cultists, alien Dark Elves, and goofy Skaven alongside Dwarves, Humans, and Elves, with brightly colored hair and visiting planar coffee shops all day. There are plenty of furry races, vampires, dragon people, skeleton races, ghosts, and half-demon tieflings in WotC Warhammer. Pathfinder adds the tired football-headed goblins, living puppets, and plant people. I swear, mass-market roleplaying is like eating at a horrible buffet where all the food is garbage and tastes the same.

By rejecting tradition, modern games have no foundation and look like AI art, bad anime, and Tumblr. A player has told me that 2024 D&D looks stupid now, and some have told me they don't know what the art is supposed to be.

Warhammer's tone has been kept.

4th Edition Warhammer is not a bad game.

The art is more melting-pot in tone and style, but if the tone is kept, I don't care since we can assume this is a later era when trade and travel have mixed the urban areas to an extent, with cross-cultural travel. It helps the game more since you can do stories of new people coming to the land, and those who have lived there are suspicious of them, with Chaos cults taking advantage of the strife. Players must solve these problems; that clash of cultures is good storytelling material.

And the slightly more diverse art, I don't really care. This is a horror game at its heart; all of them will be victims of some terrible fate, all the same. Heavy set or thin, dark skinned or light, male or female, no matter your personal preferences or culture you originate from, all are equally consumed by the Eye of Chaos.

There is an important message there.

And you can't escape it by pretending you are a cartoon.

Warhammer has leaned into the collector's market, which is a flaw. The game is playable with one book, though. Companies must stay in business, keep the books coming, and pay the license fees.

Zweihänder is still the better choice for historical games and my own world, along with a community where anyone can write expansions and adventures for the game. It has a defiant community with a chip on its shoulder. Zweihänder gets a bad rap, but it is a good game with a good community. Yes, I know you can buy the second edition of Warhammer, but can you publish books for it? Community options and gaming are good, and supporting them is worthy.

With Warhammer, you are playing in the Warhammer world, hands down. Why change the main attraction of the game? You are going to Disney World here. This is the premium experience, and it is easy to sell to others. "Hey! Want to play the Warhammer RPG?" My players said, "Warhammer? Yes!" These are more "normal people" players, not gamers who know the hobby inside and out. They know Warhammer. It sounds cool. They will jump at the chance of being in that world.

As a D&D 2024 alternative, or being stubborn with 2014, Warhammer 4th Edition is a worthy option to wash your hands of identity gaming and walk away.

Off the Shelf: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

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.

Mail Room: Warhammer FRP 4e

Beautiful layout, very nice full-color presentation, consistent artwork, iconography that reminds me of 3rd Edition (oookaaay), and an end to the book that feels rushed and jammed in there.

Only 36 pages of monsters? No meaty treasures and magic items section? I know, pages of magic items aren't in this game nor Zweihander, but the latter game has 243 pages of monsters in its bestiary. Warhammer's color monster illustrations are really nice, but I get this feeling the book ran out of pages and I am waiting for the expansion that fills the rest in.

Some have commented on the illustrations being changed for inclusiveness, and I think that is sort of a non-argument. Some of them are downright silly (with scrolls on top of hats), and Warhammer has always had that element of parody and Monty Python humor going on so you could see this is as commentary of the same D&D-style over-the-top fantasy tropes and be right at home. "Excuse me sir, why is there a scroll on top of your hat?" Not that the more inclusive notions should be played for laughs, because everyone should be able to play, but there is a right way to do this that I feel is a huge lost opportunity.

Change the World

What bothers me with the notion of inclusiveness is that they added those cultures into the existing world and didn't take a chance to expand the world's lore. What I would have given for this world to change, for a large Asian-themed trading company to take a part of the old world, for wealthy nations from African-like nations to arrive on the shores, a Hispanic-themed trading nation, and the melting pot to happen and we get all sorts of interesting things going on.

And don't make those perfect Mary Sue cultures, give them just as many problems with corruption and natural enemies that they are thematically interesting to play in all by themselves - I should not have to show up to The Empire to have fun. Let me play in these places and have the Warhammer experience. Create a new melting pot area, a new faction with serious troubles, where everyone is better together - but with deeper problems threatening what could be a better future. Make some of the Old World factions new bad guys who resist the new ways.

Change things. Advance history.

I know...heresy! Change nothing! But...this is a RPG. Take advantage of that. Craft a world that sings to those wanting to jump in. Give them interesting places to start, and let them enter the world.

Myself? Count me in with the heretics. I would love for this world to change, for new cultures to arrive and be fun to play in, and for the inclusiveness to feel like a natural progression of the world. This way, you can have a mix of all sorts of backgrounds in the existing classes, and you get that dramatic flourish of the world growing, coming together, and battling its demons together.

Let people play in this moment where the world changes.

Setup a conflict between the old ways and the new, and leave it for the players to resolve.

Even if this had to be an alternate timeline, I feel the entire game could have been taken in a new and exciting direction, possibly with reexamining some of the traditional Warhammer backgrounds (dark elves, dwarves, etc) and giving them nuance and internal conflicts that would make the game even more compelling while increasing the inclusive factor for everybody.

It Doesn't Feel all There

To me, the game looks cool, but it feels cut short and I feels misses a huge chance to take things in a new direction that would make for some compelling stories and fascinating RP in that universe. I feel it sticks to tradition and "what's safe" just a little too closely, and gets confused as it tries to paint the old world with a new set of paints when it could expand the canvas and create drama and history.

And then I feel the book abruptly stops and I want more. It falls off a cliff. Parts feel missing. I want the rest of this book. I want the other iconic races from the wargame. I want relics and artifacts. I want some of the fun from Mordheim and Advanced Heroquest. I want a big book of Chaos. It does not feel complete as it is, sadly.

Yes, I could do an updated world in other dark fantasy games, but for a new edition of a favorite universe, I would have loved to see things shaken up a little more and getting people talking. I would have loved the game world to expand a little to increase diversity in a way that mirrors history, but in a way is a very cool Warhammer take on a changing world.

More soon on this, but these are my initial feelings after giving the book a flip through.

Oh, and my book has an odd issue with the pages being warped some and sticking together as I flip them. Not ink-sticking, but just like the entire block of paper was cut strange and now wants to move as one huge brick of wood fiber. Odd. My book is cursed by Chaos.

Game Shopping: Zweihander vs. Warhammer FRP 4th

 

So...you want to talk grim and perilous? Obviously reading Rolemaster Classic and desiring a more realistic and gritty game, I am going to have to talk about two of today's dark fantasy greats. I ordered both of these and they are coming, so I will be able to compare them soon.

What follows is what I read about them and my though processes on why I chose one over the other.

Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play: 4th Edition

This was the game I went looking for, because I know Warhammer, own the 1st (and third) edition games, and when you are talking a dark, violent, and realistic game you immediately pick up a classic. And I heard they had a new edition out, how cool! So looking I went for this, and it led me down a path through a dark, twisted woods full of shadows and lurking eyes upon my soul.

And over there in the "customers also bought" section of the product page was barely the sign of another path off the main road towards Warhammer 4th Edition. Some game called Zweihander I never heard of? Nah, it mustn't be anything much. That path looks barely traveled, best to stick to the main road and keep heading towards what I know...right?

Games inspired by are rarely as...good...

Right?

Zweihander

So I peeked down the path, read reviews, and learned some dark secrets. This was developed as a OGR retro-clone of the Warhammer 2nd Edition "style" of game - but even darker. Even more brutal. Unforgiving. A world that not only hates you, but scars you, changes you, and twists you into a dark shadow of yourself. The reviews were glowing, but then again, I heave read lots of glowing reviews of games I own but never play. What makes this so special beyond healing being more difficult and it not being Warhammer?

Many said they would keep using Warhammer Fourth to play Warhammer, because why stray from what works? Some said Zweihander does it just fine. But one review in particular caught my eye. Zweihander can do all that, plus modern gritty fantasy such as countless novels, films, games, and other worlds. It doesn't feel like a Warhammer with the serial numbers filed off of Game of Thrones, The Witcher, or Final Fantasy Tactics. It feels...like a dark and gritty version of those places, worlds, and peoples. It is those places of darkness if you want it to be. You make it into a dark place of your own.

It is dark like Warhammer, without the Warhammer feeling or world. Without the call to battle. Just the darkness. And the despair.

And that opens up...options and possibilities.

Oh...really?

No Armies of Plastic Figures

I love Warhammer - both worlds. The dark and gritty one in the role playing game. And the one filled with giant formations of painted figures standing proud on the field of battle. It always felt to me like the world existed in two realities: a dark one with death and hopeless fear, and another brightly painted and lined up in formation. This always bit our roleplaying campaigns in this world, since we played the tabletop wargame, the roleplaying game saw its share of dwarves on motorcycles with a gunner firing a crank-fired black-powder chaingun on a rear pintle mount. The dark elves showed up with their metal battle garter-belts and whips. Chaos always fielded a massive army like the Soviets in East Germany.

Our games felt like Warhammer Fantasy Battles: The RPG.

They were fun, but grim and perilous went out the window. Those crazy mohawk dwarves showed up, with no fear, and whirled like two-axe wielding dervishes through formations of Skaven. I guess we were still kind of high on the paint fumes of all those figures we had to paint, or in some way we wanted to see those figures come to life in the roleplaying game. We were kids, we didn't know better, and it is a natural urge when the wargaming hobby and the RPG are so closely connected.

And yes you may have started out peasants and rat catchers...but...I am going to be one of those army figure heroes someday, hold a giant banner, hold a heavy bolter, wear my power armor, and...wrong game but you get the idea. We weren't even in the right mindset. We were heroes in a world filled with armies.

With Zweihander there is none of that. You build the world as a dark reflection of your nightmares. You pick the setting. There is no invisible contract that the world can't end as it is consumed by chaos because that would mean hundreds of hobby shops would go out of business and the next version of the rules couldn't be printed. Your world can end. This is your story.

Go Anywhere, Do Anything

The Zwiehander "it can be anything in the darkness" feeling appeals to me. That do-anything, go anywhere, explore the darkness within draws me in. Warhammer with its iconic monsters and setting is always kind of like D&D's cosmology to me now, the Skaven, Chaos, Empire, Elves, Dwarves, Dark Elves, and other icons of the setting are so well-known and set in history they feel like D&D's beholders, Tiamat, displacer beasts, ropers, intellect devourers, mind flayers, and other "product identity" copyrighted creations at this point. I am a fan of them all like I am Luke Skywalker or Iron Man.

But what if I wanted something of my own? Where would I go? It is hard to use Warhammer for generic fantasy because the urge to have the Skaven (tm) show up is too great when using that book. If I wanted to have the "rat people" to be the result of some mad experiment of a alchemist in a campaign my players would smile, say "okay", and roll their eyes because the referee is changing things again and this is a "not Warhammer" using Warhammer rules. Those are really Skaven haha. You know how it goes.

With a set of rules without that established, any monster in any campaign is what I want it to be. Are the rat-people the result of demonic magic? A failed experiment? Pollution? Genetic manipulation? They came from the dark magic jungle of evil across the ocean? Are they ship rats who evolved because of a cursed island and now copy those same sea pirates,. but insane with funny hats and parrots?

My next campaign they may not even show up. They may be something different. They may change size and be tiny rat people. They may be the enemies of the dwarves in another game. The players won't know and they don't know what to expect.

The game is mine.

The darkness is infinite and unpredictable.

A Choice to Make

That appeals to me, because in the true darkness you don't know what terrors lurk - and the nature of the darkness you face is unknown. As a GM, that appeals to me greatly. This is why I went with Zweihander first, and I will look at Warhammer 4th mostly for nostalgia. I love the Warhammer world, but mostly for nostalgia at this point. It will be fun seeing them like old friends.

Also Warhammer 4th is about 360 pages where Zweihander is over 600 - so Warhammer 4th sounds like the tighter rules set for a game, while Zweihander sounds like a novel in RPG form. While I enjoy both, there are times when a concise set of rules tightly put together appeals to me in a mechanical and play sense. I will hold my final opinions for when I see both, but it should be an interesting comparison.

Also, Warhammer was - and still is uniquely British. Zwiehander as I hear is an American author, but a superfan of the dark fantasy genre with new ideas to add into the mix. An interesting contrast.

Especially against the retro-80's Rolemaster Classic standing over there looking like Don Johnson playing Robin Hood. Gotta love that hair and those pastels.

Well, both books are in the mail and more soon.

Player's Pit: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game by FFG

Big Crate of Fun!

After some mail delays we finally got our huge boxed set from amazon of Fantasy Flight's Warhammer fantasy Roleplaying game deluxe set! Here is our un-boxing review:

Deluxe Packaging

I was surprised at the quality of the set! You get a ton of character cards, power cards, dice, high-quality cardboard minis and such. The only ding is they only give you 16 plastic stands or all the cardboard heroes, so we ended up 33 short. we found a deal on FRPGAMES.com that sells 10 stands for 3 bucks so we ordered a set of 4. One thing I love is that this big box game experience feels like getting a Christmas present with lots of goodies in it. FFG knows how to make game that tweak my collector's itch! I must resist ordering the GM, played, and monster add-ons before we've had a chance to get our game on with this....

Fresh Car Smell

The box has tons of room to add expansion books if you buy them, and from the look of the offerings, each one adds a different aspect to the game. they have a royals set for playing, royals, a war based set for military RP-ing and such. I love the focused product design aspect and you need to only add whats important to your game when you need it. My evil twisted royal idea may need the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Lure of Power expansion though... so....tempting....FFG...you are a tease.

*pout* Game Envy!

The whole production makes me wish other companies spent this much time on engineering the "out of box" experience like FFG does. I like the feel that you get when you get something like this. You feel like your going to have a ton of fun times with all the toys you get. You could imagine a spy game or even a super hero game with all the trimmings like this game has.

So it spoils me to the standard "hey here are two 400 page books to digest and deal with it" approach many roleplaying games have. I do respect if your a small game publisher and putting out a couple books for people to enjoy your ideas; but when you get to the big budget games, I would more expect a nice velvet glove treatment in the way Fantasy Flight Games does. It is an impressive set, to say the least.

Overall: Imposing and Impressive!

If you plop this crate on a gaming group cold, you'll have casualties if you don't do some reading and mastering of this set ahead of time. I suggest getting up to speed first in a private session s a referee and them like a seasoned and suave host, and with a little impressive swagger, plop this down on your friends and start in. My first impression is like getting a huge 10,000 piece puzzle for my birthday and then settling in afterwards to dig into it and have fun.

My First Character

Evil duke bent on carving out his own kingdom in the chaos of the Empire through deceit, plotting, and good old fashion politics. Done. We'll see how it goes with the initial session and post a second part when we get there!


Stay tuned!

~G

"Why not play a dungeon?"

We are continuing our playtest of the Warhammer RPG, and an interesting question came up during play, "Why don't we just roll up a dungeon and play that?" Before I get to answering that, let me tell you how we got to that question.

Our Warhammer play through is focused on the traditional Warhammer style of adventure, a roaming, story-based adventure that changes locations, situations, and NPCs rapidly as the characters travel about the local land while trying to solve a big problem. It is definitely not a dungeon, like an OGL game would use, but more of a series of situations the characters are free to solve any way they would like, and the outcome determines what happens next.

Contrast this with an OGL game, where a simple dungeon map is good enough. That is the adventure, and the reason for playing is to gain loot and get XPs. This is a similar motivation of D&D4, it is simple, and that simplicity is its appeal.

Let's look at Pathfinder and also D&D3.5 circa Forgotten Realms. Here the adventure de-jour is a roaming story, much like our Warhammer play through, but with an emphasis on throwing in the occasional dungeon run. A great example of this adventure style is the Pathfinder adventure path. It is different than a pure roaming story adventure in two ways: you still have a strong loot motivation, and dungeon interludes are emphasized strongly.

"Why don't we roll up a dungeon and play that?" Is a valid question when playing anything, and the answers to this question are often more interesting than the question. With Warhammer, there is no strong loot motivation - the game is very character based, and the definition of success and failure is 100% on the story and the world. There are no huge lists of magic loot in the game (with the set we have), and the things to buy in the game are limited. Advancing your character is a goal, and solving the next problem is what lies ahead. Roaming around in a dungeon is pointless in the larger scheme of things.

With OGL or D&D4, the same question is valid, and the answer is, "Why not?" There are strong loot motivations in these games, and the motivation to go out in the world and accumulate 'great power' is often the primary motivation for playing. This is a shift, and we have saw many players more motivated by power than story - to them with power, any story is solvable. D&D4's power cars, item upgrades, and focus on the combat minigame focuses the accumulation of loot like a laser.

Pathfinder has a more story based focus, thanks to the legacy of its adventure path setup. We still have a strong loot motivation, even better loot that D&D4 in many cases, but the players the game attracts typically are balanced between power and story based gamers. It is a fine balance to keep the dungeons in the adventure paths feeling like they belong in a story-based adventure, when the party wants to move the story along and not get bogged down in a dungeon crawl.

"Why not play a dungeon?" Is a great question, and you can learn a lot by answering it. Even the negative responses can teach you a lot about a game, what the game's motivations are, how the game expects to be played, and how the designers focused game play. Understanding what a game rewards and the behaviors it discourages helps you understand a game better, and increases the enjoyment you get from it. Asa  game master, this understanding is critical to how much fun your players will have at the table.