Customer Reviews

Realm of the Ice Queen: A Guide to Kislev (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Realm of the Ice Queen is wfrp supplement that is aimed at covering the Land of Kislev, the Empires closest neighbour.

After a run of excellent WFRP supplements, notable Tomb of Salvation and Nights Dark Masters, I had really high hopes for this book. Unfortunately they where is several area's dashed.

The book starts well, Chapter one presents a workman like brief overview containing the usual mixture of useful details and quotes, and Chapter Two is the section on history. There's nothing wrong here that I can see, and the two chapters provide a good introduction to the region.

Chapter Three leads into Kislev politics and its here in my opinion that cracks first begin to show. Obviously dealing with such a large topic in seven pages is a heroic effort, but due to the low page count this is not treated with wfrp's traditional depth of topic, and is essentially a list of factions and how they deal with the Tsarina.

This is followed closely by a chapter on Law, which is probably one of the highlights of the book. It's overview of the states twin legal system is pretty comprehensive. This includes crimes, punishments, politics and a section of the Chekist secret police.

Religion and Custom really more covers the Cults and Arcane Orders, and you get the feeing the small section on Birth's marriages and Funerals really belongs back in chapter 1. I think here it is worth pointing out the *Huge* improvement upon Knights of the Grail. Unlike Grail Damsels, Ice Witch's and various other orders are fully detailed. There is an issue here with the Cult of Morr, which this section says the people of Kislev never understand how the Empire can worship. Kislev city itself has a Temple of Morr and says that unlike the rest of Kislev Morr is well respected within the city. Erengrad has a Temple of Morr with no notes of it being unusual, and the stanista of Bolgasgrad is said to be dominated by its large Temple of Morr...

Chapter 6 is what should be the Meat and Potatoes of the book, the actual Guide to Kislev. Ironically, as with Knights of the Grail, it's this core purpose that it doesn't fulfil. It starts badly, choosing to depart fro the topic in hand by introducing a plethora of new exposure style rules which really should have been relegated to unobtrusive sidebars. It then compounds this by splitting the entirety of the country into five areas, often with les than half a page said on each. There's no gazetteer, no examples of population sizes, army sizes or any other information at all on any of the settlements, even the ones that are briefly detailed. Clearly this is a layout issue, with the most important segment of the book being crammed into less than six and a half pages. On the other hand, the Region Map, (as with all the Art work,) is excellent. It is only on A4 but as you can download a massive version for free, I feel that is scant grounds to criticise.

Chapter seven provides information upon Kislev's three principle cities. The contrast between this chapter and the former is dramatic, with each city well detailed. Indeed each is more detailed than Altdorf, which gets its own book. There is very little to criticize here, although the number of structures made of solid magical ice did strike me as a little off tone for wfrp, its nothing that cannot be easily ignored. Out of the three Praag is probably the best, rife with references to things such as Ariaka and even bloody Tzarina Katharina. Again sadly there are no population details, or indeed any stated out NPCs.

Chapter eight is the rules, which is sadly full of what I found to be several minor annoyances. Focusing on the positive, this does have all the required stuff for character generation, including a Kislev name tables which is fiendishly complete in detail. The first annoyance s the introduction of a New Feat called "Provincial Expertise" which codifies the +10 region rule in Sigmar's heirs. The problems with this is one, its not a rule that I think needs codifying as its an obvious bonus and secondly there are no guidelines to how to apply it to other characters not from Kislev, essentially meaning there's now two systems. The next section is equipment, which is pretty solid and contains a few nice new additions, New Arrows of use to any archer, the Berdysh (Not sure this needed special rules tbh,) and a couple of bows. Theres also info on coinage and a set of stereotypical Kislev items, horses, dogs, booze, tents clothing and a Trained bear. Prices all seem in line with OWA at least, so there's no uber inflation or bargain weapons here.

This section is however brings my second minor annoyance, as it is the first one where you come across the new "Dark Heresy" which came as a bit of a shock. Essentially the secondary stat line is removed and you get a line below listing Attacks, Movement and Wounds. This undeniably saves a bit of space, but the loss of clarity and familiarity makes me doubt that it is worth it.

New Careers also suffers from a change of template, first the "Career Entry" section has been moved above the profile, which I find quite annoying when trying to ascertain Career paths at a glance. But by far the second most annoying thing about this book is they have decided to replace the nice easy to comprehend list of Trappings with a piece of fluff text telling you more about the Career. This is to me a disastrous choice of layout, not only taking up more space but actually managing to provide less information. Terms such as "some" and "most" dominate these descriptions, leaving the poor GM and Player actually at a loss for what the exact trappings are supposed to be.

Apart from that the Careers are pretty well done. I question the hard requirement in the special conditions to go through Noble to be an Ambassador, due to some Tilean Republics not having any, and on top of that how exactly are the people of a far off land supposed to magically know who is a noble and who is a charlatan? The Ice Witch Career gets to go from +2 magic straight to +4 which, after my own playing about with the concept, strikes me as a big mistake. Oh and two careers have as entry routes "any" which I rather feel should have read "none"

On the plus side, all the careers do fill a new niche, and I especially like that fact that Horse Coper is now official. (Also a Career for Bears!) The only other major addition here is a new Academic Knowledge (Spirits), which tbh probably will not see much play outside of Kislev.

Chapter Nine is magic, and again its worth noting that this chapter is a Huge Huge improvement upon Knights of the Grail just by existing. It introduces a new type of magic called witch lores, which get 8 spells and there own table to roll on when you get a casting double. This seems to be the basis for a start of the much awaited third way of magic, and is to be commended. Petty Magic (Ice) and Petty magic (Hag) combine there own spells with those from Petty Magic (Arcane and Hedge)

There's some nice Lesser Magic spells, including Ghost Shield which operates very much as an old style Zone spell and Glamour which is probably going to make the compulsory list of spells to buy for every evil NPC. The two witch laws seem pretty balanced and it's nice to see some old Ice Magic favourites. The Three major Kislev gods also get Divine Lores with six spells each, more than enough I would have thought.

Chapter Ten is a scenario, which looks OK. As I am not a fan of scenarios I will skip over it apart from to note that this is the only source of Stated NPCs in the whole book. After seeing Manfred detailed in Night's Dark Masters I really did hope to see the Ice Queen detailed in this book, and I think it's a shame she is not.

Finally there's a Bestiary at the back. Some of these, (Elk, Bear, Troll,) seem mainly redundancy for people without the Old World Bestiary. Of the rest, Eyeless ones are blind undead, Frost Fiends are Bat winged, White furred and otherwise un described, Glimmers are a new type of Ghost, Indrinka are a type of horse that deliberately cause avalanches and Nippers are small imp things that lay eggs in your flesh. None of these massively grabbed me tbh and all seemed a bit D&D. The last on the list though, the Firebird is utterly inspired. And is a prime example of how to take something and warhammerfy it correctly. It will certainly see play in my campaign... somehow.

In summery, the book has a nice collection of misc stuff with a kislev theme, but as with the dire Knights of the Grail before it, it actually fails in its prime job, which is to cover the region in enough depth to actually easily base a campaign there. Too much of this book is dedicated to providing bells and whistles and next to none is spent actually doing the hard work so the GM wont have too.

A good effort and a marked improvement, but still no where near to claiming Sigmar's Heirs crown.

** Usability
*** Liked

This one of their best guides for outside the Empire. It covers everything a GM need to run a game up north, or just visit. It also has everything a player needs for backgrounds. Includes rules for ice witches, hags, and a number of additional careers. Nothing you need to run a game, but a good resource, and good read.

Given Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's long history of bouncing from publisher to publisher, this might be one of the last few supplements that are worth picking up. Realm of the Ice Queen is a sourcebook for Kislev, which in the WFRP Old World is something like Czechloslovakia and something like historical Russia. Standing to the north and east of the Empire proper, Kislev stands directly in the way of the raving hordes of Chaos, and as you might expect this makes the people of that region a little different. Packed with cultural details including politics, military factions, ethnic and regional groups, new Kislev-specific careers and even a new form of magic for spellcasters, ROTIQ is an excellent sourcebook and if you're a WFRP player or collector, you won't be disappointed. Better than "Night's Dark Masters" and just as interesting as the "Tome of Corruption" or "Children of the Horned Rat". And since Black Industries isn't doing WFRP any more, this may be one of the last really decent supplements to come out for the game-- it remains to be seen whether the new publisher will continue to put out books of the same quality and excellence. So go get this one, and the "Tome of Salvation" and keep your fingers crossed for proper support from the new publisher, FFG.