Customer Reviews

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: A Grim World of Perilous Adventure

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've seen a lot of fantasy games, and a whole heck of a lot of RPGs in general. Probably over a hundred. And this is the best fantasy game I've ever seen (and easily the best I've ever played).

It supports political intrigue, mystery, horror, adventure, even black comedy, all with a strictly defined setting. It does not do "epic" fantasy, a la Lord of the Rings, but all it's tropes still apply. People used to more epic fantasy should definately not try to take metagame logic from that system to WFRP (if, say, a band of goblins that outnumbers the party approaches, it's alright to outright attack them in most fantasy games. Better to negotiate or hide in WFRP, as combat is quite debilitating).

The combat system is detailed enough to give the tactics one wishes for, but also light enough that one doesn't fall asleep waiting for his/her turn. Even better, the incentive to dodge combat all together, as it tends to be quite deadly. WFRP doesn't have the reputation of "Call of Cthulu: The Dark Ages" for nothing, though this title is a bit misleading.

In Warhammer, it's good to keep in mind that even the weakest peasant with a rusty dagger can still kill the mightiest hero in the land in one stab (it's possible, just highly improbable)

The magic system is corruptive and elegant. There is a price to pay for the powers one wields in the game. The magic system is not of the "Fire and Forget" variety (see D&D).

All the standard fantasy monsters are present, from Orcs to Dragons, some with very similar intentions, some with a twist. I highly recommend getting the Old World Bestiary with this product, should you buy it, as the bestiary in the core is serviceable but not very wide in scope (Mostly orcs, mutants, and undead)

There are a few flaws with the game, mostly due to this reviewer's pickiness. I have an all-or-nothing policy when it comes to randomness in character creation. This game has the vast majority of character creation as random roll (stats, careers, etc), but still allows the player to pick a very important aspect: Race.

Looking at the races, it is obvious that there is a succession of power, where Halflings/Humans are at the low end, and Elves/Dwarves are at the high end. For this reason, the first game of WFRP I ever played involved only Elves as characters. It wasn't even fully intentional, I'm sure, but everyone's powergaming roots were showing. So I decided to make Race random roll, placing the odds heavily in favor of everyone playing Human (around 60% chance), and my next, more mixed party made more sense.

That's another quick perception one must make, while balance (game balance that is) really doesn't have a place in Warhammer (where one character can be a Noble and another a Peasant), nor does powergaming.

After this, and utilizing all the random roll options in the book, WFRP chargen (character generation) was fun to my players. Chargen usually isn't fun, most veteren RPGers can tell you, but WFRP is. I still catch myself rolling up a character now and again in my spare time, just to see what I'll get.

It also seems much easier to GM/write up NPCs than other fantasy RPGs. I find ideas flow to me pretty quickly once I "got" the setting.

Overall, if you're unhappy with other fantasy games and want to try something grittier, or just want to try something new, I'd recommend WFRP. Until I played WFRP, I was completely burned out on fantasy roleplaying.

If you don't like WFRP after playing it, you are more likely an epic fantasy lover, at which time I'd recommend either DnD, Everquest, or World of Warcraft (either the RPGs or the MMOGs). If you find you like the character's roles to be "larger than life" heroes, I wouldn't recommend WFRP. In WFRP, a character starts as Joe Average with a tattered cloak (perhaps even Joe Belowaverage). He or she builds the role of "Hero" from scratch. It's a hard journey, one that most character's won't finish. If this concept doesn't appeal to you, I wouldn't recommend getting WFRP.

I played the original version of this game briefly in the 90's, and I actually got the oppurtunity to playtest this version about 4 to 6 months before the release, and they have made some very nice changes since the first version. A LOT of stuff that was tested that never made it to the original, but that's irrelevant in this review. I think one of the most important changes from the original was the magic system, it's a whole lot easier to use now, and generally more fun than it was in the first version.

One thing that I was extremely happy about was the fact that they kept the percentile system (D10's) instead of moving to a D20 system like most games have recently. It's a really good change to the normal everyday D&D type gaming. Personally I like the Warhammer lore and world much better than D&D, but that's just me. They also implemented this with the current rule set of the miniatures, so it's completely compaitable with all of Games Workshop's current miniatures rules.

For those of you that have never played Warhammer, it's a bit different than your normal leveling system. It uses careers to advance instead of levels, so for an example let's say you get 200 Experience at the end of your adventure, you can use 100 of that to advance skills (Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, Strength, Willpower, etc...) and the other 100 to change careers, or use all 200 to advance skills, or advance two careers. As you advance careers, new options for other more advanced careers open. Definitely a great concept. A refreshing change from your typical D20 systems.

This second edition of the WFRP ruleset is a simple, yet fun, role playing game (RPG) system. The rules footprint is a tiny fraction of d20, yet it covers all the basics of fantasy adventure in a clean system that consistently reminds the players they are in a dark and perilous world.

The only dice used are d100 and d10. Combat can be very dangerous, and even the most experienced character is at risk every combat. Should a player die or loose a limb, there are fate points which can save the character. However, fate points are very, very hard to get.

Magic is hard to control and dangerous, yet powerful and useful enough that the players will want to use it. They may pay the price in loss of sanity, attracting the attention of deamons, or getting their deity annoyed with their constant petitioning.

The Warhammer world is deep and twisted, with plenty of lore coming from the table top miniatures game of the same name. The default setting is The Empire, a fantasy take on the Holy Roman Empire. The dark forests are full of beast-men. The underground is teeming with rat-men. An army of chaos demons has ravaged the north. Chaos cultists lurk in every city, in every social class. The technology level is pre-baroque. There are black powder weapons and printed books, but swords and illiteracy are much more common. The world is corrupt, and powerful threats to The Empire exist within, as well as without, it's borders.

Game balance and fairness are given short shrift in favor of mood, atmosphere, and dark humor. One player might start out as a rich noble, the other a rat catcher. Yet if the party finds themselves searching for clues in sewers and tunnels under Middenheim, it might pay to be the rat catcher.

If you have played d20 for years and want something different and grittier, or if you've never tried a RPG, and want to start with one whose rules are easy to grasp, I would recommend this game.

Warhammer Fantasy is an angry game. The setting is bleak and forlorn and the system is very lethal making the lives of characters nasty brutish and quite short. Characters are as likely to die of disease or mishap as they are of a sword in the chest and dying of old age (anything over 30) is practically unheard of. Instead of strong kings and a centralized government the Empire, such as it is, is a patchwork of independent kingdoms with a weak emperor chosen by each of the electors. Religion, unlike many other fantasy roleplaying games that skirt the issue, is a very powerful force in the kingdom that is at the same time one of the most unifying and dividing forces in the Empire.

Gods and demons, or at least demons, are as real to the backwards, superstitious denizens of Warhammer Fantasy as they were to the backwards, superstitious people of the 14th century. Magic, while legal under license from the Empire, is hunted down and exterminated as heresy and chaos corruption.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has one of the best system-setting matches. Everything is based off of a percentage or D10 roll, armor provides damage reduction instead of making you harder to hit. Landing a good solid blow can lop off an arm, leg or outright kill. Magic is very powerful and consequently very dangerous - spells are only slightly more likely to work than they are to backfire with disastrous consequences.

The book itself is mostly mechanics - there is only a chapter or two of setting information provided. While this might seem to short shrift the setting the concentration of rules here makes later books more able to focus on the setting rather than simply serving to add only more rules to the game.

WFRP is historically inspired fantasy at its finest - hard-bitten, dark, depressing and violent. Hero is a relative descriptor even in the face of villains that are absolutes. WFRP is a much needed injection of bile in a hobby choked near to death with stale heroics.

WFRP is the game that brought you The Enemy Within campaign which contains "Death on the Reik" -- touted as one of the best RPG adventure ever written (second only to Call of Cthulhu's "Masks of Nyarlathotep" which is considered the best).

I've been a fan of WFRP since way back when Game's Workshop published the game in the mid-80's, and I stumbled across this newest incarnation earlier this year on Amazon. I'd forgotten what "Grim and Perilous" meant, but it all came flooding back once I got my greedy little hands on this hardback book.

This is not for the D&D 3.5 and the endless line of you-must-have-this! "supplement" books crowd. (Is it true the text D&D 3.5 has been dumbed down to a 6th grade level?)

Skullduggery, duplicity, horror, betrayal, face melting magic, and savage combat -- it's all still here. More gritty details and game mechanics have already been detailed by other reviewers, so there's no need for me to rehash the same. However, the post about the 1st edition book by Green Ronin Publishing having HUNDRED's of typos (sentence syntax, spelling, etc) is TRUE.

Thankfully, GRP fired and/or hired editors/proofreaders and quickly published the 2nd Printing which is virtually typo free. (Seriously, this reflects poorly upon GRP and their editors)

When you pick up a copy, just look inside on the frontispiece (title page) where the publisher and copyright information is located. In the right hand lower column it will say in black bold type "Second Printing". I've been looking in the mall chain gaming stores and it's been hit and miss as to which edition you can find. For example, one store had four copies of WFRP -- three were first printing, and one was Second Printing. But across town, the same store in another mall had two copies, but both were Second Printing.

I purchased mine from Amazon, and it was Second Printing.

The mood of the world in the new edition may still be dark, danky and disheartening but the game system revision is far from being grim, on the contrary it is quite resplandecent.

For the newcomer to The Old World:
If you have never played it (or any other RPG) this game is a very good start.
Rules are nice, easy and maleable, the setting is very enticing and detailed plus the whole world information is contained in one book. Action resolutions are figured out with 10-sided dice only, and in most cases, via percentage rolls. Magic is powerful and for that reason it is dangerous to use, and the system is entertaining and complex but not complicated.
All characters come from the same stock races as most games (Elves, Humans, Halflings and Dwarves).
Antagonists are the usual Orcs, Trolls, Dragons and other fantasy favorites plus a few other WHRP-specific creatures.
The greatest difference and what makes Warhammer truly unique is the use of careers to mark the progress and development of a character. You must select one of these to learn skills and acquire trappings and then, when you are done with that one, move on to a related occupation to keep up your life's progression.
It is set in a world resembling ours circa the 14 or 15 hundreds (somewhere between the late dark ages and the renaissance).

For the Warhammer veteran:
It is in essence the same game you played before with the radical exception of the magic use. This new approach seems to have made many a player very happy. I never disliked the old system but it appears that most people did. Well, the new one is actually truly good. It is vaguely reminiscent of the Ars Magica system where you must roll a difficulty number with a certain number of d10 dice (avoiding rolls of the same number) in order to cast a successful spell. And if not done correctly there will be dire consequences. Ingredients are optional to enhance the magic use and there are no more Magic Points. Magical schools make their appearance and if you have read novels you will see that they are those mentioned in some of the books, such as the Bright Wizards. Quite a bit of the world story and background has been modified to fit into the setting that the novels have created.
The occupational groups (Rangers, Warriors, Academics, etc.) have disappeared, as some of the details of creating a character such as age and hight. Free Skills are now given to only 2 races, and Fate Points are generated differently.
Weapon damage and armor absorption now goes up to 10. There has been a slight rearrangement of the profile, where Initiative and Cool have been deleted, and Insanity and Fate points included in it. Skills have been divided into Skills and Talents.

In comparison to the old edition:
HIGHS: The magic system is very entertaining to use and very detailed. Skills and Talents are very easy to memorize since they all work under the same principles so they quickly become intuitive. Skills allow you to perform actions and Talents support and enhance the use of some of those skills. Critical charts are now generic so missile and melee weapons use the same ones and the results can be read in both kinds of damage. And for the superficial of us, the presentation of all the books made by Green Ronin is superbly done.
LOWS: The Bestiary is quite stingy. Only a very diminished number of creatures appear in the one included in the rules book. If you would want to populate your world with mean critters you would probably need the Bestiary sourcebook (or a bit of time to convert the ones from the first version). In general this case is a constant low, many features that where included in the first edition now are modular, and only appear in the detail that they did in the original tome in several different companion books.

A note for all: Typos and errata are rampant in the edition I have (the first), so all you have read about it until now is totally true.

The new Warhammer roleplay book is an excellent return to the good old days of Warhammer roleplaying. Gone is the cumbersome magic system and the mediore careers and the somewhat clunky dice system. In the new system everything is done by D10s and that helps things greatly. I have high hopes for this new system and the company that puts it out especially when (at the end of the book) the publisher said that there would be new Warhammer material released more often than when Hogshead published it. If you ever played Warhammer roleplay I highly recommend this book as It improves the overall game while adding new flavor. 5 stars all the way!!!

The much awaited second addition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Green Ronin provided a much needed update to an amazing old system, while keeping the feel, flavor and speed of the old system intact. Vetrans of the system will find much to love with this one. Most of the old system remains; from Elves Dwarves, Halflings and Humans as playable races, to Advanced Carreers like Assasin that everyone seemed to want. What has been removed are alot of the limits of the old system. No more must elves be Good or Lawful, no longer must you pick a Warrior, Ranger, Rogue or Academic). The system remains relatively unchanged, with percentile rolls making up the majority of game mechanics. The D6 damage system has been replaced by a D10 system (eliminating the needs for multiple types of dice) with more wounds per charcter keeping this balanced. Combat has moved from open ended miniature style to grid based - with conversion rules for fans of the old system. All tests are now done based on a skill instead of a characteristic (with a %50 penalty if you don't have the skill), balanced with the addition of purchasing certain skills more then once to add +10% each level. Without getting into too much more detail this is an amazing, well needed update, that brings Warhammer back to the forefront of dark fantasy gaming. A great addition to a veterans collection and a great way for new players to learn that +5 swords and Dragon's hoards are they only game out there. One last note- Warhammer in the past was barely supported, with new material being released sporadically over periods of years. Green Ronin aims to change that and they have. With a new book promised pretty much every 3 months this is a great time for the Warhammer world.

The world is exactly as described: grim and perilous. You roll up your "dooming" at character creation, and spend the game trudging through the peril toward insanity. Of course it depends on your GM, but within the first six games of our first Warhammer campaign, three characters were dead, two were amputees, and one had lost an eye. This might not sound like much fun if you're used to playing essentially indestructible heroes in other games, but trust me, everyone loves it!

The percentile-based system is far easier to deal with than the mechanics of other games we've played; rather than an arbitrary target number assigned by the GM, you need to roll under the number on your sheet (with possible modifiers in degrees of plus or minus ten), so you immediately know whether you succeed or fail. The optional rules for drunkenness, insanity, and disease are often a combination of hilarious and disgusting. Not exactly adults-only, but definitely in the PG-13 range. This is the best pen-and-paper RPG I've played.

The Warhammer FRP Character Record Pack contains a 50-sheet pad of double-sided, black and white character sheets (identical to the one from the rulebook). It has a wraparound cover featuring a bunch of interesting little illustrations, for character inspiration, I assume. The packet is 16 pages, containing a title page, a 2-page recap of character creation with all of the relevant tables, six pages of name tables, two more pages of tables relating to birthplace, doom, and heraldry (which, sadly, are not given spaces on the character sheets), a 2-page spell summary, and two pages of combat action (very useful). The final page is the spell sheet for characters, which will need to be photocopied. It would have been nice to include some of these in the actual pad of character sheets, due to the limited utility of the rest of the package. I am giving it three stars rather than two because of the novelty of a pad of character sheets, something I haven't seen for almost a decade or more. It's this old school approach I like about the new Warhammer.