First review: Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 3rd Edition

Welcome, dear readers to my first review. The format will almost certainly evolve over time, and formally reviewing games is not something I have ever really done before, so if you think it needs some changes or different focus, please feel free to reply below. Now, to business:

Warhammer fantasy roleplay 3rd edition. (WFRP)















System: The basics

Right, the basic system is a simple one. You roll a bunch of dice and compare the symbols to see what happened. But as ever the devil is in the details. The dice in question are weird custom dice, and the symbols are weird custom symbols and this annoyed a lot of people. Specifically, what you do is:

1. Look up how many stat dice you have. Pick up this many blue d8 dice.
2. Look up how many skill trainings you have. Pick up that many yellow d6.
3. Look if you have any advantages, if you do, add the white d6s.
4. Look at your stance, conservative or recklesses, and turn that many stat dice into the red d10s(reckless) or green d10s(conservative). This is your skill pool.
5. Your Gm will tell you the difficulty, which tells you how many of the purple d8s you pick up.
6. They will also tell you about any disadvantage, and how many black d6s that is worth.
7. Roll all of that, and look at the symbols they show.

Right, these dice will show some symbols. Those symbols tell you how it went. They go like this:

Hammer: This is a success.

Eagle: This is an advantage. (boon)

Twin tailed comet: This is a critical success.

Crossed swords: This is a fail. It cancels a hammer.

Skull: This is a disadvantage, it cancels an advantage. If you get more skulls than eagles, then you will get some bad side effect. (bane)

Chaos star: This is a critical failure.

They look like this:

So, these create a bunch of different possible responses. Either:

a) You got more hammers than crossed swords: You succeeded! The roll does what it said it would! More successes is more good.

b) You got the same number or more crossed swords: You failed.

At the same time you can roll:

a) More eagles than skulls: Something good happened. This is the and part of yes-and or no-and. This good thing is not a success, but it is some other good advantage.

b) More skulls than eagles: Something bad happened. It could still succeed (if you get more hammers) but something else happened.

What does this all mean though? Well it means that there are two axis on each roll. You can either succeed or you can fail. You can also either get some benefit or some other drawback. This leads itself neatly to each roll having a yes and or yes but sort of response to the question of if the action succeeded. This means that there is more to interpret on every roll, and if you as a gm had to think of the possible side effect to every single roll then this would be difficult and help with burn out. Helpfully, there is a default “damage” that can be dealt with disadvantage and healed with advantage called stress and fatigue. This means if the side effect from banes is not something that would be good for the game right now, or would drag you down a side alley of things which are not interesting, just do them some stress and move the hell on.

But when something has interesting side effects possible, then the boons and banes (advantage and disadvantage) are there, ready to give a mechanical kicker for that.

How does this system play? Well, it takes about 1-2 sessions to become intuitive and start looking for cancelling signs in your dice pool, but when you have done that then it starts to become both very fast and good at fleshing out the details of side effects on a roll. The system makes a huge deal out of the fact that you can also work out where your success originated, from skill or luck or natural ability, but in play, I have not seen anyone being too bothered about that, because how do you tell which one was the un-cancelled success?

Success and failure do not seem too swingy, and there seems to be a good chance at succeeding at things. In fact, it can become exceedingly unlikely that on normal checks a specialist will not succeed, which in many ways feels a bit un-warhammer to me, but so it goes. Difficult rolls can be suitably difficult, and people breeze past simple rolls.

The criticals do not cancel. This can make some things a bit complex. My gm once set me a 2 difficulty (average) check to climb a wall. But, he said, a chaos star meant you fell down. Now, since there is a 1/8 chance of rolling a chaos star, there is a 15/64 chance of a 2 difficulty getting a chaos star. So nearly a 1 in 4 chance of you falling, regardless of your skill or ability. Which was deeply annoying. But this shows the problem that you get a lot of chaos stars, which are not cancelled. This can make life very disaster prone, and make a lot of work for the gm.

I am going to sign off here, since I have already written a shitload on just the basic dice rolls. I will talk about the cards and the other mechanics tomorrow.

Reviews of all my games

So, when I spoke to an old friend about this blog, and the first thing he said was "you should review some rpgs!" because I like to buy rpgs and I like to talk about rpgs. So, basically, this is a short post to say that I will be reviewing a different game I own every (probably) monday or tuesday. I own a lot of weird little indie games, so I have a big backlog to cover. My main question to myself is what to start with.

[new setting] The purpose of adventuring

Why do adventurer's adventure? What lures men and women out of their comfortable homes and lives to go and face dangers in the wilderness? Because adventure is the fastest path to godhood.

When we tell the stories of a god, they are mythic things; how the moon forced seduced the sea, how the gods found the secret of language and gave it to the people. But these myths, just like the gods who did them, began with something smaller.

When an adventurer or group of adventurers take up their path to heroism, their acts begin walking a path to power for them. When they go and take a job, they might emerge with a tale along the lines of "aldarac steals the secret gem of the sourcerer". This is not a path to godhood yet, but it lays steps in that direction. The universe notices aldarac as a notable thief. When, much later in his career he hopes to steal the knowledge of life and death from the keepers of the underworld, then he can rely on the fact that he has already stolen a magic from a dangerous keeper. If the people he is working for agree to give some of their magic to tell the tale ritually, it will give him even more strength.

In this manner, adventurers and would be gods get themselves strength to build toward their future. By doing notable acts and overcoming great dangers, they advance towards being able to face down the dangers of the cosmos and performing acts of the gods themselves.

In game terms, the players will collect a list of titles of the stories of their escapades and relationships. They can try to focus these to resonate with each other and allow them to perform a mythic story that moves them on the next station of their path towards godhood. Basically, getting heroic deeds sets you on the path of being able to legendary, divine deeds. They probably also act as an aspect of xp mechanic.

[new setting] Paths to divinity

Paths to power

When a person becomes an adult in their culture, this is nearly universally marked with an initiation into adulthood. This initiation varies with culture and by people, but it usually attunes the initiate into the first linking they have with magic and their first taste of power; their ambition. An initiate gives their ambition in the dream quest that they walk to get to adulthood. In doing so they usually walk a path similar to a great myth already made, or a sacred path that is well understood. In doing so they connect them self with some part of the world and gain a part of it’s power.

A farmer from a barely surviving set of hill farmers experiences the myth of his god gathering the clouds into the first flock of sheep and forging them into living animals to warm and feed him. In doing so they open themselves up to that source of power and gain access to the sheepherders magic. Before long, they learn the song which will cause a lost sheep to bleat out it’s position, and the secret language of herding dogs. They learn how to dance the dance with their fellow herders that scares away the parasites of the sheep herds and the poem which makes a sheep sleep for shearing.

His sister initiates into the path of the raider, and goes through the rite of the youngest of the gods proving their worth to their fathers and mothers by going into the halls of the devil and stealing his wealth, after fighting the seven deadly guardians and escaping the four endless traps. She will soon learn the words that convince a cow or sheep that you are its owner for a night. She will learn to smell pursuit on the wind and the dance which makes her steps faster and arm stronger.

These people are moving into one of the traditional and sanctioned roles of their culture. Someone on the path to divinity, however, got there in a different way. When they went on their initiation they had a different experience.

The first is that their ambition was for something which they had no myth to fall back on, and they flailed around lost in the dreamscape until they came upon the first and high god, and they recreated the myth of him making the first and high god, who was himself. These people’s cultures know from then that they are on the path to divinity, and this is the only myth that seems to transcend all cultures and be omnipresent.

Second, they could be questing on a normal myth and go much further in the myth than is usual. This will normally bring them into the presence of the living god they sought to emulate, who will gift them with a mark that puts them, if willing onto his or her path to ascension. This is most common with those who walked to become a priest and were found special by the god they sought to devote themselves to.

The third is to quest for divinity intentionally. This is dangerous and powerful quest and it claims a lot of the lives of the people who attempt it. If you walk the myth of the first and high god creating the first and high god, who is himself, and come back successful then you are attuned to his powers of divine creation. This deliberate move towards divinity is the hardest of all the paths, but at least it is certain.

This is only the first initiation, and the first station of power. Before passing on to even semi divinity, there will be many more initiations and stations to walk. But for no one ever forgets their first initiation.

Things I sometimes use

So the internet is full of useful tools. It is full of creative people. Some of them are good at demographics and cartography. I am powerfully shit at both of these things. They make useful tools for me, I share them with you and praise the people who made the tools.

Without further ado, here are some online tools for the more lazy person who wants to do prep. I am usually only the lazy half of this, but am experimenting with prep at the moment.

World generator, for the cartographically challenged:

http://donjon.bin.sh/apps/

Just got this thing, and it seems to be freely downloadable, and props to these guys. I mean it made this beauty for me just now:

Which if you can see it and zoom in has little pictures for what type of territory is on the map. Never again will I have to sketch a map and mess it up badly for a world! Thanks guys. Good jobs.

Speaking of maps... I also found a lovely little tool for making city and town maps. I am using it at the moment in a campaign, and it allowed me to produce maps in seconds that were not my usual mess of a style. It is availible freeware here:

http://inkwellideas.com/worldbuilding/roleplaying-city-map-generator/

(and honestly a bunch of places on the web)

and made these for me:

A little spaceport in a dome for my fading suns game

and a shitty village to be the source of problems in my WFRP game, complete with a broken down village pallisade and two roads! Count 'em.

I have also found the fantasy demography generator interesting:

http://www.welshpiper.com/medieval-demographics-online/

These are recent tools I found to do stuff I am rubbish at. I hope you enjoy!

For clarity: None of this stuff is mine. I am taking it off of the internet. It is eaither freeware or creative commons license.

New setting thoughts

Working on a new setting.



Things I want in a setting:



1)The bronze age. There is not enough bronze age gaming.

2)Magic everywhere. Everyone has some sort of magic, and that is absolutely normal in setting.

3)There are gods, and they were important in setting up the setting, but they were all, also sentient beings who started out mortal scale in the setting. How can someone who only went through apotheosis yesterday have had a hand in building the world? The priests will tell you this is one of the central mysteries of being a god.

4) I want the magic everywhere in the setting to have an effect on the setting. I do not want a bronze age Greece and then magic added on. I want to spend some time thinking of the ramifications of the magic on the setting.

5) I want it to be a bit odd.

6) I want the path to godhood to be a known thing, and something anyone can potentially set out on. Essentially, the adventurers will be setting out on this path and that will be why they are a rag tag band of weirdos doing weird things.

7) I want the religion in the setting to matter.



Yes, I know that this reads a lot like I want glorantha, but I want something a little different and with more blank space and less lore for a new player.

First post

After a long (ish) time of posting my random gaming thoughts in a G+ group, I have decided to start a blog where I will store my gaming thoughts. I hope you all enjoy it!