Washerwoman Career for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e

Update weekend

Working on my Warhammer game this weekend (Wrapping up Power Behind the Throne in true Bridesmaids style on Tuesday!). But I have a treat for everyone - the next 2, almost 3, Nerath campaign updates are ready to be queued up for my other blog (nerath-mp.tumblr.com) tomorrow!

I want to stress how much I really do love this edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I love the vibe of it. Jon Hodgson, the art director, does a fantastic job of establish a world that is grim, that harkens back to 1E without slavishly reconstructing it, that doesn’t shy away from modern aesthetic but also doesn’t turn into bland, uninspiring mush like D&D 5E. Art in RPG books is meant to fill my head with ideas, and I have an excess of them after flipping through any given WFRP book.

I digress, sort of. This is Rough Days & Hard Nights (2019), the first set of scenarios for WFRP4E. It is uniformly awesome. My desire to run these crashes directly into my hesitance about the system and, I think, the scenarios stay standing. That good.

Which, they’re all by Graeme Davis, an old hand at the Old World. Each involves a web of seemingly connected plots that, in the end turn out to be separate. Each has its own timetable, the clock ticking away, events happening whether the players act or not. All of them are a mix of grim, gruesome and hilarious. The second scenario is probably my favorite and a good example of all of this. It takes place at the city courts. There are SEVEN different potential plots unraveling that day, the prime of them involving a judicial duel. That duel is the subject of constant interruption in a way that is just comedy gold. All of these scenarios are NPC and roleplay heavy, the sort of games that ask a lot from the GM, but the pay offs are clear. I thinkn that makes this book is an instant classic.

Also, gnomes! Now a playable race. That’s neat. Lots of nice art, as I said. I still love the WFRP1E tradition of having maps featuring building facades. Such a good aesthetic choice.

This is a tricky one. I have fallen in love with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, sort of, since reading the original Enemy Within back in 2019. I like the IDEA of WFRP1E a lot, but the system is heavier than I want to run these days (even if it isn’t quite so heavy as you might think). I have no desire to wade into 2E or 3E — I like the look of 1E and not liking the look of 2 and 3 is enough to put me off. I do like the look of Cubicle 7’s fourth edition, however (2018). A lot. I know it isn’t quite so gritty as the 1e vibe, but I still find it appealingly grimy for a pretty top tier game in the year of our lord 2022. I also generally like C7 — Cthulhu Britannica was good fun. My hope here was to get something like Call of Cthulhu 7E — the same essential system with a ton of polish and modern renovations.

It is that, sort of.  There are lots of nice improvements. The career system gets a nice overhaul, which allows characters to keep their career for, well, their whole career, without awkward changes or dead ends. The trade off is that means all the careers advance in basically the same, balanced way, so you don’t get that sense of variety, but I’m OK with that. I love status levels — your wealth, which gives you access to everything within your means without book-keeping. I also dig XP bonuses for keeping random results in character generation. Skill tests, magic system, everything feels pretty good. Except combat. I love the idea of trying to capture the momentum of a battle through tokens, but it just keeps getting more and more complicated as you go. And it isn’t just Advantage you have to track — you’ve got Fate and Resilience and Fortune and Resolve as well, each its own currency. None of it is bad, but all of it together is too much and so intricately interconnected, I can’t see a way to simplify it. Like, no way, easy or hard.

That basically means I can’t bring this to my in-person table. Which is fine, it probably runs great digitally. But when I finally run Enemy Within, I might just do it with Warlock?

Ubersreik Adventures II (2021) is a smart expansion of what has come before. It is essentially a scenario book, but the approach is takes makes it as much a lore book, really. The idea here, between the starting point in the Starter Set sourcebook, moving into the discrete adventures of Rough Days, the loose campaign of Ubersreik I and the epic sweep of Enemy Within is to create a world that feels like it is alive, without smothering it with elaborate metaplot. All of this is open-ended, with soft connections that make decisions feel weighty, but not forced. Through all that material, though, you don’t really feel the connection. Ubersreik Adventure II starts drawing the threads closed.

The most important detail here is that the adventures occur in the wake of (potential) events from Enemy Within parts 1 and 2 (I’ll be doing all five part of that monster later in the year). Possibly caused by the action of players, if you’re running that campaign, possibly as dramatic background, if you aren’t. Broadly, the best WFRP material — lore, adventures, whatever — center on the tension between stagnation and change. The way Cubicle 7 is approaching this with their scenario material is extremely interesting, both in the straightforward way, but also in a meta sense thanks to how they are putting out material both old and new.

All the scenarios are pretty good. Some underscore or anticipate the events of Enemy Within that might be dangerous in the hands of a clumsy GM (I’d advise particular caution with “Double Trouble”). They actually remind me a little of how the historical flashbacks in Horror on the Orient Express for Call of Cthulhu work to emphasize the themes of the main campaign. Similarly, I am not sure these scenarios stand as well on their own as those in the other anthologies. That probably doesn’t matter — you likely aren’t going to start running games out of a book with a big 2 on the cover, but it bears mentioning.

Art’s still nice and consistent across the whole line. I will say, though, that I can do without the black and white art. I know it is meant to hark back to the 1E art direction, but I find it jarring in the modern style. Just do it all in color. ¶ #RPG #TTRPG #TabletopRPG #roleplayinggame #DnD #DungeonsAndDragons #WarhammerFantasy #Cubicle7 #WFRP4E #Warhammer

I wish the promise of the  Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set (2018) had manifested in the hardcover. There are six pre-generated characters, printed in luscious gatefold folios, counters for advantage, some rules reference sheets, percentile dice and some very nice maps. The meat of the thing is split between two books.

The first is the Adventure Book, which is the main teaching tool. Most of it is taking up by the scenario Making the Rounds, which teaches you how to use this (rather stripped down) system as you go. Refreshingly, Part One introduces the combat system and Part Two immediately switches gears into a lengthy roleplaying section — so as much as the combat system bothers me, the game is consciously not focused on combat alone and that is a good thing. It seems to play easy enough here, but it does feel incomplete, like a primer, rather than the real thing. Ten short scenarios round things out for additional play — there is a big honking chunk of game time here.

The second book is a sourcebook for Ubersreik, the city WFRP4E is currently focusing its attention and new material on. Everything in this book is great. I love the fact that they developed something new to explore and made that central, with the Enemy Within revamp both the forthcoming main event and something that can be ignored if you want. This book is the jumping off point for the next several scenario books and it does a great job of inviting exploration.

Can you use just the Starter Set rules for all your WFRP4E needs? I mean, if you like these pre-gens, maybe? It does feel incomplete, though, like you’ll get into the larger world and run into situations where the rules just cascade into complexity. After all, the currencies (advantage, resilience, etc.) are still in the game here, they just aren’t fully explained yet.

Ubersreik Adventures (2020) is an anthology of six adventures, spinning directly out of the source book for the duchy in the Starter Set. They can be run separately, but the real intention is to string them along as a loosely connected campaign, slotted between other scenarios (a couple, but I don’t think all, would work as asides during Enemy Within, but I reckon you’d have to switch the locations.

Anyway! They’re all pretty great, though a little off the lofty heights of Rough Days. You’ve got a creature in the marshes, a village afflicted with madness, a dust-up with a chaos cult and a no-win situation involving the sabotage of coaches (which can be used to segue to Enemy Within). There’s one with a plague which is a bit on the nose these days (no way Cubicle 7 planned that, though).

They all, to one degree or another, fit the general WFRP template. The problems they present are complex with no easy solutions. There are lots of NPCs to talk to and sites to see, but piecing together the truth of a situation is always a puzzle with seemingly too many (or not enough) pieces. Combat is generally secondary to investigation and interviews.

A bit less thrilling art in this one, though, in fairness, it leans so much on the Starter Kit sourcebook, which has plenty, that you can forgive it.