Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - Setting and System

Today we're talking a long, nostalgic look back at Games Workshop's flagship roleplaying game - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.  Set in their self-styled "grim world of perilous adventure" this game promised to be very different from what had come before.

In this episode we take a look at the game's setting and system.  The previous part featured a review of the game's history, and the final one will see us sitting down to have a good old chinwag about our favourite memories of the game.

If you'd like to get in touch with us you can find it us on Twitter @savepodcast, email us at roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com and find us on Facebook by searching for Roll to Save.

HOST: Iain Wilson
VOICE OVER: Keeley Wilson

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Transcript

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Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast. Episode 1, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

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Hello and welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast where we take a fond look at role-playing games from yesteryear. I'm your host, Ian. This is a rework of episode one because we've had a couple of pieces of feedback. The first piece, well, it seemed that the initial podcast was far too long. Apologies for this, we're new to this podcasting game and we're passionate about our subject and consequently we had a lot to say about it. Secondly, there were a couple of sections that were far too quiet. Apparently, it sounded like I was reading a bedtime story. Given that I'm no Tom Hardy, that's probably quite a creepy prospect. Therefore, we've decided to split this podcast into three parts. The first will cover the history of the game, the second its setting and system, and the third part will be a roundtable discussion. I've also messed around with the sound, so hopefully it sounds a bit better too. Oh, and I've ordered a new mic. After all, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing right. In this episode, we take a look at Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Games Workshop's first in-house RPG set in the self-styled grim and perilous world of adventure. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a fond place in the heart of many gamers, especially British gamers, and was a novel take on the fantasy genre in a day and age where everything was very heroic and noble bright. For those of you unfamiliar with it, you'll quickly learn that while some games leant towards magic and great deeds of daring do, Warhammer was far grittier than every man in its field. So, without further ado, let's get into it. Tell us where we're off to, voiceover lady.

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Setting and background

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When Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was released back in 1986, it was building on a setting previously established in Games Workshop's miniatures wargame, Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Even though the latest edition of this game had been released two years previously, the known world, as it was called, had not been substantially defined. Warhammer Fantasy Battle came with a book entitled The Battle Bestiary, which provided a lines for the various races available in the game, as well as a three-page overview of the nations therein. Curiously, it states that the Warhammer world bears more than a passing resemblance to our own. This is because the known world exists in a parallel reality. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that this is the first and last time that that concept was referenced. Therefore, all the material released in both the main rulebook and the enemy within Source Park was, in 1986 at least, brand new. The main setting, a human kingdom known as the Empire, was akin to Germany at the beginning of the Renaissance. It was also, firmly, a low fantasy setting. Magic was rare and feared, indeed, it was exceptionally hard for players to become and succeed as wizards. This was not a D&D-esque setting where dragons roamed the skies and potions could be bought off the shelf at ye olde magic shoppy, most people in the empire were from the lower labouring classes and were much more concerned with putting food on their families tables than worrying about quests, fantastic creatures, magic and other such nonsense. This is very much reflected in the player characters themselves. Rather than choosing to have their alter ego reflect some heroic fantasy trope like fighter, wizard, cleric or barbarian as was the case in most fantasy RPGs of the time. Player characters in Warhammer fantasy roleplay had recently chosen to become adventurers as they'd become bored of the mundane life that they were living and they were therefore leaving their old careers behind. These careers were also suitably mundane. Things like herdsman, student, labourer and even beggar. Sure, some were more traditionally suited to the fantasy genre like soldier, thief and mercenary but whereas in the likes of D&D you might be a paladin outfitted in glittering armour and wielding a magical sword called something trite like Light of Justice, a soldier in Warhammer fantasy roleplay was very likely to be a footslogger in some Grand Duke's army outfitted in a shabby male shirt and wielding a second hand sword that most likely didn't have a name. That being said, it was made clear to the players that they were a bit and unlikely to die, as the book put it, at the hands of the first goblin to swing an axe at them. This was reflected in the concept of fate points. Each character started off with a small pool of these, sometimes only a single point, and these could be used to cheat death. If a character was going to die, either as a result of combat or by doing something ridiculous and stupid in game, they could expend a fate point to live and fight another day. The GM was courage to get creative and use these moments of miraculous escape to advance the plot rather than the simply extra lives. Of course, as gritty and in the mud as the setting was, this was still a fantasy world, a grim world of perilous adventure no less, so the GM needed some more fantastic building blocks with which to construct the world. This was provided in spades by the main rulebook. Following all the rulesy chapters came the setting elements, namely details on the types of creatures that inhabited the Warhammer world, complete with all the stats and special rules you'd ever need, and an extensive look into the history of the setting, information on the known world, and a deep dive into the Empire itself. The chapter on creatures and monsters included everything you'd expect from a fantasy RPG. Goblins, orcs, dragons and griffins abound, but this being Warhammer fantasy roleplay, there were several things uniquely to the setting, some of which have built up a cult following over the years. Things like Skaven, Zotz and Femur were GW creations and these, along with the setting itself, helped make adventures in Warhammer fantasy roleplays world refreshingly different to some of the more Tolkien-esque RPGs on the market at the time. Players of the more recent editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle coming to first-ed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay might be surprised by what they find. When it was first published back in 1986, the authors were very clear that they wanted to make this world grim and perilous. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the Emperor of the Empire himself, Karl Franz. In later editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, this guy is a handsome, charismatic and mighty warrior, armed with the eponymous Warhammer, leading from the front and riding a mighty griffin called Deathclaw. Is he like that in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying? Nope. He's a weak inbred puppet who only happens to be emperor because the rest of the imperial electors find him easy to control and manipulate. As long as he's in power, the rest of the nobility can do what it please. But that's just one individual I hear you saying. Okay, let's look at the old world nation of Bretonnia. In the last iteration of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Bretonnia was a land of knights, sorcery and folklore. Here, Arthurian myth is blend with medieval France to create a cauldron of valiant questing heroes, magic, forest spirits, honour and more chivalry than you can shake a stick at. Seriously, you even have a Lady of the Lake and a Green Knight. Oh, and Grails. Don't forget the Grails. However, in Warhammer fantasy roleplay, Bretonnia is much more like France on the eve of the French Revolution. The nobles of the land are riddled with corruption, wilfully blind to the decay around them and sordidly decadent in every way. The book describes painted fops parading around in a finery amidst the mud and dung of the streets, whilst ladies sit like dolls in shining carriages bedecked in glittering jewels and tall white wigs, whilst hiding their ghastly pox marks and wasp disfigurements behind rouge and white powder. Meanwhile, the majority of the population are described as being poor, disabled, diseased and politically volatile, this is a land where chaos has wormed its way into the nation's very soul, very much an embodiment of the enemy within. Contrast this to the Bretonnia of years later, where ranks of glittering knights with brightly coloured banners heroically charge the enemy whilst virtuous maidens sling spells from afar and heroes on pegasi descend from the heavens. clear at some point that GW had realised that The Enemy Without sold more plastic models. As the Bretonnian example illustrates, GW's vision at the time was that Warhammer fantasy roleplay adventures would be based around rooting out the corruption that was gnawing at the heart of society. Yes, there were still goblin dominated mountain holds and dark haunted forests for those that wanted a more traditional flavour to the fantasy adventures, it was investigating in society itself where Warhammer fantasy roleplay really shone. The first parts of the Enemy Within campaign really highlight this and produced some of the game's finer moments. Even the introductory scenario that came with the main rulebook, the Oldenholler Contract, held true to this theme. Set in the city of Nuln, this scenario sees the brand new adventurers agreeing to investigate a local organised crime cartel who have taken something from the main NPC. Ostensibly a dungeon crawl, this adventure nonetheless deals with the theme of corruption eating away at the heart of the Empire. As the players investigate, they find out that the local criminals were dealing with more than they bargained for, and the climax of the adventure suggests that the character's patron may not be quite who he seems. Although in later years, particularly after the arrival of the Realm of Chaos books, Warhammer became synonymous with chaos spiky bits and armies of huge black clad armored warriors descending from the north in droves. First edition Warhammer fantasy roleplay very much treated chaos as a more insidious, subtle and corrupting force. Yes, you could put your players up against hordes of beastmen and chaos warriors if you liked. Indeed, the history of the world has a section on the incursions of chaos but it was at the heart of human civilisation that the greatest danger lurked. The more physical manifestations of chaos's corrupting taint are seen by humanity at large as easy to deal with. Malformed and mutated infants are slain at birth, and those who don't manifest their taint until later in life are driven deep into the empire's vast forests, presumably to be slain by the creatures that live within. However, it is this spiritual taint, the corruption of the soul, that will be humanity's downfall. Mankind's meteoric rise to power is in part down to chaos. The versatility and lust for change that drives humans to greater and greater heights and which will ultimately doom them is down to the mark that chaos has indelibly left on their souls. It is also made clear that chaos, by its very nature, is not necessarily evil. Chaos is about conflict, excess, corruption, change, but it doesn't nest have a moral tinge to it. Indeed, the ultimate victory of chaos is portrayed as having all of reality decay into a seething mass of formless protoplasm, including the chaos gods themselves. Even the antagonists that the players encounter aren't necessarily evil in the traditional moustache-twirling Saturday morning cartoon villain sense of the word. Take the main opposition to the players in Shadows Over Bougainhaffin His road to damnation is ultimately driven by the fact that he felt outcast and overlooked as the younger son of a rich family and his embrace of chaos as a quick and easy road to power came through a desire to make something of himself. His subsequent descent into greater and greater corruption came from the fact that his initial dash had been foolhardy, rash and short-sighted and he was looking to correct things. The fact that this will result in more death and destruction perfectly illustrates the corrupting nature of Chaos. He didn't set out to cause the death of thousands, he just wanted a bit of power. Now, in a bid to save his own soul, he is willing to damn others because he is selfish and lacking the moral character. That's in him, not Chaos. Chaos merely wants to dissolve all creation back into its primal building blocks. This clown's actions are simply a stepping stone to get there. The death and destruction caused along the way are not Chaos's objectives. They're just collateral damage. Is chaos uncaring? Absolutely. Is it evil? No. No, it's not. And when portrayed correctly, that, more than anything else in this setting, should frighten your

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players.

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When Dungeons& Dragons first appeared in the late 1970s, it brought with it two staples that were embraced by many, many role-playing games of the time. The first was class. Namely, what type of character you were playing. In D&D terms, a class was an archetype. Something like fighter or cleric that aggregated several skills, behaviours and abilities into something that a player could easily portray. They were distinct and unique and each got their own moment in the sun. A thief was essential for disarming traps and picking locks. A fighter was the guy you wanted around when the orcs showed up to find out why the traps weren't working and the cleric took care of all those awkward wounds that resulted from encounters with fiery orcs amongst other things. The other staple was levels, or to put it another way, how far advanced your character was within their class. A level 10 fighter for instance was much better at, well, fighting than his level 1 counterpart. These terms have remained timeless are still used today. In fact, they are probably far more commonly used within the video games industry than within traditional RPGs. Indeed, levelling up has become a catch-all term within gaming circles used to describe the unlocking of new abilities and powers. True to fall, Warhammer Fantasy roleplay abandoned both of these sacred cows in favour of the system of careers. This decision has been both lauded and condemned to unequal measure. Fans of the career system point out that this fits perfectly within the spirit of the world that GW had created. The fact that Warhammer fantasy roleplay careers are mundane and often pedestrian fits perfectly within a setting where characters are driven to seek out adventure due to the sheer tiresome banality of their everyday lives. Proponents of high fantasy weren't so keen. Who wants to play a rat catcher when you can play a wizard or a paladin? The way the system worked was, on the surface, rather simple. Each career had with it several profiles advances, which would enhance a character's stats and several skills. For example, a trader might be good at battering, whilst a herdsman would have charm animal. Well, you have to have something to do on those long nights alone in the pastures with only a flop for company. These could be bought with experience points to give your character more abilities and online usefulness. Starting characters get all the skills and equipment listed for their previous career, as well as the same The others could then be bought with experience points as the game went along. When a character finished with one career they could choose to move into one of the others listing under career exits and carry on their character development. It was here that the system always began to run into problems. One school of thought, I'll call them the purists, held that you had to play career advancement in real life, which is to say that if you wanted to move into a new career, you'd have to find someone willing to teach you the ways of it. You wanted to move from the career of herbalist to pharmacist? Well, you'd better find someone to teach you all that fancy chemistry stuff. In fact, this didn't just apply to careers, it applied to all skills. Can't ride a horse? You have to find someone to teach you how to get Dobbin moving. Just because you've got the XP doesn't mean you can magically learn this. There was a surprising amount written about career and skill development in White Dwarf and then collected into other books. Skills were graded into how easy they were to learn. If they could even be learned in the first place, something like very strong was obviously a natural talent. Or was it? could you just spend time working out with your gym bros and earning a strongness that way? You can see how this got confusing. Suggestions were given for GMs on how to introduce opportunities for characters to pick up mentors and teachers en route who could teach them the career of choice. But this did put a terrible burden on the GM, who then had to build plots to accommodate future careers that the PCs might want to undertake. On one hand, this seems fairly simple, but consider a situation where one of your PCs is playing an underworld little wife and who really wants to advance to the career of torturer. How is this going to fit into the game of courtly intrigue that you've written? There's also the question of downtime. Learning skills at a whole new profession takes months if not years of game time. How does this fit in with your plot where the PCs are racing against time to save the world? simply not get to spend his experience? All of this caused some people to point out that if GMs were going to artificially drop in encounters with willing mentors and teachers, how was this any different from just allowing the players to spend their XP in first place? This is what prompted the second school of thought, proponents of which took a more abstract approach to careers. rather than operate within the strict guidelines of you must go and sign up at the local merchants guild and serve an apprenticeship for six months before you can change career to merchant The abstract approach figured that your character, if he wasn't an adventurer, could be a merchant if he spent the XP and the career change. In effect, he showed the aptitude for that career rather than be a card-carrying merchant or ship's captain or whatever. Likewise, this approach hand-waved away the concept of having to learn skills and assumed that everything could be self-taught and that's what experience represented. Yes, it wasn't hyper-realistic. After all, how did someone who'd been adventuring in the wilderness for months suddenly learn how to dance, but it did let characters advance within the confines of their careers without having to hyper-realistically play out their apprenticeship as an artisan. Both schools of thought were equally valid, but I tended toward the latter. I've mentioned the characters' stats and skills, and at first glance, the Warhammer fantasy roleplay system borrows a lot from its Warhammer fantasy battle predecessor. The skills are the with the inclusion of dexterity and fellowship as benefits are role-playing, but rather than being on a scale of 1 to 10, most of them, but confusingly not all of them, are now percentile members. Basically, if you want to do something more hammer, you find a stat, tally up any bonuses you get for skills, and any penalties you get for bad stuff that might be happening to you at the time, and try to roll a percentage number less than or equal to the modified stat. This is all helpfully described in the Games Masters chapter, which includes details on all sorts of standard texts, everything from Hammer Fantasy roleplay system isn't a binary you did it or you didn't do it system. Most tests include degrees of success, therefore it's possible to fail a role but ultimately accomplish the task in question. It might just take a little longer than anticipated or your work might be a bit shoddier than the guy who passed the test. All in all, it's a fairly straightforward way to play and an experienced GM can easily run this without having to resort to the rulebook. Just pick what stat you think the player on to use, let them argue their case for skill usage, chuck in some modifiers and off you go. Of course, it wasn't just skills and stats. There were some really fun rules buried in the GM's chapter, rules that were refreshingly different to those normally found in the overly heroic fantasy genre, namely insanity and disease. Yes, Call of Cthulhu had dealt with sanity years ago, but this was the first time that a fantasy RPG and suggesting the brave and heroic protagonists could go mad. This being Warhammer, these rules made perfect sense. After all, if you were confronting the sanity-blasting horrors of chaos, it was no doubt going to take a toll on your mental stability. As far as disease was concerned, this was an acknowledgement of the fact that early Renaissance Germany, sorry, the Empire, was a filthy place. Instead of improbably named fantasy disease, This system included things like the plague and the pox, things that were an everyday fact of life in a society where medicine was in its infancy and largely only for the rich. It also included rules for infected wounds. These made combat even more deadly. Yes, you might have wiped out those filthy orcs, but those rusty blades that cut you might kill you in the long run. After a few experiences of these roles, I had one player who carried certain herbs on him at all times and made that slightly obsessive point of washing and cleaning any wounds he or his party members sustained. Amusingly, we had a new player join who had never played when infected wounds were killing players left, right and centre. He asked, seen anyone's wounds become affected in this game, the germaphobe, slightly irritated, replied, You're welcome! However, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay suffers a little bit in its translation from tabletop wargame to RPG. For starters, the movement stat is somewhat redundant. In real terms, it's used to determine how far a character will move in a round, turn or an hour, but in practice it very rarely comes up. And in game terms, it really translates into how many tabletop edges can a model move in one round. They were really pushing those miniature sales. There are also some stats that are manifestly more useful than others. of tests that make use of initiative, whereas leadership rarely comes up. By far though, the area where this translation falls down most egregiously is in the magic system. I've mentioned this before, and long time roleplayers will doubtlessly have heard Warhammer fantasy roleplay veterans complain about the magic system, and it was probably Realm of Sorcery's failure to address its shortcomings that led to that long anticipated supplement being so badly received. In short, it's more or less a direct poem from 2nd Ed Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Aside from the inclusion of petty magic, drooling magic and ingredients, it's practically word for word the same as Warhammer Fantasy Battle. casting system, the rules for spellcasters wearing armour, the concept of magic points and power level, all of these come straight from Warhammer Fantasy Battle 2nd Ed. And while these rules are fine for a game of mass combat, they don't always translate very well to a tabletop RPG. Some of the illusionist magic that dealt with creating entire buildings and armies out of thin air works really well on the tabletop, but not so well in a roleplaying game. Likewise, as benefits its Warhammer fantasy battle roots, there's a lot of magic dedicated to pummeling, zapping, and generally messing up your opponents. After all, it is called battle magic, which again is fine for a tabletop war game, but in an RPG that can deal with investigation and interaction between characters, aren't we really saying that magicians are simply fancy artillery pieces? There's also the simple fact that under this system, it's very difficult to become a wizard. or at least a competent one. This is largely down to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's career system. If you're playing as a purist, you're basically bowing your character to spending years slaving away as an apprentice at the feet of a more experienced wizard. Want to go up a level? You have to go back to your master to do that. Want to learn a spell? Find a dusty toon with it, or else a wizard, presumably your mentor, who knows the spell, will have to teach you it. Want to learn some more wizardy skills? and back to the mentor again. In fact, the only thing you don't have to go running back to your master for is your advances. The other problem with this system is that your mentor can only teach you what he or she knows. That means, unless you were apprenticed to a level 4 wizard, and I don't think there's a lot of them kicking around in the provincial imperial backwaters which most characters come from, you'll have to go out and find a new teacher. Now, whilst this could be quite good fun as a solo game, is quest for the new teacher really that exciting for the warriors, rangers and rogues in the party? It also takes away the ability for the GM to write any time sensitive scenarios and the wizard is going to spend months of that time learning new spells and abilities. There's also a cost factor for wizards. Unlike other careers where it costs 100 experience to move to a new career, the cost to move up from one level of wizardry to another is much more expensive Then there's the cost of spells that get more expensive on top of this. In the end, it seems no trouble when it's worth trying to learn to be a wizard. Oddly enough, when I used to run Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, on the rare occasions that I had PC wizards, I used the abstract, hand-wavy approach to careers. You could reduce the cost of learning spells and going up a level by having a teacher or a grimoire, but otherwise you could learn them without having to spend the months at the end locked in the classroom. Whatever The new additions to the magic system that generated a lot of noise amongst fans was the inclusion of ingredients. In short, if you wanted to cast a spell, you needed some kind of eye of newt to do so. This was nicely thematic, but ultimately problematic in execution. Some of the higher level ingredients were nigh on impossible to get hold of, and a lot of ingredients were body parts and bits of animal. The petty magic spell Gift of Tongues literally required a tongue Therefore, to necessitate multiple castings, wizards were reduced to carrying around stinking bags of offal with them. Realms of Sorcery actually did a good job of addressing this, suggesting that spells could be cast without ingredients, but with a chance of the spell not working. The ingredients were a focus that made them work, but weren't essential to the casting of the spell. A nice change, but unfortunately one that didn't come out until almost 15 years after the original game was released. By far the worst part of the magic system was that dedicated to clerics. Unlike other RPGs where clerics had divine magic or something such like, clerics in Warhammer fantasy roleplay simply were given a grand bag of various spells that they could learn from the various magical disciplines. Unless you were a druid, in which case you got pages and pages of brand new spells. No, I don't know why either. Being a cleric was generally a lot less flexible than being a wizard. Now on one hand, it was quite nicely themed. Clerics weren't just the party's medics. If you were a cleric or more, they got the death. you got a bunch of spells dealing with the undead and if you were a cleric in Tal, god of the wild places you got elemental themed spells however if you wanted these type of spells you could simply be a wizard and pick them by far the worst part of being a cleric though was the advanced system if you wanted to go up a level as a cleric you paid the xp and then rolled in a table now you can modify this by plus or minus 10 if a character was particularly pious or heretical But you could still get a situation where a character who largely knew their gods' talents advanced to the next level, whereas the mother Teresa of Warhammer Land ended up being stuck at level 1 doing penance for no real reason other than her dice sucked. Why were clerics the only career to get lumbered with this nonsense? The fickle will of the gods, maybe? On a brighter note, one area of the system that's firmly remembered is, you guessed it, combat. Ask any player of Warhammer fantasy roleplay what one of their fondest memories of the game was and the vast majority will probably get a slightly crazed look in their eyes, smile maniacally and mention the critical hit charts. Combat in Warhammer fantasy roleplay wasn't just deadly, it was visceral. Each character had a wounds stat which indicated how much punishment they could take before real damage occurred. Think of wounds as an action movie star's ability to duke it out with the villains before dusting himself down and saying, that, that's just a scratch. However, unlike most Hollywood blockbusters, characters in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay didn't have a large supply of wounds, and when players took a hit, they rapidly depleted. Armor and a character's natural toughness helped absorb some damage, but sooner or later, after taking a few hits from an axe, things started to get bloody. character, whether a PC or an NPC, was struck, the dice determined which location of the body was hit. If a character had no wounds, or if the hit took them below zero wounds, then a table was used for the body part in question to determine what kind of injury was caused. These critical hits varied in scope from being winded to having your skull shattered, with larger hits, the vaunted plus six critical hits, causing the most extreme damage. It was these that made combat and war fantasy roleplay so bloody, and oddly enough, fondly remembered. Unlike in D&D, where a bad guy would keel over after being reduced to zero hit points, in Warhammer fantasy roleplay, you dispatched your foes in gruesome, unmemorable ways. Seriously, you messed these guys up. I still remember one of my playgroup from back in the day who'd overcome the big bad at the end of one scenario, talking about it in character months later. Do you remember a few months back there was an Let me tell you about how I cut their leader in two. The one downside of the combat system was, at least for starting characters, the fact that it was generally quite difficult to hit anything. Most characters were lucky to start with a weapon skill over 40, which meant most of them had about a 33% chance to hit anything. Beginning monsters were about the same, which meant there was a lot of back and forth before anyone even connected. an imaginative GM would paint this as a series of fates and back and forths, rather than simply two protagonists swaying missing to each other, but it could be a source of frustration from time to time. So, how does the system stand up nowadays? Well, it's certainly not perfect, and its early 80s roots are a player for all to see. In fact, in the cold light of day, some of it looks cobbled together. Why do magic users have levels and other careers don't? Why is the straight out of Warhammer Fantasy Battle and the other parts of the system are new. Likewise, combat feels very deadly, if you ever hit at all that is, by modern standards. A lot of games nowadays are more concerned with story than with the tactical side of the game, some of them going so far as to give politely abstract combat. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, on the other hand, came from that generation when character death was a very real hazard and something that players almost expected. Some of them even, somewhat perversely, looked forward to it. Yes, it was hard to lose a beloved character, but you could always roll up a new one, right? That was quite exciting. Actually, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was slightly different from other games of the time with the inclusion of fate points. These were a nice acknowledgement of the fact that the heroes had a way of cheating death, and with a combat system that included things like plus six critical hits, this was a very necessary acknowledgement. Despite all this, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had one redeeming feature that a lot of more modern games could learn a lot from. It was a complete product. The main rulebook was a beast, but it contained everything you needed to run the game. If you didn't pick up another supplement, you were good to go out of the box for a long, long time. And by complete, I don't just mean that it included all the rules. All games have this. This game had everything. You didn't need a monster manual for this game. All the creatures you ever needed were here in my book. You had a scenario. It wasn't an amazing one, but it nicely captured the feel of the setting and it was perfect for new players and you could certainly build on it. Clunky as it was, you had a complete magic system. You'd probably have to jury-rig it to make it work nicely, but it was complete. There was a massive list of arms and armour. In fact, other than one supplement including details on different types of firearms, don't recall there ever being something as tedious as a weapons supplement ever being released for this game. The world setting was rich and detailed. Compare this to a lot of modern games where, after buying the main book, you're almost forced to buy into an endless series of splat books or else risk making your homebrew material come into conflict with whatever is currently canon. And building in this was a wonderful system of careers. Again, it wasn't perfect, but it let you create most conceivable kinds of character and really helped immerse your players into the low fantasy setting. In the modern age of games, having a handbook for this and a guidebook for that, it's refreshing to have a game that genuinely wanted you to be able to get up and going with the main rulebook and explore their grim and perilous world of adventure.

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Thank goodness that's done.

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And that was part two of episode one, The System and Setting of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We hope you enjoyed it. Tune in to a third and final part of this episode to hear us witter on about our fondest memories of the game. We're a semi-regular podcast about old school roleplaying games. If you enjoyed this episode, please get in touch with us on Twitter at SavePodcast or email us at role.to. Thanks again for listening.