Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - 4e Review

We finally get around to reviewing Cubicle 7's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition!  As a life long fan of 1st ed, how does this new edition shape up?  Will it let us continue to adventure in that grim world of perilous adventure that we're used to, or has it turned into something else?

In this episode we talk about everything that is good and bad (in our ever so humble opinion) about 4e including, but not limited to character creation, the system, combat, magic and stealing all your player's money between sessions.  It's a BIG book, so there's a LOT to talk about!

We also resist the urge to rant too much about the artwork.

As always, we try and remain measured an unbiased in our review.

You can get hold of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at Cubicle 7's website here or on their Drive Thru RPG page.

Contact us at:

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

HOST: Iain Wilson
VOICEOVER LADY: Keeley Wilson
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).

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

Iain: 0:24

My first RPG back in the day was Maelstrom, published under the Adventure Game Books label by Puffin. Now I didn't realise it was an RPG when I first bought it, I assumed it was some kind of newfangled fighting fantasy book with a blue spine rather than those distinctive green ones that had become such a feature on my bookshelf during the mid-80s. However, rather than another foray into the Fantasy Kingdom of Alancia, Maelstrom actually turned out to be something called a roleplaying game, and it led to me merrily taking up the mantle of Gamesmaster, which I've kinda done ever since, as I wrote Adventure After Adventure for my friends. I don't remember much of those early days, other than the fact that it would be all great fun and our eyes were open to the wider possibilities that this hobby offered. Around the same time, I had received a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Battle 2nd Edition as a birthday present, and I was absolutely sucked into the world that Games Workshop had created. When I became aware of the fact that GW were releasing a roleplaying game set in this universe, well, I had to have it. I got a copy the Christmas it was released, and at that moment, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay became my first proper RPG. No disrespect, Maelstrom. I stuck with it until the early 90s, but by then the direction GW were going left me a bit disenchanted with the setting. Gone was the grim world of Perilous Adventure TM, and instead we had the high magic world of oversized hammers and shutless dwarfs and steroids. I bought a copy of 2nd edition when it was first released, but again, I was put off by its artwork and focus on Chaos spiky bits. I didn't even bother with Fantasy Flight's third edition. Their weird fetishism for bold game components and custom dice in their RPGs always puts me off their products. Why am I mentioning all of this in the context of a review of Cubicle 7's 4th edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay? Well, I thought it only fair to lay out my stall early on and make it abundantly clear that I was a massive fan of 1st edition, didn't really give 2nd edition much of a chance, and didn't bother with 3rd ed at all. Therefore, this is a massive your mileage may vary and Ian's a bit of a grumpy old man warning. As far as first impressions go, it's an impressive book. Weighing in just over 350 pages, this is a hardback that you could do some serious damage with if you chose to hit someone with it. The cover is an homage to John Sibick's iconic first edition artwork, and everything is laid out in a clean, clear and easy-to-read manner. I'm not a massive fan of the maps found at the beginning and end of the book. It seems in a bid to make them more stylistically appealing, they've actually made the maps rather difficult to read. They're also out of place, they'd be much better served in the chapter dealing with the setting. As it is, a reader unfamiliar with place names will find themselves flipping back and forth when reading about the setting to try and build up an impression of the land. Regarding the rest of the artwork, it's well produced, but it's not my cup of tea. Remember what I said earlier about disliking GW's change in direction from grim and dark to oversized everything for everyone? That very much applies here. Well, let's dig into it for a moment. I have an issue with the fact that over two-thirds of the dwarf illustrations in the book are of slayers. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with this unique aspect of the Warhammer Mythos, slayers are dwarfs who have suffered shame or dishonour and seek to make amends by finding a death in battle. The thing is, they are presumably not that common in the setting, otherwise the dwarven population would be considerably smaller than it is with people going off and dying in glorious battle. However, if these images are anything to go by, a good 66% of the resident dwarfs have dishonoured themselves to the point that they feel the need to go off and join some death cult. For new players, this pretty much cements the idea that dwarfs have to be jacked-up shirtless crossfoot bros with ridiculous haircuts. Speaking of which, I am not a fan of the signature characters that the artists keep using again and again throughout the book. We've got our aforementioned Slayer, whose hair seems to take on more and more ludicrous proportions. Seriously, check out page 12, I actually laughed out loud when I saw that. We've also got a lady spotting an ever so mysterious Guy Fox look. All I can say is that if I pulled my hat down as low as she has in nearly every picture she's in, I think I'd be banging into things constantly. Seriously, how does she see where she's going? We've also got some kind of wizard guy. Now, in the Warhammer setting, although magic is legal, provided you've got a wizard licence, we'll get to that later, the common folk are still fearful of sorcerers, and the church still have that annoying habit of burning those who get out of hand. This fella though seems either oblivious to the prevailing feelings towards wizardly types or is willing to provoke the ire of all around him, as he's clearly going for some kind of grim reaper vibe. Honestly, the guy is carrying an honest to goodness scythe and is dressed in a long robe. There's also a woman who owns a hat which, much like our Trollslayer's hair, seems to vary in terms of impracticality. On page 10 it looks fairly normal, but it's grown by page 15 to silly proportions, and in page 25 I'm not sure how she can walk about with it on without her neck snapping. There's also an overabundance of firearms. Our angsty Guy Fox cosplayer is pretty commonly seen posing with two of them, but they are absolutely littered throughout the career's illustrations. There are careers that don't even have firearms listed as one of their trappings that sees a character posing dramatically with them. Speaking of the career's artwork, this seems to be a weird fetish, and I've seen this repeated in other Cubicle 7 Warhammer products, for characters to wear these little Warhammer 40,000 style purity scrolls, which is to say little sheets of paper secured to their person with a wax seal. It also appears that 40k Terminator honours, that vaguely multi-cross style medal with the skull on it, are worn as some kind of fashion accessory too. There's also weirdness like characters having scrolls tied to various parts of their costume, even when their profile doesn't include the read-write talent. Is this some kind of weird practical joke that happens in the Empire? I remember in science class in secondary school where pupils would attach crocodile clips to the bottom of their classmates' blazers and wait to see if they'd notice him. Maybe this is the equivalent. Hey Gunter, check it out, Franz can't read, but we've pinned a copy of the Reakland Gazette to its tunic. LOL. By far the worst image, just in terms of sheer WTF excess, is that of the thief career. Now I've looked at it several times and I still can't work out why a thief from Warhammer's Empire would dress like Bane from Batman. Seriously, check it out. On the positive side, it's nice to see some diversity in the artwork for a change. Yes, you don't have to exclusively play a white Anglo-Saxon Sigmarite anymore. As I said, your mileage may vary, the Warhammer aesthetic might very much be your thing, it's just not for me. So, now that you've finished bleating on about the artwork Ian, what's the actual content like? Well, the first two dozen or so pages are made up of background fiction. The first part of this provides two views of the empire. One is clearly written by a sycophantic courtier who has nothing but praise for the rule of the Emperor, whilst the other comes from someone more worldly and cynical. It's a nice touch presenting both sides of the story, as always, the truth falls somewhere between them. There's also a letter written providing an overview of the Empire. It is what it is, as a longtime fan of Warhammer, there was nothing new there, but I think you players will get something out of it. We then jump into the chapter on creating a character. This is all fairly similar fair to the previous editions. You select a race, a career, attributes, skills, and talents. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had ditched alignment. It was present in first edition, but I always felt it was a bit of a hangover from the Warhammer Battle game, the inclusion in which was probably a hangover from DD. Heroes and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay always seemed to operate in that shades of grey territory. Remember, it's a grim world of perilous adventure, so it always seemed unnecessary to clearly box in someone's morality. As it largely served as a roleplaying aid, its inclusion as a hard and fast stat was redundant. Now, unlike First Ed, where your attributes, skills, and careers are all generated at random, 4th Ed gives you the option to choose everything from stats to career. However, if you choose to roll randomly and if you go with what you roll, you're awarded extra experience points. I like this, as it encourages players to accept the vagaries of fate. It can also be more fun taking the mismash of options that has been dealt to you and try to tell a coherent story with it. Now when it comes to race, players can be human, dwarfs, halflings, or one of two flavours of elf, high or wood. As usual, the non-human races have better profiles than poor old humans, with elves particularly falling into the everything you can do we can do better category, but this is balanced out later on, as humans are given more fate points, warhammers, extra life currency. One gripe I do have around character creation is the use of the word skill when describing the characteristics of weapon skill and ballistic skill. Now I know why they use this nomenclature. These two attributes, representing as they do your raw fighting ability, have been around since the beginning of the Warhammer line. However, given that they are attributes and that you have a second category called skills, the inclusion of a couple of not quite skills, but we're calling them skills in the attributes section can be understandably confusing. In fact, I'm confusing myself as I say this, so I will stop. The skills themselves are bonuses that you add on top of an attribute when trying to do something that you're well skilled in. So, for example, the pick lock skill gives you a bonus to your dexterity characteristic when you're trying to nefariously tinker with a closed door. In first Ed, skills existed but they were a mix of bonuses to certain tests, additions to your characteristics, and other more esoteric things such as the ability to cast spells. Fourth Ed takes this jumble of concepts and breaks them down into three separate stats. Characteristics, which we've already talked about, are your raw ability to do certain things. Strength, dexterity, intelligence, these are all examples of characteristics. Skills represent things you have learned to do. Cook, picklock, and navigation are all skills. Some skills are advanced, meaning that regardless of what your characteristic is, you can't attempt this skill without having been trained in it. And finally we've got talents. These are akin to special abilities, quirks or tricks that you've learned. Things like spellcasting, combat shenanigans, and being able to pull your ale in a drinking competition all count as talents. What determines what skills and talents you can learn? Well, it comes down to a combination of a race and career. All races get a choice of certain skills and talent. However, unlike other games with their levels and classes, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a system of careers, namely what was your profession before you decided to sod off and become an adventurer. This will inform what skills and talents you have on top of your racial ones, as well as your social standing and any possessions you may own. I'm pleased that Cubicle 7 have stuck with this system, as it's always the thing that's marked Warhammer Fantasy roleplay out as being somewhat different from other fantasy RPGs, and it certainly went a long way to contributing to its more grounded feel as opposed to the high magic setting like DD. Unlike previous editions, where characters would bounce around from career to career looking to pick up as many useful skills and characteristic bumps as possible, Fourth Ed looks to keep characters in their main career as long as possible. Yes, you can switch career, but each one has its own system of levels, or a career path, as the book calls it, which allows you to develop expertise within the confines of a single career. This means that certain desirable skills or characteristic advances won't be unlocked until you've devoted some time and effort to mastering your career. I've not played Fourth Ed yet, so I've not seen how this works in practice. At an initial glance, I like the thought of characters sticking with what you know rather than being jacks of all trades. Certainly, it takes away that issue that First Dead Warhammer saw when the GM, if they were running the games in a purest manner, would have to invent contrived excuses for how a character moved from one career to another. Also, this idea does have precedent. In First Dead, the wizard careers and things like the jump from mercenary to mercenary sergeant to mercenary captain all followed this route. One aspect of the new system I'm not so hot on is how they handle advances. In First Ed, you had an advanced scheme where you bought improvements to characteristics in 10% chunks and the skills were one-off purchases. In second ed, I believe the characteristics were bought 5% at a time. In fourth ed, not only can you improve characteristics, you can buy advances in skills, and you can also buy talents. Sometimes you can even buy them multiple times. When you're buying skills or characteristics, you're improving them in 1% increments. In addition, as you take more and more advances, the cost to improve goes up. Oh, and the cost for skills and characteristics are obviously different. This will lead to a lot of bookkeeping. I can quite easily see a situation where a character is paying three different costs to advance his characteristics and several more for his skills while trying to determine if those talents he has can be bought more than once and if so, how much they cost. That's not to say the system is bad, merely it's very crunchy. DD players and players of other you reach this XP threshold and you level up games, be wand. Careers also have the social level of the character baked into them. This is represented by something called the status tier, and it can be brass, silver or gold, representing the poorest in society, to townspeople and professionals, all the way up to the rulers of society. Each tier is further split into five separate levels, representing the distinction between people of the same class. This is a nice split. It shows that a simple trader won't be able to distinguish one noble from another, as they all seem important to him, and people he should carry favour with. Likewise to the aristocracy, it doesn't matter if you're a hardworking peasant or a filthy beggar, those at the bottom of society are all smellioics. There are various rules for the effects of interaction between people of differing statuses, as well as mechanics for the cost of maintaining your standing in society. Yes, it is possible for nobles to lose status by slumming it with the Hoi Paloi. More rules in Crunch, but I think they handled it pretty well. A few scribbled notes in the back of the GM screen should make this all fairly easy to remember. Speaking of Crunch, characters also have fate, resilience, fortune and resolve points, all of which let you interfere with core game mechanics in certain ways and which are all regained in different manners. Character creation is rounded out by around half a dozen pages on adding detail. A lot of this is cosmetic like hair and eye colour, age and other physical details, but there's a surprisingly crunchy section on your long-term and short-term ambitions, conditions which if you fulfil them you get a mechanical bonus. There's also the same for the party. Rather than a you all meet in the tavern and decide to go off on an adventure approach to party building, Forth Ed assumes the protagonists will all have a collective goal, the fulfilling of which will again generate a mechanical bonus. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It feels a bit like the old white wolf concept of nature and demeanour, which were tools to prod characters into role-playing a certain way with the promise of getting a refill in willpower, but which in practice very rarely came into effect. Likewise, a lot of players when a new game begins don't really have a firm view of what their characters' long-term goals are and instead like to settle into their character and see where things will go. Forcing them to nail down their ambitions, without necessarily knowing what form the campaign will take, seems artificial and limiting. So, after the introductory character creation and careers chapters, we come to the fourth, which details the various skills and talents a character can have. It's here that I have a problem with the book's structure. By the time you're finished the fourth chapter, you're over 130 pages into the book and you still don't know what the rules are. I can imagine a lot of flipping back and forth in the first few sessions of a game, in fact, session 0 where people make up their characters is probably going to be particularly painful. People like to know what effect in the game their choices at character creation will have, especially in a system as crunchy as this one. When you consider that the actual core system itself only takes up around 5 pages, would it have been that hard to move the basic method of resolving tests to much earlier in the book? There are also a lot of talents, and when you consider how they interact with fundamental game mechanics, I can imagine that these would slow a lot of games down and necessitate a lot of homework on the GM's part to memorize the more important ones and what they do. Speaking of the system, when it comes to resolving challenges, Fourth Ed has two types of tests, simple and dramatic. The difference between the two is, well, simple. If the degree to which a test succeeds or fails is important to you, make a dramatic test, otherwise you make a simple test. A simple test involves throwing a D10 and comparing the result to the skill or characteristic that the GM asks you to use. If you get lower or equal to it you pass, otherwise you fail. The GM can impose a modifier depending on how difficult or routine the task is. Easy, right? Sadly, dramatic tests are not as straightforward. These are used when it's important to know how well or badly a test went. This is done through the concept of success levels or SLs as the book calls them. To determine this, take the tens number of what you rolled away from the tens number of the characteristic or skill you're testing. The higher the SL, the better things have gone, whereas the more negative it is, the worse the consequences. There's a handy have you succeeded table for GMs to consult. Like simple tests, it's also possible for the GM to throw over modifiers as necessary. One nice touch is that an average test gets plus 20% to a success chance, taking away some of the whiff factor that Warhammer is famous for. Again, I'm going to caveat this with, and I've never played this, but the feedback I've seen online is that the concept of success levels, which is baked into a lot of talent usage, not to mention combat, slows things down a lot. Any test that has modifiers and which is affected by talents is going to take a lot longer to resolve than a simple D100 roll. With a system already burdened by Crunch, this is probably not surprising, but I'm not sure it's a welcome surprise. Combat essentially boils down to a series of opposed dramatic tests. Both combatants roll their melee and whomever scores the most success levels hits. For ranged combat, you simply make the test, your opponent doesn't oppose it. If you hit, reverse your roll to determine the hit location, then take the weapon's damage number, your strength bonus, and the number of success levels you scored, add them together, and the resulting total is the number of potential wounds caused. Then subtract your opponent's toughness bonus and any armor points on the location hit from the potential wounds to determine the final damage total. There are also rules for critical hits and fumbles, but it should be evident by now that there is a fair amount of maths involved in every swing of a sword. Yes, First Ed had a fairly similar and cumbersome system, but that was over 30 years ago. One of my hopes for the new system was it would cut some of the fat from the mechanics, but it feels a bit like Cubicle 7 have doubled down on the complexity. Thinking of the opening chapters of the enemy within, the flagship Warhammer campaign, the combats that crop up there, although simple, could easily take up a sizeable chunk of a game session. Anyway, this goes on for 20 odd pages with rules for critical injuries, healing, and using fate and resolve to survive otherwise lethal blows. It's all very detailed. Fine if you like that stuff, but fairly hair-raising if you don't. There's then 10 or so pages dealing with corruption, disease, and psychology. This is all good Warhammery stuff. One of the things that always made Warhammer Fantasy roleplay stand out from the crowd was that it was set in a pretty grubby, dirty world. Unless those wounds you take are going to be treated, chances are they will become infected. Likewise, in the filthy cities of the old world, disease abounds, and things like the plague and the pox are as deadly as any monsters from the forests. Hand in hand with this physical decay is the concept of corruption, which represents the insidious influence the ruinous powers of chaos have on a character's soul. The more corruption a character accrues, the more likely they are fall to the lure of chaos, and then they'll start to change in various interesting and deadly ways. One aspect of this system that I love is that of dark deals and dark whispers. In short, you can gain corruption by voluntarily accepting a point in exchange for something like a reroll, whilst you can also lose corruption by letting the darkness within come out to play for a little while and generally cock things up for you. Things like letting an enemy escape, making a mess of a ritual, or telling that important noble exactly how you feel about him are all great examples. Anyone who has had the misfortune to have played in more than a handful of games run by me will learn very quickly that I adore mechanics like this. I've always found that any temptation mechanism can be used to drive story and inter-party roleplay like nothing on Earth, and I really, really take a gleeful delight in letting players damn themselves like this. In short, this is exactly the kind of approach to chaos that I would put into my Warhammer games. It's insidious, subtle, slow, and frequently starts from a place of good intentions. In short, it embodies the enemy within. It uses a system of tables and points to allow players to further develop their characters and provide a bit of colour other than yeah I guess I slept off the ears of my coffin. Warhammer tries to do something similar and it breaks it down as follows. First, you generate a random event that has occurred. Then you spend any money you might have acquired on your last adventure. After this, you take part in what is called endeavours to represent tasks that you might take part in when not adventuring, like playing a trade or managing an estate. Finally, all the players resolve the stuff and then they're ready for the next adventure. Oh, and then the players lose all their money. Yeah, I'll come back to that one shortly. Now, credit to Cubicle 7, they do have a box saying it's all optional, and that some people might not choose to follow the rules presented in this chapter, and after reading them I know I would be one of them. Simply put, there is way too much crunch here for the sake of it, with little regard for logical consistency. As an example of this, each player gets one endeavour per week of downtime between adventures, but no more than three regardless of the length of time that passes. This is patently ridiculous and makes no sense. Yes, I get they want to limit players potentially abusing the endeavour system, but there is a substantial difference to what a character can do in three weeks of downtime and what they could accomplish if there were six months of downtime between the adventures, which isn't an unrealistic thing to imagine. Then there's the fact that high-tier characters have to take an income endeavor or they'll drop to a lower career tier, and the fact that elves have to use one of their endeavors to send messages back to their elf families. This wasted endeavour is apparently a way of balancing out the fact that elves are so much better at everything else. By far the most egregious part of this system, and the one I've seen the most outcry about, is how it handles money. In a nutshell, if you don't bank your cash, you lose all the money you've accrued in the last adventure during downtime, period. Apparently you've drunk it, gambled it, paid off old debts, had it stolen or whatever other reason you might want, but it has all gone. Now, for adventurers with a pus full of coin, I can see that being possible. You've just come back from seeing off the old goblin bandits and you've spent your three weeks of downtime living at large. Time passes and you're left thinking, best sharpen the old sword, strap on the backpack and get adventuring again because those beers won't buy themselves. However, what if instead of dealing with some miserable goblins, you and your S-Wild companions had undertaken a quest of epic proportions and had returned with a king's ransom and treasure? Or even just a few thousand gold coins. Are we honestly meant to believe that you've somehow managed to splodge all of that with nothing to show in a couple of weeks and that you will continue to demonstrate this reckless behaviour between every adventure? Now, there are options to try and mitigate this. If you want to start the next adventure with some money, you can either take the income endeavour and earn that an honest wage, or you can choose to bank your cash. With the latter, you can choose to invest and can then roll for things like interest rate and whether or not your investment goes bankrupt and you lose all your money. If the investment succeeds, you can use another endeavour to withdraw your money and do more fun bookkeeping to work out how much interest you're due. If that doesn't sound appealing, you can choose to stash your money. You don't earn any interest, and you can withdraw your cash without spending another endeavour, but there's a 10% chance someone will find your stash and steal all your money. Do you get the impression that the authors thought that if they took cash away from the players, GMs will be able to make more use of, and the NPC offers you great riches if you accept the adventure? Only, if they know that they're probably going to lose it all when they finish whatever quest they're on, it's hardly a great incentive, is it? Moving away from downtime, we jump into the Religion and Belief chapter. Now, this was always one of my favourite sections of the original Warhammer Fantasy roleplay. And I am pleased to say that Cubicle 7 have done a brilliant job with it this time around. The gods of the Warhammer world have always had a very unique feel to them, and this has been captured perfectly across the 20 or so pages of this chapter. All the main deities of the old world are accounted for, with one-page write-ups for each detailing things like worshippers, holy sites, penances, and strictures. Following these, there's a brief overview of non-human deities and an even briefer note on the Chaos Gods. Hopefully, a future supplement will expand upon these topics in more detail, as these were always areas that I felt were lacking in the original Realms of Chaos supplements notwithstanding. We then get details on the two types of powers available to clerics, blessings, which are minor miracles, and invocations, which are flashy or manifestations of divine favour. Each deity provides those with the blessings talent 6 blessings, whilst the miracles are flavoured to each of the individual cults. I really like this update to the system. In First Dead, clerics were essentially wizards with a much more limited choice of spells. In this edition, clerical magic feels special, different and, more importantly, themed to each of the individual gods. Therefore, a cleric of Viverena will invoke miracles of a very different type to those of a worshipper of Ulric. My only gripe is that the focus of miracles is purely limited to human old world cults. It seems like Half-Lean Dwarf and Elden Clerics will have to wait for another supplement to get spells of their own. Following on from Religion, we dive into a chunky chapter on magic. This was one area that First Edition really struggled with. Seriously, the magic system was a straight port from Warhammer Fantasy Battle 2nd and not really suited to an RPG. Advancing as a wizard was difficult, learning new spells was difficult, casting spells was difficult, and in general the whole thing was a clunky mess. With a few exceptions, all of the spells were a straight port from Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and as a result, their application in a non-battle setting was seriously limited. Hell the main body of spells, which incidentally clerics drew their magic from as well, was called battle magic. So, how does 4th edition compare? Well, thankfully the system is a lot better and it's also a lot more thematic. Naturally, this means that things are a lot more complicated, but if you've made it this far into this review, you're probably not surprised at this. At its simplest, casting a spell involves making a casting test and accumulating a number of success levels equal to the casting number. If you don't manage this, you fail. Given that all but the most basic of spells have a casting number much higher than that which can be easily achieved, spellcasters have the option to channel the winds of magic, allowing for the round by round accumulation of arcane energy until they're ready to attempt the spell. I like this, it conjures up images of sorcerers trying to control the dangerous energy that surrounds them and weave it into a spell which they finally unleash upon their opponents. The rules also do a great job of conjuring up just how dangerous magic is. A critical role means that the winds of magic are flared out of your control, granting your spell extra power but with potentially disastrous results. Being around a source of chaotic corruption makes this more likely, which fits very nicely with Warhammer's theme of magic is really just controlled chaos, allowing wizards options to mitigate the effects of miscasts through preparation and ingredients helps add to the flavour and gives magic using players a lot of options. Do I take the time to safely cast this spell or do I really need to get it off quickly? Spells are broken out into petty magic, simple cantrips every wizard learns when starting out, and lore magic, which represents your character's area of specialization. Normally a wizard can only learn one lore, but naturally elves are able to learn more if they meet certain conditions, presumably because they're magical and amazing. Lores might relate to one of the skills of colour magic, witchcraft or something naughty like demonology or chaos magic. While each lore is wonderfully thematic, magic users can also choose from a pool of arcane spells, which allow for more generic magical effects like flight, magic shields, teleportation, and magic missiles. There are almost 20 pages of spells, so there's plenty for budding wizards to get their teeth into. I love how each lore feels very different from the others, and I'd be interested to see how the system plays out in an actual game. Yes, it's complicated, but I think that could work in its favour. After all, isn't magic meant to be complicated and laden with potential risk? I can see a player accidentally forgetting that they could use an ingredient with a spell and having the spell flare out of their control. The only real gripe I have with the magic chapter is I'm not a fan of the direction Warhammer went with regards to magic following the third edition of Fantasy Battle. Suddenly we had wizard licenses and magical universities, and the low fantasy world of Warhammer all of a sudden became much more high magic. This is a personal thing, I know some people love it, and this edition was released with over three decades of fluff established for it, so I'm not going to suggest that the inclusion of these elements somehow makes this a bad product. Just don't claim online that your game is gritty, low magic, grimdarkness, when you've got wizards wreathed in blazing nimbuses of fire, whizzing by on griffins, and blasting people from the skull-topped wands. After we finish with magic, we get around half a dozen pages on how to be a games master. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but I'm sure new players would find it useful. We then get around two dozen pages that serve as a guide to the right land, a section of the Empire that is a game's default setting. The content is fine and it details the setting quite nicely, but as someone who has read the World Guide in First Edition, this just feels kinda sparse in comparison. If Firstead could give us an overview of the entire world, how come we only get detail on what amounts to a single imperial province here? Worst of all, there are no maps. If you want to work out in your head what everything is, you'll be flicking back and forth between this chapter and the end papers, which, as I mentioned earlier, aren't that easy to read. Whilst these maps do a wonderful job of looking like an oldie worldie mappy, they're not that usable. Plus they're repeated once at the beginning and once at the end of the book. Why not replace one of these with a useful simple black and white map? This example of style over substance goes a long way to making the Reichland chapter less useful than it could be. We then have the consumer guide, which is to say pages and pages of useful equipment to spend your hard-earned gold crowns on, presumably before downtime steals those crowns away. This includes everything from weapons to clothing to prosthetics. Weapons, unsurprisingly, add more complications to the game. They can have qualities and flaws, which is to say extra rules that affect combat. On one hand, this makes weapons more interesting than this is a sword and this is a plus one sword. I like the plus one sword better, but it does mean there's a lot more to remember in a fight, and combat will consequently take a lot longer. The final chapter is a bestery made up of a mix of generic fantasy creatures and creations that are pure Warhammer. Femur and Skaven, I am looking at you. Each entry is exactly what you'd expect: a brief description of the creature, a stat block, and a picture. One nice thing is the creatures that are assigned a number of traits, which do a good job of shorthanding things like skills, talent and weapon qualities. For example, the orc has a trait saying weapon plus 8, which means when it hits, to calculate damage, you just take the success levels earned in combat and add them to 8 to get the total potential wounds caused. This is a great design decision and should hopefully make things like combat move much more quickly. The downside is that most creatures have a lot of traits. Take the goblin, one of the most generic of adversaries, and you'll see that they've got at least half a dozen. This means that the GM will have to do quite a bit of prep before most games, and I would imagine it will probably entail a lot of page flipping during the first few games that they run. Speaking of Orcs and Goblins, the artwork for them is great, and the descriptions are devoid of the gobbo nonsense that Games Workshop are so fond of in every publication ever to feature these creatures. So imagine my disappointment to find a quote from an orc boss full of the faux Cockney speak that is still serving as a substitute for humour after almost three decades. Still, at least I've not found any references to things like Zogin Umigates yet. And that is us. That was a big book. So after 350 or so pages, what do I think? Well, gripes about artwork aside, I think there's a lot to like. The most important thing though is it feels like a Warhammer product. Again, other than my gripes around some of the more high magic elements creeping in, I was happy with that, and after reading it, my first thought was I can't wait to run this. Guess I better get something planned though before Steve listens to this and takes that last statement as a promise. We hope you enjoyed it. If you want to check this game out, you can find it on Cubicle 7's website or on Drive Thru RPG. We are a monthly podcast about RPGs. We started off being a history podcast, but we now have a whole ton of episodes covering things like interviews and actual plays, as well as the history episodes themselves. If you want to get in touch with us, you can do so on Twitter at Save Podcast, or you can find us on Facebook by searching for Roll2Save. If you would like to email us, you can get us at roll.save.pod at gmail.com. Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed this, please leave us a review on your podcast directory of choice. All those sparkly little stars cheer us up and it helps us with visibility. So be sure to check out Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fourth Edition, and we'll see you on the next episode.