Wrath & Glory and Other Warhammer 40,000 RPGs Disappear From DriveThruRPG

Despite its first wave of products coming out and its core rules being pretty solid as far as I was concerned, there’s been a concerning silence about Wrath & Glory. Aside from a few mentions in interviews, there wasn’t much emerging from the design team with respect to details of future products. The game’s standalone website was still up, though it’s a singularly crap effort – there’s no link to buy the game from, only the starter set is detailed, and the social media links go through to WordPress defaults – and all mention of the game seemed conspicuously absent from Ulisses North America’s front page. Rumours floated around about poor sales, though sales figures in the RPG industry are incredibly difficult to pin down.

Now, though, a much more concrete sign of trouble has emerged: without warning, all Wrath & Glory products have been pulled from DriveThruRPG, along with all the PDFs of the Fantasy Flight Games-era 40K RPGs which Ulisses Spiele had been given the rights to sell as part of their deal with Games Workshop. The products are still available in your library if you’ve purchased them already, and they still show up on searches – but you get an error if you click on those search results, so it’s no longer possible to buy the products on DriveThru if you haven’t already.

On doing further checks, other Ulisses North America game lines like The Dark Eye and Torg are unaffected, so it doesn’t look like this is a shift in policy on their part to shun DriveThruRPG (a bizarre choice since it’d mean walking out of the biggest shopfront in the market). Likewise, Rough Nights and Hard Days – the new supplement for WFRP – is still available on DriveThruRPG (and is doing pretty well in the sales rankings at that), so it seems unlikely that Games Workshop has abruptly decided to cancel all their RPG offerings or ban their licensees from using DriveThru. (Such a move would be a bit out of character for Games Workshop these days anyway, since under their new CEO they seem much more reasonable and gamer-friendly than they’ve been for a long while.)

On the whole, the situation stinks of a licensing issue between Games Workshop and Ulisses – extending, possibly, to a full-on cancellation or freezing of the licence. Why this would be the case I do not know; a lot hinges on what termination clauses and measures were written into the licence, and as a result it’s possible that this was initiated by Games Workshop, or by Ulisses, or by both.

It’s difficult to speculate what could have prompted this, but if I had to put bets on it, I’d say that some sort of acrimonious disagreement is involved. Compare this to the situation where Fantasy Flight gave up the licence voluntarily, and were able to declare as much to give customers a chance to make a last few purchases before the clock ran down. I can’t see that either Ulisses or Games Workshop would have wanted it to go down this way if they had a choice about it.

Possibly it’s just a momentary argument about royalties due from PDF sales or something of that nature, and PDF sales will be restored in due course… but it feels more likely that Wrath & Glory is dead in the water. Whether this came down to Ulisses tossing the 40K licence away (perhaps due to poor sales making it no longer worth their time, or their arrangement with Games Workshop constraining them from making other deals they thought would be more worthwhile), or down to Games Workshop slapping the franchise out of Ulisses’ hands, we don’t know. We can only hope that sooner or later someone else will step up to the plate to handle the grim darkness of the far future in tabletop RPG format.

UPDATE: It’s been announced that Ulisses are turning over development of Wrath & Glory to Cubicle 7. Cubicle 7 press release here, Ulisses statement here.

Despite Ulisses putting a brave face on this, I feel like this is mostly good news for Cubicle 7 and Games Workshop, and a bad sign for Ulisses North America. UNA lose a major brand, Games Workshop greatly simplify their oversight workload on the RPG front, and Cubicle 7 get all the Warhams RPGs under their banner. I have to suspect that Ulisses Spiele may feel that UNA has overextended itself and have decided to prune back their American branch accordingly.

Cubicle 7 confirm that there’ll be a revised printing of the core book, which I actually welcome – as much as I like the new system, the production values on the core book could do with a little Cubicle 7 magic, and folding in the errata would be a nice move.

Supplements of Humanity

And so we come to the end of our slog through the 40K RPGs of a now-bygone era with the supplements to Only War. There weren’t many of these – out of all the 40K RPGs under Fantasy Flight’s custodianship, Only War pretty much got the least love. Sure, Black Crusade only had one full-length adventure put out for it – but it at least had a supplement put out for each Chaos God, whereas there were only three Only War supplements and, as we’ll see, a pretty major gap in the line which Fantasy Flight had ample time to fill and yet didn’t. And by comparison all three of Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch got stacks more support.

Still, Only War did get a few bits and bobs, and I’m going to cover them here so we can put it in the past and look forward to Wrath & Glory…

Hammer of the Emperor

This adds a nice fat chunk of extra regiment creation options, as well as a bunch of additional writeups of canonical regiments (including the Tanith First-and-Only from the Gaunt’s Ghosts series). You also get some rules embellishments (like mounted combat on horsies!) and advanced careers for most of the rank-and-file Guardsmen types. As fun as the advanced careers are for giving guardsmen a bit of extra flavour, there is a caveat: there was never a supplement published giving advanced careers for the Scholar careers – the Commissars, Storm Troopers, or Psykers of Only War – so if you have any of those in your party it may seem a little unfair to use advanced careers when they don’t have any available (unless you’re willing to cook up your own or trust in fan-written ones).

On the one hand, at least in the case of Commissars and Psykers I think you can make a case that the basic concepts are flashy enough that they don’t necessarily need Advanced Careers – on the other, it’s a shame that they don’t get the additional differentiation that Advanced Careers offer. As such, this aspect of the supplement is one you might have to finesse a little depending on the preferences of your group.

Shield of Humanity

This does the Hammer of the Emperor job for your support specialists – your Ratlings, Ogryns, tech-priests, regular priests, those sorts of folks. Emerging in 2014, it was the last non-adventure supplement put out for Only War, which adds insult to injury when it comes to the lack of an equivalent for the Schola characters – FFG were able to put out supplements for Dark Heresy 2nd edition for subsequent years so the failure to fill out the line like they did for Black Crusade and 2nd Edition Dark Heresy is a little galling.

Then again, it may be indicative of overall poor sales for the line compared to the other two games. Somehow this supplement, as interesting as it is for the support characters, feels a little lightweight – it feels like at points they are stretching a little hard to find new archetypes to based Advanced Careers around, for instance. I do wonder whether a better approach would have been to condense the material here down to the absolute best bits and use the space saved to give a little love to the Schola careers instead.

Enemies of the Imperium

Your standard enemies supplement, standing out from the 40K RPG pack by the fact that it also includes a substantial breakdown of a human faction – not Chaos cultists, not Genestealer-contaminated nasties, but regular ol’ humans. Specifically, the book includes an extensive unpacking of the Severan Dominate, an area of space that has declared secession from the Imperium which was introduced in the core rulebook.

The nice thing about the Dominate is that though in their desperation its leaders are not above engaging in gentle diplomatic contact with alien races, for the most part it consists of citizens who still entirely believe in the Imperial Creed. Regardless of whatever undeclared reasons Duke Severus might have for declaring independence, the publicly declared casus belli – and thus the reason most of the Dominate’s citizens believe they’ve left the Imperium – is the corruption of the High Lords of Terra. The Dominate still believes in the Emperor – they just don’t believe in those who claim to speak for him. And since Imperial history includes periods like the Age of Apostasy, the idea that the central government might end up deviating from the true path and that rebellion against it may therefore become justified actually has a certain currency in the setting.

The upshot is that the Dominate provides a delightful opportunity for Imperial Guard regiments to face disturbingly familiar forces and have delightful “Are we the baddies?” conversations, so seeing them fleshed out in the first tranche of Enemies of the Imperium – as well as delicious suggestions about the desperate and ill-advised avenues Duke Severus may explore once the Dominate starts to crumble – is very welcome, and helps set Only War apart from much of the rest of the 40K RPG settings.

GM Kit

Standard screen, average adventure, expanded ideas on how to actually structure and run a Guard-based campaign. Again, worth it if you want the screen, not really worth it otherwise.

Adventures

The two adventures released for Only War – Final Testament and No Surrender – didn’t really grab me. I think the issue is that for the purposes of Only War I’d almost say that the actual events of battle would be more of a backdrop and a basis for combat missions in any game I’d actually run, whilst for in-depth roleplaying and character interaction and setting immersion purposes the truly important thing is the player characters’ regiment – and since the adventures are designed to be fairly agnostic about what regiment you’re running with, they naturally can’t give that much attention to intra-regiment interaction.

Only War Can Make These Rules Seem Right

Ah, Only War. The 40K RPG based around the Imperial Guard was originally going to be a supplement for 1st edition Dark Heresy before Fantasy Flight decided that the subject was big enough to deserve its own game, it ended up inadvertently becoming the model for 2nd edition Dark Heresy in the way it carried forward and built on the system amendments introduced in Black Crusade – especially when fan backlash over the Dark Heresy 2nd edition beta prompted Fantasy Flight to revert to a system much closer to Only War‘s to retain a bit more backward compatibility.

Which isn’t to say that Only War is merely a generic rules testbed – it really goes for the Imperial Guard flavour in some crucial ways. The Comrade rules are great not only for getting the sense of being part of a large, mutually supportive organisation, but also for allowing the referee to present a bit more of a meat grinder than would otherwise be viable. The fact that the PCs all hail from the same regiment really helps distinguish this from Deathwatch (where, though single-Chapter games are completely viable, the text very much assumes you are going for a multi-Chapter party), and as well as being true to the Imperial Guard structure also suggests common roots among the PCs to an extent that none of the other 40K RPGs do. The inclusion of vehicle rules and create-your-own-regiment rules in the core book makes it nicely complete by itself. There’s Ogryns and Ratlings, which I think is the first time abhuman PCs have been added to the 40K RPGs at all.

It’s a simple concept executed with stacks of flavour straight out of the core book, which is just really nice all around. Thumbs up.

Squeeage: Only War

Hey folks, the Christmas season is an appalling time for actual play so I don’t have many qualms about making some non-Actual Play-based posts, particularly when it’s a subject I want to enthuse about.

So, I am now the proud owner of Only War and the associated GM’s kit because Fantasy Flight Games are addicted to putting out Warhammer 40,000 RPGs and I am a shameless enabler of this addiction. I could ramble in a directionless way about my first impressions but I thought it’d be more fun to pitch this post both as a place to ask me any questions you might have about the thing if you don’t already own it, or to share your thoughts if you do already own it. Given that I know two out of the three people who read this blog are shameless Warhamsters like me (and there’s a not unreasonable chance Dan owns Only War already) I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine you guys are interested.