Running tabletop RPGs and working out what I did wrong afterwards.
OK; maybe in my previous look at 1st edition WFRP adventures I was a little harsh, though when you’re setting material like the Doomstones nonsense against the excellence of Shadows Over Bögenhafen it can be easy to look perspective. Having given a second look to some of the material from the period, I think there’s actually more gems from back then than I gave it credit for.
Continue reading “Deeper Into the Empire”
In both 1st and 2nd edition, some of the most absolutely beloved supplements for WFRP have been big, thick explorations of the unique metaphysic of the Warhammer world. It’s that cosmology, after all, which gives rise to the conventional religions of the setting, the ways of magic, and the forces of Chaos – all three, in fact, are manifestations of the Warp, just as they are in Warhammer 40,000 or Age of Sigmar. A close look at these supplements therefore seems in order if we’re going to hope for suitable sequels for 4th edition.
The 2nd edition of WFRP had a nice, healthy supplement line, with various types of product there. Some of these were lavish treatments of major aspects of the Warhammer world’s cosmology. Some of these were focused supplements based on various human nations or non-human cultures of the setting. Still others were perhaps less sexy than these items, but at the same time had a seriously utilitarian bent to them which made running or playing WFRP all that much easier. This article is dedicated to the latter.
Continue reading “The Utilitarian Supplements of WFRP 2nd Edition”
The publication history of WFRP 1st edition materials is pretty wrinkled – a range of products that had been put out under Games Workshop or Flame Publications saw reprints under Hogshead Publishing, but others weren’t – Hogshead opting instead to skim off the cream, leave some perhaps less-than-stellar material behind, and cobble the best bits together in various Apocrypha collections, although ultimately only two were published.
Largely cobbled together out of little articles here and there – some from the pages of White Dwarf magazine, others from previous WFRP releases like The Restless Dead – Apocrypha Now! incorporates useful commentary on and expansion of the 1st edition rules, deeper pointers on roleplaying nonhumans along with some juicy Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling-specific careers (and details on playing Gnomes), and a brace of locations you can drag and drop into your campaign as the situation demands. (This includes two nicely fleshed-out adventures centred on nights at an inn – Night of Blood and A Rough Night at the Three Feathers – which had previously been reprinted in The Restless Dead, though the versions given here thankfully lack the unnecessary clutter of the pointers on how to integrate them into the Enemy Within campaign, or the token effort to turn them into episodes in a campaign spuriously stringing all the adventures in The Restless Dead together.)
Split between original articles (like some nice in-depth looks at funerary traditions and crime and punishment in the Empire) and reprinted material, this 2000 collection is much in the same vein as the previous one. Between this and the previous one you more or less get all the material worth reprinting from The Restless Dead (without, like I said, the unnecessary clutter of trying to tie them all together into one campaign or The Enemy Within), plus more besides.
The Empire is often the focus of WFRP campaigns, and for good reason; whilst a British RPG publisher producing a fantasy world that was basically a twisted funhouse mirror version of our own world back in history times might have been expected to default to medieval England, Games Workshop elected to take the world less travelled and centre the gameworld on this strange take on the Holy Roman Empire circa the early Renaissance. (Albion, in the WFRP setting, is a near-irrelevant dirt pile haunted by horrors – like 2000 AD, Alan Moore, and Michael Moorcock, they were riding a wave of 1980s British fantasy that was out to burst the bubble of jingoistic British exceptionalism, and it warms the patriotism-despising cockles of my globalist Remainer heart to see it.)
For WFRP purposes, the main sources of lore on the Empire during 1st edition days consisted of the brief writeup in the core book and the welcome additional detail provided in The Enemy Within – later compiled in various ways, the most recent and easily-available version of which is the Hogshead Enemy Within Campaign Volume 1: Shadows Over Bögenhafen, which compiles the original Enemy Within set and the full-length Shadows Over Bögenhafen adventure, which is now on sale as a PDF on DriveThruRPG thanks to Cubicle 7. The second edition, which due to Games Workshop requirements takes place after the “Storm of Chaos” metaplot event, required an update to this material, and the main delivery mechanism for this update (aside from the core WFRP2 rulebook) was Sigmar’s Heirs.
Continue reading “The Empire Renewed, the Old World Refreshed”
Whenever people talk about classic WFRP, one of the products which always gets mentioned is The Enemy Within campaign. Originally released between 1986 and 1989, the campaign is to WFRP what Masks of Nyarlathotep is to Call of Cthulhu – an extensive campaign released in the 1980s that gets regularly reprinted and talked up a lot, and is a reasonably iconic example of a particular style of play, but at the same time actually has a number of issues which have become more and more apparent in retrospect as best practice in scenario-writing has moved forwards.
In fact, poke WFRP fans a bit harder and it becomes apparent that most of them are actually more keen on the idea of The Enemy Within than they are with the campaign itself. Some parts of it are held to be of much higher quality than others, and in particular whilst opinions do (as always) vary the consensus seems to be that WFRP‘s various publishers over the years have never quite been able to stick the landing when it comes to delivering the full campaign.
Back in the days of 1st and 2nd edition WFRP, the fanzine Warpstone was an important lynchpin of the fan community. It is no longer extant; a large part of this probably comes down to the fact that to a large extent Internet discussion fora and fansites largely fill the niche that fanzines used to fill, and do so both with less expense to customers and creators alike and with a great deal more convenience. The typical issue of Warpstone involved some homebrew adventures or setting material of varying quality, a few reviews, and some letters and commentary; a reasonably active fan forum will deliver to you all of that, in greater quantity and with greater interactivity and a tighter community, and do so all year long. Another driving factor in the shuttering of Warpstone may have been WFRP 3rd edition; amidst the fan controversy surrounding its stark abandonment of the old system, Warpstone announced that it would not be publishing material supporting it.
Back in the 2nd edition days, Warpstone hit issue 25. Whilst I can take or leave most issues of Warpstone, this one was rather special, since aside from the briefest possible news and reviews section most of the issue is given over to what is essentially a fully-developed mini-supplement. This is The Fimir: Ruinous Inheritance, drawn together by Robin Low from material penned first with an eye to release by Hogshead before it got passed over, and largely updated to 2nd edition WFRP whilst retaining some concepts from 1st edition which hadn’t been so prominent there (like the gods and daemons of Law and daemons of non-Chaos gods).
