[OSSR]Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st Edition)

[Ancient History]

Section 1:
The Gamesmaster

FrankT:

One of the strangest things about this chapter, other than the fact that they insist on writing “gamesmaster” rather than “game master,” is the seeming assumption that the GM won't necessarily read the Player's Section. It's chapter 2, and the first page tells you to familiarize yourself with dice, and then directs you to check out more information in the previous chapter. It's just kind of weird. Do they really think a prospective GM will skip the player information? Is that a thing that happens?

Note: Since it is quite likely that we will be using the word 'gamesmaster' quite a bit in this section, you will find it has been abbreviated regularly to GM. In the long run this will probably save us 10 pages in the book...

That really looks like it isn't just an excessively British witticism, but a frank admission that the book was being written in pieces by the different authors. Remember, this is all done with typewriters and printing blocks to be cut and pasted with actual scissors and actual paste. It was probably literally years between the start of writing and the finished project. That note was probably penned to the other authors, and it is at least as plausible as otherwise that its inclusion in the final book represents a paste-up error.

So at least some of the back and forth between the chapters represents authors trying to fob off work onto other authors or leave notes for them to get back to things later. Sometimes they never do, as in the case of how in the Player's Section it tells you that the GM will have more information about Fate Points, but they actually don't because the citation is just a circular one that gives no more info on either end.

• Circular Reasoning: See Reasoning, Circular

AncientH:

The Gamesmaster Section is, uh...well, we wouldn't call it that these days. Most of it is just a massive amount of system rules, often the fiddly things like disease, light, traps, Fire!, and stuff that get squeezed into the end of combat chapters in most books. A lot of it is unquestionably of interest to the PCs, like alignment, character advancement and experience, advanced careers, etc. There's some stuff at the end about designing scenarios and creating NPCs, but I think mostly this was called The Gamesmaster section because "Player's Guide" hadn't really come into existence or something yet.

Also stuck in here is the first bunch of color insert pages, which I can't impress strongly enough was uncommon in gaming at the time. Hell, it was still uncommon 3 years later when Shadowrun started doing it. I don't think White Wolf ever had color insert pages. But this was glossy stock back when that shit was reserved for high-end magazines like National Geographic.

FrankT:

The system is, at base, a d100 roll-under system. The GM is allowed and encouraged to load up modifiers however which way he likes, and there isn't really a standardized set of stats to actions to roll against outside of combat (well, there is one, but it's so short and telegraphic that it might as well not exist). So if you need to ride a horse in a difficult situation, you might be called upon to roll against Initiative, Dexterity, Leadership, or Cool. Or something else entirely. And those numbers will probably be very very different. But on top of that, the GM is also supposed to add or subtract bonuses and penalties all over the place, to the point that the system might as well be GM-fiat as to whether you succeed or fail. In actual practice, that's too hard and the lack of sample modifier tables meant that WFRP GMs rarely gave modifiers at all, resulting in most tasks being a simple matter of the GM picking an attribute arbitrarily and the player attempting to roll equal to or less than it on a d100. And since the average stat started at 31, players failed at almost all tasks almost all the time.

Some tests can be two stats added together with another stat subtracted, or just two stats added together. It is possible therefore to have a test have a greater than 100% of success, and the rules don't say what happens. However, the general gist is that most tests are still going to succeed 40% or less of the time. In many ways, having relevant skills was not necessarily a good thing. Having Concealment: Urban gave you a +5% chance to hide while moving. And that's actually worse than not having that bonus in a lot of circumstances, because you are probably going to fail a hiding check even if you are an Elf. So anything that reminds the GM that you might be supposed to roll actual dice is like turning on Yakkety Sax or the Three Stooges soundtrack before declaring what your character is trying to do.

AncientH:

It's hard to say how much of these rules was a distillation of D&D and RuneQuest, but you can definitely see that's where the writers were taking their cues from - it's easy to forget nowadays how weirdly clunky the old systems are (as opposed to how weirdly clunky new systems are); they really were creating all these different rules and guidelines and stuff pretty much in a vaccum, and there's a lot of stuff that's highly individualistic and unintegrated into the general resolution system. Bribery, for example, must go on for an entire column, and deals with everything from minimum bribes to the percentile chances of taking a bribe based on alignment; the same goes for gambling and, yes, even Stupidity.



Some of these rules include examples, and the examples include Clem Shirestock. I can't throw stones, I used to do the same thing in my rules examples.

FrankT:

Sneak: Although not a standard test, it is anticipated that characters – with or without Silent Moves skills – will want to creep past guards and potential problems. To discover whether the character is heard, refer to the Listen tests above, and the section on Movement.

I would fucking kill to get even a page XX error in this shit. It's obvious that there are pointers being written with no idea of what the other parts of the book are going to say, let alone where in the book they are going to end up.

As it happens, the rules are that good stats help you avoid being seen, but don't do anything to help you avoid getting heard. There's a Hide skill that adds slightly to your chance to avoid being seen, and there's a silent moves skill that subtracts slightly from the chance of being overheard by enemies when you are in their detection radius. There is an “excellent vision” skill, but it doesn't interact with the rules for spotting hidden enemies at all. Instead, it raises the maximum vision range. But Elves have to take Excellent Vision, and the Elf gets their own chart entry on the Vision Ranges table, and I have no idea whether that is supposed to include the Excellent Vision bonus or not. All in all, I think there are enough incompatible ideas about how to handle the stealth minigame that it boils down to literally every single designer on this project having their own system and just writing their sections their own way.

AncientH:

Actual movement involves tables. Very many tables, in fact. On page 73 they give you tables for move allowance at three speeds (Cautious, Standard, and Running) in terms of yards per round/10 seconds, yards per game turn/minute, and miles per hour.

FrankT:

The movement rules go on for 5 pages. The wargame roots of the system are obvious. You also get a couple pages on cutting walls down that go into great detail and on traps, which don't. Traps have a triggering mechanism and a payload, and are mostly handled by magical teaparty. Initiative tests can be called for, but by and large we're dealing with really old school traps where you describe what your characters are doing and the GM decides if this bypasses the traps or not.

AncientH:

You can tell this system was designed post-D&D because they feel no real need to explain what a trap in the context of a dungeon is. They just assume you to know, and then go on and give you some guidelines for basic traps ripped out of D&D and medieval sieges.

The Fire rules are also refreshingly influenced by old wargame mechanics.

Burning Oil
Burning oil sticks to skin and clothing and is very difficult to put out. To burning oil everything and everybody is a flammable target - including people! Characters or creatures hit by burning oil suffer 2D4 points of damage, and will be ignited if they take 5 or more damage.

To make Molotov Cocktails, bottles or flasks of oil must be fitted with a rag wick, and count as improvised weapons. They burst into flame only 50% of the time, and attempting to throw one necessitates a Risk test. A failed test means that the contents of the bottle or flask end up all over the thrower, with the usual 50% chance of igniting. Characters carelessly soaked in inflammable oils and spirits count as flammable targets to all fire damage.

You know what image that goes with, don't you?

No, I'm not posting the other one. You monster.

There are disease rules (yes, you can catch the Black Plague), poison rules (black lotus, elfbane, manbane, trollbane, truefoil, etc.), and insanity - the latter system being that you gain insanity points, and once you hit 6 or more you need to start taking tests or you roll for a disorder. These include but are not limited to alcoholism, alignment change, anorexia, drug addiction, Hatred, Frenzy, gluttony, and my personal favorite: Heroic Idiocy. Some of these disorders are more-or-less beneficial, others suck the sweat off a dead man's balls. Fortunately, there's a chance of curing your insanity with trips to the asylum, surgery (you really want to try a Renaissance-era lobotomy?), drug treatment (same), and magic. Man, good luck getting your insurance to approve any of that.

Psychology is actually a bit more important than the insanity rules suggest, because Dwarfs start out Hating Orcs & Goblins (a holdover from the minis game) and stuff, so there are some essential things to know about your character here.

FrankT:

The actual descriptions of what Alignments do and what Alignments characters can have are mysteriously in the gamemaster's section. It has the same five part alignment system that 4e D&D went with, where Law is more good than Good and Chaos is more bad than Evil. But they also tried to do a thing where Law was also bad because it was too extreme, and really Neutral was more good than Good. Or something. But really, it's just a line where Law is on one end and Chaos is on the other, and the forces of Chaos are fucking bad. Chaos is all up on their face eating and raping you with a scorpion dick. It's so unappealing that it only works as comedy, not as horror.



Anyway, despite what they told you in the Player's section, Humans and Dwarves can have any alignment. Elves can only be Lawful or Good. Halflings can only be Neutral. But those restrictions are optional anyway, and I don't understand why they made this have so many onion layers instead of just writing up the alignments and letting players pick one. Or just not have alignments at all, because it seriously makes fuck all difference.

AncientH:

The Lawful/Chaotic thing was supposed to be a big deal, and borrowed much more directly from Moocock than D&D ever did. Later editions of WFRP pretty much simplified down to "Not-Chaos" and "Chaos."

FrankT:

All advancements cost 100 experience points (called “EP” instead of “XP” because fuck you). it takes one advancement to buy a skill associated with your career, and one advancement to buy a stat boost associated with your career, and one advancement to change careers once you have everything in it. That's the whole system, but they take a fuck tonne longer to explain it in this book. You get all the skills for a career if it's your starting career, so careers with a lot of skills (like Outrider with 7 and not at all like Roadwarden with 1) are great as starting careers and shit as things to get into later. I really don't know how the skills that have chances work for non-starting careers. It might say somewhere, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

The advanced careers are pretty hit and miss. Some of them are actual D&D characters like the Wizard and the Templar, while others are just educated dudes. The Artillerist is a guy who can spend advancements to learn how to make and fire catapults. While fascinating, the utility on an adventure is basically nil. Some of these careers appear to character ending. If you become an Artisan you get a random specialty, and if you roll poorly and end up being a chandler you not only don't get any good skills you also don't have any career exits. Wizards are so pimp that they don't even get a writeup in the advanced classes, they have a super double secret class writeup in chapter 4.

According to the Slaver writeup (yes, you can be a Slaver), there are Half-Orcs in this setting. The game contradicts itself on that point a lot.

AncientH:

Half-Orcs wouldn't be fully expunged until Herohammer (WFB 4th edition), I think.

If you did end up in a dead-end advanced career, your options were not terrific:

Certain Advanced Careers do not have career exits. Players wishing their characters to advance from these careers should start their characters through new Basic Careers, as described in Changing Careers).

This is a bit disingenuous as some of the career exits are basic careers already, which makes you wonder if left hand was talking to right hand while writing this.

The highlight of the Advanced Careers is that in general they have more and higher profile advancements, and more and better skills. But then again, you also have the Demagogue, who is...well, pretty fucking worthless. Trollslayers get the option to upgrade to Giant Slayer, and in this book that's as far as it gets. Later advancements would introduce Daemonslayers and whatnot, but you can pretty much blame Bill King for that.


Miss you, Bill.

One thing that should be really emphasized at this point is that you get access to many more and better skills involving gunpowder weapons, which is another of those things that really set WFRP off from D&D, where you only got guns if you went through that one shitty adventure that had an alien ship crashland in Greyhawk or something - this was years before Ed Greenwood tried to introduce crappy blackpowder weapons in the Forgotten Realms, and WFRP proudly embraced the European tradition of firearms with all manner of pistols, blunderbusses, bombards, etc. They didn't always work but they were always awesome, and I don't say that just because I dedicated a page of my homebrewed WFRP supplement to dwarf runes for gunpowder weapons.

As NMAth pointed out, there is a top-out to your advancement - you're pretty much guaranteed to rarely go past 3-4 advancements (+4/+40%) in any given attribute, no matter what profile (exception: Wounds), so if you start the game at minimum (30%) you're unlikely to see 70%, and very unlikely to see go beyond that, though certain Skills can help.

FrankT:

The last three pages of the chapter are given over to describing adventure plots, treasure charts, making NPCs, random encounters, and adventuring in the wilderness. It's very old school and very rushed. I don't really know why I'd need a chart to tell me whether a random NPC was a Human, Halfling, Elf, or Dwarf. Especially since Warhammer is a world where NPCs could be Goblins or rat men or whatever. And where African people
were considered to be a different race. It's so half assed and non-encompassing that even though it's really short, it still feels like wasted space.

AncientH:

This is the first real part of the chapter where things feel spaced out weird, mostly because they use the same space-hogging head symbol six times on two pages and the margins between the paragraphs become gigantic. But I've seen worse wastes of space in modern roleplaying books.

[Voss]

If you're an Elf, you're better. You get an extra 10 to 30 points in almost every fucking stat and no real disadvantages to speak of

Fucking elves. Their disadvantage is supposed to be roleplaying one, in that Empire is racist and hates elves. The problem with this is that GM either ignores it and elves have no disadvantage, or he enforces it and the whole group is at a loss for hanging out with an elf.

That... isn't true. At all, at any point in the WH background. Normal folk might be a bit antsy around elves because they don't see them much, but there isn't any weird anti-elf racism or shit like that. They aren't close allies like the dwarves are, but they help against chaos when shit really hits the fan- mostly they're just distant.

The disadvantage is really intended to be fate points, and you will chew through them pretty damn quick. Most of the published adventures have the GM rewarding new ones 3-4 times over the course of the module, so everything being equal, random bad luck (which pretty much dominates WHFRP characters) will have the elves dead and making new characters first.

[angelfromanotherpin]

All advancements cost 100 experience points (called “EP” instead of “XP” because fuck you).

That is a Britishism. Brits are continually perplexed at the American habit of abbreviating words that begin with 'e' as if they began with 'x.'

[Ancient History]

Section 3:
Combat



Epic battles against giant monsters don't happen very often in this game, and if they did happen would be very short.

FrankT:

The combat chapter is a good 16 pages long and out of 364 pages, that is only 4.4% of the book. Considering that this entire game is based on a wargame, that might seem like not very much. But remember that a lot of the combat rules are actually in other sections of the book. Lots of stuff from combat movement to attacking (and being attacked by) inanimate objects was in the gamesmaster's section. Really, I think there's some kind of combat rules in pretty much every chapter of the book. This chapter is really just about initiative, attack rolls, and healing. This is not a good use of organizational space, but I'm willing to give it a fair amount of slack because it was the mid 80s and this entire book was put together with an exacto knife and rubber cement. I'm still in absolute awe of that, by the way. The production values are way over what could be expected with the tools at hand. It must have been great being the only gaming company in the entire country and getting essentially limitless cheap or free labor.

Sorry, “labour.” Or should I say, “labour”.

AncientH:

Just in case you missed the fact that these are *hint*hint* rules designed for minis, they actually have charts and stuff with mini-cut-outs to show facing and stuff.

Also, they have something you don't see much these days: hit location. The idea being that if you hit someone it mattered - and it mattered more than most in WFRP, because your armor only covered certain parts of you and for different values, and used the RuneQuest "deduct armour from damage" rules instead of the D&D "add armor to difficulty to hit" rule. On a critical hit, you get to consult a Critical Hit Chart and roll more dice to determine how bad it was...and it can get quite bad indeed, from "Your blow skins your opponent's knuckles" to "Your blow smashes through the arm and into the chest, caving in one side of the ribcage." with appropriate additional effects.

Note, some of these critical hit descriptions are almost (literally) copypasta'd, so for example the most severe leg critical hit is "Your blow smashes through the leg and into the pelvis, caving in the lower abdomen." I'm not sure how that works, but it makes my man-bits wince.

I should mention at this point that while yes, technically all dice on the D&D spectrum are represented in this game, realistically most of the time you're rolling percentiles (for skills and random charts) and d6s for damage.

FrankT:

One of the ways the book gets to be 364 pages is by repeating information over and over again. So the Excellent Vision skill tells you to check “Light and Darkness,” and it doesn't tell you where that is, but it's in the Gamesmaster's Section. But there's a more in-depth description of night vision distances in the Combat Section under Positioning and Detection in the Combat section. Then very next section of the Combat Section is called “More About Rounds” and you guessed it – that's pretty much exactly material covered in the previous chapter under “Time and Movement.”

But it's not just that things are redundant, it's that they often are contradictory or simply don't make sense. The Positioning and Detection bit is all about where to put things on the battle mat during the first round of combat during a random encounter. It's so old school that it's really kind of amazing. Night vision distances are such that Dwarves probably see farther into the darkness than their lantern lets them see, and I really have no idea what that even means. Do the distances add? Does the lantern shut off the natural nightvision? I have no idea. There is a one sentence justification of natural nightvision that it involves “seeing heat,” a nod to AD&D Infravision, but it also requires starlight and doesn't work in enclosed spaces for some reason. Obviously there were different design concepts being cut together, but I doubt anyone really knows what the final version was supposed to be.

AncientH:

Of course, in the realm of not-immediately-lethal combat there are Stun attacks, which basically involve a called shot to the head without trying to kill them, but no guarantee not to accidentally injure them. I'm not sure in practice whether this works out better or worse than just trying to bash them in the head.

Also relevant are hit locations for non-humanoids, in which we are given a number of options, most of which aren't really applicable. For example, the list is Winged Humanoid (none in WFRP), Octopus (no stats given), multiple heads (fair enough), flightless bird (...ostriches and giant penguins, I guess, neither of which have stats), snake (fair), centaur (fair), hydra (check), and "tails." Why not, I dunno, dragons? Or regular quadrupeds?

FrankT:

You wouldn't think that a game where the average character has 6 hit points, no advanced character is ever going to have more than 15 even at the top of their game, a basic attack does a d6 damage, and starting hobos can get two attacks per round would be a game that would need additional rules to increase deadliness. And indeed, it really doesn't. But they are here anyway, because why the hell not? So there's a bunch of crazy accounting when you run someone out of hit points (which as noted, can easily happen in one round or even one attack from enemies who might get 4 or more each round). You roll another set of dice and consult two charts, and that directs you to a wound effect which varies from “you drop what you are holding” to:

Your opponent's head flies off in a random direction landing 2D6 feet away.

Each critical effect is pretty much stand alone and all have their own rules. Some of these rules don't really interact with the other rules. Each critical injury that leaves you bleeding to death (and there are many) has its own unique mechanics. One might give you a random amount of time to get medical care, while another might cause you to lose wounds every round. I'm not actually sure what losing wounds every round is supposed to do, because you virtually by definition have zero wounds left if you're rolling on the critical chart at all.

Despite the truly vast array of non-humanoid monsters you could be asked to stab in this game, the combat chapter gives only a small set of choices of non-humanoid creature hit location rules. You get “flightless bird,” “snake,” “winged humanoid” and a few others. But you don't have a general case, nor do you have “Three armed, worm headed, tree trunk looking thing.”


Seems like an oversight is all.

AncientH:

Okay, I think we covered most of the same stuff there, just in different amounts of detail. Some special rules for specialist weapons are given here, of which the most annoying is:

Elf Bow - The elf bow is a specialist weapon that does not require specialist weapon skill. It can be used only by Wood Elves - in the hands of another race it counts as a short bow.

Fucking pointy-eared master race fuckers.

On the other hand it also covers lassos, bombs, repeating crossbows, and crossbow pistols along with, for some reason, three artillery pieces: the bolt thrower, bombard, and stone thrower. In case two artillerists decide to get into a duel.

FrankT:

The basic combat system is essentially AD&D's THAC0. You hit if you roll against your own weapon skill. Your enemy's skill, speed, and armor don't actually count for anything in melee. So to a first approximation, battles between higher skilled opponents take less time because when everyone has better Weapon Skill, people hit more. Now, there is a skill called “Dodge Blow” where your stats actually help you not get hit, but it's just a once-per-round chance to negate a single hit. So in battles between skilled warriors it's important – but not actually that important because everyone is throwing around 3 or more attacks.

Missile fire actually has a bunch of things that modify your chances to hit, which since I remind you characters start with BSs of about 31, mean that if any negative modifiers apply you can get forced off the RNG altogether. Missile weapons either take a long time to load, have low fixed strength scores, or both. So you'd think that people wouldn't bother using them. And you'd be wrong, because the game is so fucking deadly that being in melee is just a really bad plan. So if you meet a monster on the road, and everyone pulls out slings and throws rocks, they'll all miss 4 times out of 5, but you'll still turn a harpy or whatever into mulch in just a few rounds.

AncientH:

Healing concentrates on how many wounds you have suffered. The average character has 3 + d3 Wounds or thereabouts, modified by career advancements, and these are basically hit points. In a world that does d6 damage for hand weapons. How hurt you are is determined by how many Wounds you have remaining; if W >= 2, you'll heal up on your own at the rate of 1 W per day of complete rest, sooner if you have access to a competent healer (good luck). If W < 2, you need to go see the surgeon, and again: good luck. If you suffer a critical hit, you need emergency surgery, which must be really fun considering the current level of medical technology in Warhammer.


He's bleeding out! We need to balance his humours, stat!

FrankT:

The last part of the chapter is about firearm misfires, healing, and surgery. That may seem to be a weird bunch of stuff to put on a page, but this is Warhammer. Of course, the rules for psychiatric surgery were in the previous chapter, so the fact that the rules for cauterizing bleeding are in this chapter is still pretty strange.

AncientH:

Altogether, these rules are grim'n'gritty and serve to make combat a lot longer than absolutely necessary. Which is both kind of amazing and incredibly prescient of D&D3 in many respects, even if it is essentially an unholy kludge of RuneQuest and D&D combat mechanics. That said, it's still incredibly more compact than comparable modern rules.

Next up, Magic!

[Koumei]

Sorry, “labour.” Or should I say, “labour”.

I think you made an error there. Not with using British labour, I get that, but apparently correcting something with the exact same word.

[OgreBattle]

Fucking elves. Their disadvantage is supposed to be roleplaying one, in that Empire is racist and hates elves.

There's really no reason to have mixed race adventuring groups in WHF (or 40k either). One of the things I like about the WH setting is that the humans really are just a step above goblin compared to everyone else being superhuman. So for humans to break their limits they really do need to turn to magic, faith, vampirism, or chaos worship.

Well, except for dwarves and humans because the the dwarves are too short to make the humans feel inadequate, and the humans have lots of gold to trade for dorf stuff.

That dwarf is shaped exactly like Kirby, if Kirby was wearing a dwarf-head hat. It's things like this which make Warhammer great.

[Sir Neil]

Period placement, Koumei.

[Voss]

for some reason, three artillery pieces: the bolt thrower, bombard, and stone thrower. In case two artillerists decide to get into a duel.

for some reason: odds are good that someone (likely the GM) plays warhammer fantasy on the tabletop and actually has one or more of the above and is going to want to inflict them on the players at some point.

Though to be fair, sneaking into a gobbo camp to set their Mangonel [In Gobbo/Orcish: Man-mangler] on fire is pretty damn fun. Though odds are pretty good that Clem will die in the ensuing fight when the troll-slayer decides this a suitably heroic task to die doing and so wakes up the entire camp. Fucking stunties.

[codeGlaze]

Ah... I love the Warhammer 'verse.

I hated WFRP though.
You two reviewing this makes me hate the RP less, though. I think I see what they were trying to get at.

Definitely my favorite OSSR to date.

[TheFlatline]

Though to be fair, sneaking into a gobbo camp to set their Mangonel [In Gobbo/Orcish: Man-mangler] on fire is pretty damn fun. Though odds are pretty good that Clem will die in the ensuing fight when the troll-slayer decides this a suitably heroic task to die doing and so wakes up the entire camp. Fucking stunties.

This paragraph has brought back all kinds of memories of TPKs.

[Solmyr]

Any chance you could review 2nd edition for comparison?

[Ancient History]

Section 4:
Magic


The other characters are like Rat Catchers and shit.

FrankT:

Magic is available to a set of advanced careers. These advanced careers are Cleric, Druidic Priest, Alchemist, and Wizard. Of those, all of them sit at the kid's table except for Wizards. Note that they do get to sit at a table, which is more than Grave Robbers and Sailors get to do. However, Wizards are way more powerful than you. With the entire rest of the game spitting out characters that range from peasant levies that cost 3 points in the war game to elite soldiers who cost 12 points, Wizards go up to battlefield controlling crazy fuckers who cost 250 points. A Wizard who has completed his career is supposed to be worth more than twenty Templars who have completed theirs, and if anything that's incredibly conservative. It's not that Wizards go up to 11 and you don't, it's that Wizards go over nine thousand – and you don't.

The game comes up with a wide array of ways to try to make the Wizard less attractive. To try to convince people that the Wizard has sufficiently earned their power that it's somehow fair that he can summon an army of elementals that are individually more powerful than the entire party. And we'll get into those in time. The first way it does this is to make the Wizard career require a metric fuck tonne of advancements to complete. By contrast, if you have an advanced career that is “lame” like say Counterfeiter, there are 21 advancements to take before the career is over. And you're basically certain to have many if not most of those 4 skills and 17 stat upgrades before you join the class. But for the Wizard, it takes two advancements to learn each spell. There are four levels of spells and five schools of magic. It costs even more advancements to unlock each level and each level of each specialization before you're even allowed to start buying spells at 2 advancements a piece. Being a level 4 Elementalist makes you win the game, but it's 11 advancements just to move from level 3 to level 4 and buy a spell. The other players are going to lose interest and stop playing long before you get enough advancements to show them what Summon Elemental Horde actually does.

AncientH:

Wizards rule and every other spellcaster drools, more or less. The system is based mainly on WFB (which was, in turn, based mostly on D&D), with several embellishments also mainly borrowed from D&D, with the upshot being that WFRP magic looks a lot less like the current WFB sorcery rules and a lot more generic magic-system-y. Spellcasters have Levels instead of separate careers like everybody else because WFB has levels, and they can't cast well in armor because of WFB/D&D, and druids and clerics as spellcasters is a thing because of D&D, specialist wizards and illusionists are a thing because of D&D, and material component ingredients is a thing because of D&D. A lot of the really familiar elements like the color-coded Colleges of Magic and the Chaos Gods didn't really exist yet, at least not as we know it today, and there were lots of add-ons, some of which persisted and most of which were dumped - like Dwarf Wizards.

Probably the biggest difference between D&D magic and WFRP is that instead of a Vancian system of fire-and-forget spells, WFRP uses magic points. More levels you have as a spellcaster, more Magic Points. Druids and Clerics, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, have the best MP progression, which are rolled like HP and so sort of random - I say sort of because even though it is theoretically possible for a high-rolling Alchemist to have more MP than a low-rolling Wizard or Druid Priest at mid-level, first you have to get an Alchemist to mid-level. And let's face it, anybody that makes it out of their apprenticeship is doing well.

FrankT:

Magic in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is incredibly dangerous and random. Spells have an activation roll, and higher level spells get penalties to that activation roll, so bigger spells hardly ever succeed even one time in two. And lots of spells have horrible misfire possibilities, some of which can happen even if a spell is successfully cast. This all may seem extremely incongruous with having characters have to survive dozens if not hundreds of adventures before they can seriously call themselves a “mid level” wizard. And um... yeah. It is. Even if campaigns of WFRP survived long enough to see the really top level spells, no Wizard is ever going to. Part of this is that this is the same Games Workshop that thinks it is fucking hilarious to have two players put hundreds of dollars worth of figures on the table and then roll a d6 to see if a completely overpowered siege engine destroys the enemy army or their own.


We heard you spent points and pounds on a “pike formation.” That's hilarious.

But another part of it is just a really old school way of looking at things. That if something was rare, it was OK for it to be overpowered. Remember that this is an era where if you rolled good stats in AD&D you got bonus XP. An era where people didn't understand that the Deck of Many Things was the DM telling you he was done with the campaign.

AncientH:

Somewhat bizarrely, the method for learning new spells seems to be influenced more by early Call of Cthulhu than anything else, and you don't hear that very often. However, they're weirdly expensive and restrictive in a number of ways - the cost for spells increases linearly as you increase in level (specialist spells cost double, and the total cost doubles again if you're not currently in a spellcaster career), and you require a source for them - hiring another wizard to teach you a spell costs hundreds of GP, in a game where you're probably better off investing in a light artillery piece, and you have a maximum number of spells known capped by (Intelligence / 10 x Level), and if you accidentally drink a Potion of Stupidity or something you'll actually lose spells - but it's okay, the gamesmaster can give you a +10% bonus to the Intelligence test for relearning it.

FrankT:

The real power, of course, comes from summoning. Because that gives you creatures from the bestiary. And those things are fucking insane. But we'll get to that later. Just remember when we get to chapter 6, that the last 12 pages or so are all stuff that one flavor or another of Wizard can pokemon. With all the absurdity that entails.

The authors seemed on some level to understand that this was insane, and promptly decided to take a giant shit on summoners. The two main “summoning” schools (Demonology and Necromancy) do their best to murder you for trying to specialize in them. Every time you go up a level in Demonology or Necromancy, you have to roll on a degeneration chart. Also you collect insanity points for Demonology, and “tomb rot” (which is as bad as it sounds) for Necromancy. And when you try to summon things, they will try to murder you and you can go crazy and so on and so forth. It is basically inconceivable that you would actually survive doing any of this crazy crap. Degeneration of the lesser sort also kicks in for all Wizards who happen to be Evil or Chaos aligned, which is weird because they don't actually gain anything special, it's just the author forcing players to write “Neutral” on their character sheet.

The Demonology rules are very weird. First of all, almost none of the effects you give a shit about are actually in the spell list. There are spells to call in your demons on short notice for short periods, but they already have to be your demons. The actual rules are at the start of the Demonology section, where it tells you that you can use magical teaparty to find the names of demons, and then make pentagrams and call the demons in and then make checks to avoid being eaten and make a totally magical teaparty bargain. It's mostly magical teaparty is what I'm saying. Each demon you summon requires you to be on drugs or lose a point of Toughness permanently. Since Toughness is the stat that makes you not die, and is also in extremely short supply, you want to use the drugs. I can't find the rules for the drugs. The Demonology section tells me to look them up, but neglects to tell me what page or even what chapter they are in. I really have no idea. They may not be in this book at all, because a bunch of Demonology rules were held off for the “Realms of Magic” book that they hadn't finished writing when this book went to print. It's supposed to make this all clearer. Spoiler alert: it does not.

Demonologists have to be Evil or Chaotic. And their extremely pointless spells to pop demons out in the middle of battlefields require them to carve the hearts out of innocents (thereby making it even more pointless because you can't even do it without a whole bunch of preparation – if you could bring a sacrificial victim and altar, you could probably just summon your demon at home and walk him to the battlefield). Later on they point out that there are actually Good and Lawful demons who are just as overpowered and don't want to eat the hearts of innocents, so I'm not actually sure why Demonologists can't be Good or Neutral and just
summon those instead. But in any case, the higher levels of Demonologist don't actually get you anything at all that helps you summon Demons, so you might as well be a regular Wizard and take just a single level of Demonologist. Actually, it's not made explicit that you have to take any levels of the Demonologist specialization at all. Summoning a Greater Demon apparently just requires you to put 25 Magic Points into a pentagram, so a first level Wizard could probably just do that.

Bottom line: they could have just said that Demonologists were NPC-only and not given them any rules, and it would have been better than what they delivered.

AncientH:

It bears repeating, but these Demonologists are not the Chaos Sorcerers as we know and love them today.



This is mainly because the mythology wasn't written yet, and would be expanded on further in the two-volumes Realms of Chaos book. So while today we would talks about Sorcerers of Nurgle or Chaos Shamans of Tzeentch or Rabid Masturbatoresses of Slaanesh, back then all you had was Demonologists, and the demons they summoned weren't quite up to snuff either - there's a fucking Balrog expy, for fuck's sake. However, you can still sort of make out the skeleton on which Warhammer Fantasy was built - the distinction between Lesser Demons, Greater Demons, and the Chaos Gods, the fact that basically all agents of all gods are a form of demon, etc.

The two not-explicitly evil specialists are Elementalists and Illusionists. Everyone should remember the Illusionist from D&D, and the Elementalist from the first incarnation of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.

FrankT:

The other main evil magic path is Necromancy. Unlike Demonology, this one is actually playable. And by that I mean that it is physically possible to follow the rules given and produce results because it doesn't defer most of the design choices to another book that hasn't been written yet. Necromancy will still try to murder you if attempt to go down that path. You can die during character advancement because you have to make rolls for deadly and permanently disabling diseases. It takes a d4+4 months after you start the career before you can actually use Necromancy at all because there's a weird “attuning” phase which if you are in a fast moving game just kicked you all the way out of the campaign.

Now, the book goes on at great length about what to do when you want to enchant some teeth and throw them at the ground to cause skeleton warriors to spring up out of the ground and fight your enemies. Because Jason and the Argonauts was awesome. But you are not actually going to do that. What you actually do is spend some mana every day to animate your skeletons, who then last until the following dawn. Actual skeletons are fairly terrible, but they cost about 1 mana per skeleton per day, so it's fairly trivial for a Necromancer to field the fighting strength of the entire party even at level 1.

Bizarrely, none of the level 2 Necromancy spells make you appreciably better at necromancy, but by 3rd level you get the ability to do body transference (I'm not sure what happens to your attributes, but anything is better than keeping a diseased necromancer body), and maintain a larger pile of daily undead. Of course, to get to this point, you needed to take a 10% chance, a 30% chance, and a 50% chance of contracting a deadly plague. So you'd better do your body jumping in a hurry is what I'm saying. The real prize of necromancy, of course, is turning into an immortal undead. The rules don't tell you how to do that. The rules only concern themselves with things that you might use on the battlefield, and none of the creation or transformation rituals are described. We are assured that they exist, but that's as far as they'll go.

AncientH:

If you do contract certain plagues, they can be offset (partially) by special, exotic medicines. Which are so expensive, you'll probably command the rest of your party to switch their careers to Tomb Robber just so that you can get enough bling and raw materials to keep going in your quest for Lichdom. Of course, if you do take these preparations, you're pretty much guaranteed to become addicted to them.

Aside from getting gimped on magic points and spell access, Alchemists don't have it that bad. They get the wizard profile advancements, a bunch of good skills, and d4 of some books with bitchin' titles like Treatise on ye Properties of Matter, De Lapis Polosophorum, and Rudiments of Alchemy. They're basically really-qualified chemists who can also cast spells, and (ha) theoretically they can top out their Alchemist career and start in as a Wizard, Level 1!

Bizarrely, the rules/recipe for creating gunpowder are included in the Alchemist career description and nowhere else:

Alchemists may be of great assistance to any metalworker, and are able to prepare explosives for gunpowder weapons - provided the character has acquired the Chemisty skill. The Alchemist must have a supply of refined saltpetre, suphur and charcoal, which needs to be mixed in the correct proportions. This process takes 8 hours to produce 6 pounds of gunpoweder from 4 pounds of saltpetre, 1 pound of sulphur, and 1 pound of charcoal, assuming the Alchemist has access to a laboratory.

FrankT:

All the effort spent nerfing the evil magics is kind of pointless, because Elementalism exists. Elementalism is a long walk. It's a really long walk. It has a lot of spells in it, and most of those spells are dumb. Remember they want to charge you two advancements for every fucking spell, so the fact that Breathe Underwater, Walk on Water, Part Water, and Cause Rain are all separate spells means that it is really very easy to waste a huge number of experience points and get very little out of Elementalism. The top end, though, is that you get to summon Elementals. They are basically just like Greater Demons except they don't really care about anything and won't want to eat your soul. It's a pretty sweet deal.

Partially because of their weird obsession with coming up with spells for every element for every spell level, Elementalism has almost twice as many spells in it as any other school of magic. And the density of good spells is not higher. But if for some reason you actually got to level 4 and started summoning Elementals, the game is fucking over. You get armies of monsters that have a Toughness of 9. They can take on whole armies by themselves, and you have armies of them. It's insanity.

AncientH:

Clerics and Druid Priests have it simpler. No specialist careers, more MP. On the other hand, every time the Cleric wants to advance, they have to roll on the Gamesmaster's FUCK YOU Table to see what happens. At the high end, you get sweet free EP and a Fate Point and can progress as a Cleric. At the low end of the table, you might suffer the Wrath of the Gods or be forced against your will to change careers. So yes, your Level 3 Cleric could totally end up as a Grave Robber or Rat Catcher. Them's the breaks. Druid Priests have something similar they have to roll on.

Spells start out with Petty Magic, which are supposed to be the equivalent of D&D non-combat spells, for the most part. They range from stuff like Protection from Rain (Ingredient: A miniature umbrella) to Remove Curse and Sleep. In WFRP these had their EP cost cut in half to actually encourage PC Wizards to buy more of them.

Battle Magic is the standard fare of Wizards and Alchemists, and is hilariously unbalanced, and despite their best efforts a lot of the spell effects are stolen directly from D&D, with most of the rest being pointless or interacting with the Psychology rules.

Demonologist Spells include this gem:

Summon Energy
Spell Level: 2
Magic Points: 3
Duration: Variable
Ingredients: Any magical potion, or the heart of a Demonologist

The Demonologist may use this spell to summon magical power of Demonic origin. The energy appears as a writhing mist, and the caster must make a successful Will Power test to absorb the magical energy. If the test is successful, the energy increases the caster's magic points by 4d6, but will not take the total beyond the caster's Power Level. While under the influence of this spell, the caster may only regain magic points at the rate of 1 per day, regardless of skills or rest. If the Demonologistdispells this spell, normal recovery rules apply fro the caster's own magic points.

When this spell is first learned, the Demonologist gains a new Disability immediately (see Penalties). Each time the spell is cast, the caster gets 1 Insanity point.

Hilariously, this isn't even the only Demonologist spell about absorbing magical energy fields on this page. Also, one of the guys writing this wrote it "dispell" and everyone else wrote it "dispel" throughout the entire fucking book. It seriously just alternates in places, like they couldn't make up their fucking minds.

Illusionist spells suck, mostly because they all have a time limit and none of them do much of anything. You have to be level 3 and pry the teeth out of a Chameleoleech just to conjure up a bunch of illusory people for combat. Their big thing is that at Level 4 they can teleport, but the fucking ingredient for that is a potion of flying or the hand of a demon. No one wants to level up so that they can run away harder. Except Rincewind.



Druid Spells aren't really awesome to start with, but then they try to make up for it. At first level one of the four spells available is Delouse, then at Level 2 you can shapechange or summon a hail storm, and at level 3 you're shooting out rays that cause all organic matter to decompose and tapping into the infinite power of Sacred Circles, and at level 4 you're creating sacred circles...and swamps, for some reason. Druids like swamps.

FrankT:

The Magic Items are... very old school. It's a short list, and there are random charts. Of special note is that magic armor is handed out by the piece, rather than by the suit. So after a bit of adventuring, you end up looking like an Ultima or Final Fantasy character, with Mithril Chain Leggings to go with your magical red leather arm guards and your golden plate cuirass. The magic armor is rated at +1 to +3 like it was D&D, but remember that armor subtracts from damage at its hit locations and damage is rolled on a d6. It's very possible to have armor and toughness good enough that mortal opponents just can't hurt you. For all the ranting about critical charts, those are things you roll on if you run out of wounds. With a big enough damage soak, you never take any wounds and you never roll on the critical charts.

Many other AD&D standards can be seen here. Rings of Protection and such.

AncientH:

Most of these items are taken straight from WFB. Mithril is a Tolkien trademark term or some shit and after this was quickly changed to the Games Workshop-preferred term gromril (for dwarfs) and ithilmar for elves. You can actually see references to mithril and its wondrous qualities in the earliest Warhammer anthologies, the ones that they refused to reprint for years because they were deemed noncanonical or something, and then Games Workshop's guy at Black Library took his head out of the bucket of ink he was huffing and said "Wait, I bet we can get money out of this," which is why a bunch of the back-catalogue titles are now available as print-on-demand provided you ram a fistful of cash up Games Workshop's sweaty asshole - and smile while you're doing it.

But not all of them, and we'll get to why that is in the next chapter.

FrankT:

There are magic items that make you better at casting spells. And you'll pretty much need them if you want to cast the high level spells, because casting a level 4 spell requires an Int check at -30. Considering that +30 is all the advancements you will ever be allowed to get to your terrible starting Intelligence, that really hurts. Speaking of getting that absolutely necessary +30 to Intelligence, Wizard won't give you that until Level 3, but if you detour into Scholar or Forger or something, you can go into Wizarding with your Int maxxed out already. Something to think about if you start a game with a fuck tonne of advancements under your belt.

AncientH:

Future editions of WFRP went away from D&D-style magic items, but kept the magic items they imported from the game - as, indeed, the game itself has done over many editions. Arguably the greatest advancement in magic item creation that Games Workshop ever did was Dwarf Rune Magic, but that isn't introduced in this book - next book, along with Rune Mastery, which was itself then cut from subsequent editions because Dwarfs got priority. Which yes, does mean that the Rune Lore skill is pretty worthless. However, just to give you a vague enough hope, the final entry in this chapter are a collection of magical runes! Including the overpowered (and subsequently nerfed - and I mean, very next fucking book) Great Death Rune.

Great Death Rune: This rune may only be inscribed by a god onto a weapon. Any creature hit by the weapon is slain. This rune does not dim through use.

Note: Googling "death rune" brings up a bunch of neo-Nazi sites, which was repellent and perplexing to me. The problem being that all the Aryan skinhead types into their Nordric roots recognize the futhark rune Algiz as the inspiration for the Peace symbol, and of course they have to go off and try to be assholes about what that means in the great racial struggle. Asshats.


http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_rune

[Neurosis]

Wow reading through your recap of the character creation section reminds me of RIFTS so, so much.

[Ancient History]

Section 5:
Religion and Belief


In later works, only the gods that looked like this got any press, but when it first came out, Warhammer tried to do a whole spectrum of gods.

FrankT:

The religion spoken of in WFRP is almost completely unrecognizable to Warhammer fans today. The core gods of the setting are, as everyone knows, the Chaos Gods. And those weren't written yet. The four Chaos gods we know and love came out in Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness, and Realm of Chaos: the Lost and the Damned. These came out in 1988 and 1990, two years and four years respectively after this book was published. This is actually why the Chaos god enmities are so fucking weird. Khorne, the “no wizards allowed” god of warriors, is opposed to Slaanesh, the god of hedonism. And not to, for example, Tzeentch, the god of the wizards that are not allowed into Khorne's club. Obviously it would make more sense for the god of warriors to hate the god of wizards and the god of hedonism to hate the god of plague. But the four chaos gods came out in two different books spaced out by two years. When Khorne was written into the setting, there was no god of magic for him to hate, Slaanesh was the only game in town.

But it's not just that the entire Chaos thing got written into the setting since this book was made. When Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay went to print, the current edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle was 2nd edition. When Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay finally got a 2nd edition in 2005, Warhammer Fantasy Battle was in its 6th edition and beating the drums for a 7th. So if you think you know anything at all about the gods in the Warhammer universe, you probably don't know the gods in this chapter – because all the ones you've ever heard of were written in later books and later editions. Gork, Mork, the Horned Rat, all of it comes later. In this book you have a bunch of Greek God expies that no one gives a shit about. About the only god in this book you even might have heard of is Ulric, their Odin expy.

Of course, some of the “lesser deities” ended up going places. Sigmar only gets a paragraph in WFRP, but went on to being a major player in later books. Khaine, the lord of murder, got a complete revamp and is now wholly unrecognizable as the four armed vaguely Hindu evil god of assassins described in this book. Khaine went on to being written in as the god of the Eldar, and got conflated with Khorne, and then got translated back into Warhammer Fantasy as an Elf god.


Current Khaine


Original Khaine

AncientH:

Some of the religion stuff in this book got more play in the novels, and even WFRP 2, because Games Workshop rarely throws anything away...which brings us to Malal.



Malal was the Chaos God of opposition, which meant he was the Chaos god that opposed other Chaos gods because that was the ultimate rebellion or something. He got equal face time with the other early Chaos Gods, and even shows up (through a champion) in the early anthology Ignorant Armies. He was actually one of the driving forces in the WFRP campaign Death on the Reik.



Unfortunately, there was a dispute in ownership, and Games Workshop set about completely abandoning the idea that Malal had ever existed. Total retcon (minus a few irresistible in-jokes), to the point that the end of the aforementioned WFRP campaign, Something Rotten in Kislev, had to invent two new minor gods to handle Malal's place.

That said, while most of these deities are footnote-tastic to WFB players, they've generally been kept in the Warhammer Fantasy universe as part of their IP, sometimes being expanded and sometimes being more or less ignored.

FrankT:

In addition to a short list of gods for Chaos, Law, and the demihumans, we get the Old Faith. The Old Faith specifically predates all the old world gods and is made up of Druids. Druids are Human Only, so in WFRP, the Humans are specifically a way older culture than the Dwarves or Elves. This is a rather important plot point that by a few editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle later had been completely expunged. I'm not sure when Humans started being a “young race” in the grand scheme of Warhammer things, but it was obviously after 1986.

AncientH:

Gods in Warhammer Fantasy have a kind of wiggy thing, where it's never quite clear if they exist as actual entities, except for the Chaos Gods. This is really played up on purpose in the Realms of Chaos books and, later, the Liber Chaotica, but the idea that there is no Ulric or Myrmidia or whatever, or that they're basically just Greater Daemons of some sort, adds to the bleakness of the setting. Except we're not there yet, we're not even at the point of the Imperial Cult of Sigmar yet really; the gods presented here are generic RPG fantasy deities that wouldn't be really fluffed out until much later.



Druids are one of those things that seem to have been lifted more-or-less directly from D&D, with only the barest touch of British witchcraft/druidism by way of Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner.


I invented Wicca. I was just trying to get laid.

In later versions, most of the Druids would be isolated to the fog-cloaked isle of Albion, and all the big stone circles and menhirs and stuff would be attributed to the Old Ones/Slaan/Elves/Dwarfs in pretty much that order, firmly establishing Humans back as a "pretty damn young" race. But in WFRP1 timeframe, it's all ancient earth Mother goddess worship and crap.

FrankT:

Did I mention Law gods? Yeah, there are totally Law gods. There are as many Law gods as Chaos gods. Alluminas, Arianka, and Solkan. Gods you basically don't hear about at all any more. Since we're doing Elric at this point, in WFRP the Law gods were supposed to be an equal and balancing force to the Chaos gods. Them winning outright was supposed to be bad because change would cease or something, but since they were the light of goodness and everything they did was awesome, it was a rather incoherent philosophy. It's basically the same thing and just as stupid as when Gygax ran off his mouth about how you had to have a balance of Good and Evil. Because if there isn't enough baby eating we'll forget what baby tastes like. And then we'll all be diminished. Or something.

The problem with the whole “balance” ideal is that it was kind of stupid in the original Moorcock, and basically just an excuse for the protagonists of the books to be giant douchenozzles and still be the hero. It never worked as moral theory, and game designers fapping to it was always dumb.

AncientH:

Law never really caught on in the Warhammer Fantasy setting, and most (but not all) references were expunged around the time WFB 4th edition (Herohammer) rolled around. The only one to really get any play was Solkan, god of vengeance, and even that was left pretty much to the novels.

Later books that expanded on the Warhammer Fantasy fluff would show that all these different gods were supposed to be taken from different cultures and sort of muddled together in the weird cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Empire, sort of like how in ancient Rome they had cults to Etruscan deities, Greek deities, and Egyptian deities - the more the merrier. So Khaine here is a human god, but really he's the Elven god of murder that's just being worshiped as god of assassins because humans can't comprehend his true majesty or something; Myrmidia is an Estalian god from not-Rome; Ulric is the wolf-god of one of the tribes that went on to found the Empire, etc. And all of that was tied into the Warhammer 40K stuff until they decided to differentiate the game lines.

FrankT:

The gods don't all follow the same organizational system, leading me to believe the writeups were done by different people and likely not at remotely the same time. This is especially important when it comes to spells. See, Clerics are spellcasters and they get their own damn mana points and spellcasting. Some god writeups give out detailed descriptions of what spells they get. Others... don't. So if you're a Cleric of the god of murder you... um... I don't know. There's no description of the spellcasting of murder clerics at all. On the other hand, if you follow Shallya the healing goddess, you get your very own spell list with spells that are mysteriously right here in the middle of the religion chapter and not in the magic chapter where you might expect to find them if you were a sucker.

In the middle are gods like Ulric, who get spells off the Battle Magic list, but then there are some spells that behave differently in their hands and it's not entirely clear how that's supposed to work. If you pick the right god, you can apparently just get huge piles of mana and cast spells from multiple Wizard specialties. If it wasn't for that thing where Clerics have to roll to see if they get kicked out of the church and forced to become a boatswain every level, Clerics would be the route to real ultimate power. Or at least, Cleric of the gods that actually tell you what kind of magic you get would be the route to real ultimate power.

AncientH:

Morr was always one of the fan-favorite gods, because later supplements/editions let his clerics tap into some sweet Necromancy spells without, y'know, getting plague, taking on a cadaverous appearance, and resort to life-continuing drugs to survive. Whoo, Necromancy!


Also, I finally get to use my Garden of Morr setpiece again.

FrankT:

One of the things that can happen if you're a cleric is that you can be forced to go on a quest by your god. And then the whole team has to fuck off and do whatever the fuck it is your god wants you to do. Because you know, it's still an RPG. Most gods have extremely vague ideas for the gamesmaster of what their quests should be like. Like how “Trials set by Verena will normally involve the discovery or preservation of knowledge, or the prevention of conflict.” Other gods don't even have that. Like how Sigmar doesn't even have an entry for “trials” because not all the entry types are on each god.

AncientH:

Really, the best god is the Dwarf god Grugni (who would later be elevated to head of the pantheon). Minor festivals every 10 days, major festivals every 100 days. This is also the first mention of the Chaos Dwarfs, who are my own personal favorite of the Warhammer races. They started out in 2nd/3rd edition as random Dwarf mutants infected by Chaos, and then got completely re-imagined in WFB 4th edition as the Big Hats, then forgotten about for a couple editions, and now they're back as Forgeworld race!


You mess with the Red Bull of Hashut, you get the horns!

[Koumei]

Interesting. I always wondered about the Khorne-Slaanesh rivalry and the Tzeench-Nurgle one (which seems very "after the fact").

As for Khaine in Fantasy Battle, that's actually closer to the original one presented there - Dark Elves only, and even then a special EXTRA DARK faction (the Khainites) including... yep, assassins. And many of the older Khainite models were indeed holding people's heads.

[Ancient History]

Section 6:
Bestiary


This is a Zoat. Warhammer was really proud of their Zoats at one point.


Remember these? Neither does anyone else. But they were Fimir.

FrankT:

Flipping through this section, it looks pretty much like an AD&D monster manual, or a Runequest monster booklet, or the critters section of a Shadowrun book for that matter. There really aren't that many ways to format monsters in an RPG book, and D&D came up with a good system early and everyone has copied it ever since. Or they made things that were ass, like those incomprehensible White Wolf antagonist paragraph blocks. shiver

So you have your basic monsters with stat lines and descriptions and pictures in alphabetical order. Except they are put into arbitrary categories, and those categories are not in alphabetical order. And some of the assignments will surprise you! The Giant and the Treeman are under “humanoids” while Doppelgangers are under “animals and monsters.” If there is any logic to the assignments, I haven't found it in the last 27 years. Even within the sections, the alphabetization is pretty arbitrary. The War Dog is under “D” and the Bog Octopus is under “B.”

AncientH:

I totally forgot about the bog octopus. I guess there is a use for that non-human "Octopus" hit chart notation.

Anyway, there's a lot of early setting material in this book that would eventually get downplayed or shoved off-page - stuff like Sea Elves and Norse Dwarfs which never really went away completely but ceased to be a big thing. The Fimir are notorious because they more or less originated in this book, with very limited tabletop adaptations, and this is easily shown by the fact that they get a full-page write-up and a full-page black-and-white illustration. Anyway, the models must not have sold very well because these guys got abandoned by both games fairly early on.


Of course, this is Warhammer, so there's like 2 fansplats and new models for these so that all 5 people who want to can try to field a Fimir army. Also, rule 34 knows no bounds.

Another surprise are Gnomes, where are literally shorter, crappier dwarfs with a penchant for illusionist magic that would get mentioned in some subsequent sourcebook, just to complete the ripping off of D&D. I don't think they were ever in WFB and were mercilessly dispatched from WFRP with 2nd edition, if not before.

Another testament to how early all this shit was is that the basic terminology for Greenskins was more or less intact (Snotlings, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Orcs, Black Orcs, etc.), the mythology was still very much in flux. So, you have Lesser Goblins, and Hobgoblins are still halfway between worg-mounted Mongols and D&D "bigger, lawful goblins." And, notably, there is still an entry for Half-Orcs.

FrankT:

One of the biggest problems of a d100 roll-under is that they don't scale well. Outside of a rather narrow range, they don't scale at all. Most tasks ask you to roll under your skill, and the only information the RNG can output is success or failure. If someone has a 100, they always “succeed,” and there's no way to get better than that. Warhammer Roleplay runs head first into that problem right away – it's based on a wargame where individual units can be the equal of formations of soldiers with dozens of men in them. Such as WFRP has an answer to this problem, it is to have portions of the game not run on d100 roll-under. Strength and Toughness add and subtract from a d6. Wounds is just an arbitrary number. Attacks is a stat that determines how many actions you get in combat. And it is in these scaling portions of the game that we see the most ridiculous number inflation happens.

The Bog Octopus has 8 attacks. It also has a Strength and Toughness of 8. So as a normal human, you hit it with a sword and roll a d6 and add 3 for damage, and then it subtracts 8 from that and tells you to go fuck yourself. Then it attacks 8 times, and every hit does a d6 plus 8 damage, taking a normal human and forcing them to roll on the “are we dead yet” chart in one hit. In a world where a normal human has 6 wounds and a maxxed out Templar has 14, a Griffon has 35. And keep in mind: you can train Griffons to act as mounts.

The bottom line is that while the d100 tops out at “always succeeds,” the game has ways to make actions count for more or less that have absolutely nothing to do with that RNG. And so it is that when you get to the level of big monsters, the d100 rolls are basically pointless. I mean, who gives an actual fuck if you always hit when higher end monsters average several hits per round with all the attacks it gets? And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Strength versus Toughness RNG is only 6 numbers long, and it's really easy to skull fuck that RNG with stat inflation monsters get.

AncientH:

The other race (besides Fimir) to really get a push in this book are the Skaven, or rat-men. The Skaven went on to grand success because they're comedically diabolical backstabbing assholes with cool toys and a drug addiction.


Seriously, they could have done an RPG where everybody's a Skaven and I would have been happy.

FrankT:

One of the things the book really tries to get you to give a shit about is Instability. This is a legacy from the war game. The idea was that humanoid troops had to care about leadership radii and standard bearers and company musicians and all that shit, and the magic armies needed something comparable. So while skeletons and demons don't ever run away, they still need access to magic leadership lest they phase out of existence. So there's lots of crap about rolling on tables to see what happens when undead are out of the command radius of a necromancer, and about extending command distances with skeleton champions and all kinds of shit. It's a game's workshop product, so naturally there is a one in six chance that if instability does come up it actually goes the other way and the leaderless skeletons enact temporary god mode and go on a rampage. But this is all in reference to a war game. In the context of the RPG, it's hard to see how any of this shit matters. You can't send your demon ally off to murder someone and you can't leave your skeletons behind to guard a tower, because they'll only last a few minutes outside your immediate vicinity. But once you've put that dynamic down, the specifics are irrelevant. And they get way more page count than they deserve. But I suppose something had to be filling this 634 page behemoth.

AncientH:

T'be fair, they put quite a lot of work into tying the Instability thing into the setting so that it makes sense in context - demons need LOTS O' MAGIC to manifest and stay manifest, and down in the Old World they just don't have enough juice without regular sacrifices. So when the man in the jet-black armor with the spikes and the third arm says "Blood for the Blood God!" you know he means business.

FrankT:

One amusing thing about this game is that it doesn't have defined size categories. It instead has an arbitrary line at ten feet tall. Lots of stuff causes fear in creatures under ten feet tall. They could have had a terminology on “large creatures” but instead when they want to classify a creature as large they say it is “over ten feet tall.” It's simply much more cumbersome than it needs to be.

AncientH:

I'd like to say they improved that in 2nd edition, but I'm pretty sure they did not.

Some of the D&D and Tolkien borrowings get so blatant, it's sad. It's like when Deep Purple brought out an album called Stormbringer and claimed it was based on ancient mythology instead of, y'know, ripping off Michael Moorcock. So we have doppelgangers, which I don't think ever made a real appearance in WFB, and color-coded dragons (mainly in early WFB, not in this particular book), and then there's Eagles - which are really just Tolkien's Great Eagles. Fuck, even the Moulds are based off of D&D, and that's just kind of sad. There's also a fucking Jabberwock, because why the fuck not?

FrankT:

The small animals page is always good for a laugh. Ravens get two attacks. One claw and one beak from each bird every round. It's Strength 1, but a murder of crows will shred anything that has less than ridiculous toughness in short order. Also, apparently stoats have the power to hypnotize enemies, which is bizarre.

AncientH:

There's also a deadly fucking puffin called the Razorbill, and giant sand clams. These are the sort of adversaries that prove your Mister Cavern is a) fucking with you, and b) going for the pity kill in the hopes that your next character will be more suitable to adventuring.

Some of these critters come with training rules, such as the Wyvern. I don't know when or why these would ever apply, but there you go.

FrankT:

The payoff for your various flavors of summoning is here in the bestiary. It's where you find out that when a level 3 Necromancer pulls in Mummies for three and a half mana per Mummy per day, that each Mummy causes fear and has 23 wounds. Also, they can act as necromancy nodes and are just better individually than the Skeleton Major Heroes that the game wants you to summon at 4th level for 12 mana. It's also where you see what the Greater Demons can do, and it is impressive. The greater demon of law has 10 attacks at strength 10 at weapon skill 90. It's immune to non-magical weaponry altogether, but that hardly matters because it has toughness 10 and it is literally impossible to roll high enough to cause any wounds with a strength 4 attack. Also it has a 10% chance of permanently killing a Bloodthirster if it slays one in combat, which it has a very good chance of doing. I have no idea what difference that makes, but since summoning is true name based, I guess having even a small chance of rubbing one of the names out of demonology books might come up. Also, the greater demon of law can raise the dead once per fucking round. That is not a joke. If you can convince the gamesmaster to actually let you summon a greater demon of law, the game's lethality becomes a joke in a completely different way – with player characters becoming essentially invincible because they can be brought back from the dead at the rate of 600 times per hour.


By the way, Greater Demons of Khorne look like this in WFRP. The modern Bloodthirster look came later.

AncientH:

Small point of order:

A Vampire can be held at bay by the religious symbol of any god which is not connected with death or Chaos; if the holder passes a WP test, the Vampire can actually be repelled. If a Vampire touches, or is struck by, a religious symbol, holy water, or any other religious item, its flesh will be seared for D3 points of fire damage. Garlic flowers have a similar effect.

This is terrible news to followers of the god Morr, because it means they need to go bother other clerics to help them clean out the cemetery. However, it is great news for Dwarfs, because to them axes and picks pretty much are religious items.

Unlike in D&D, being a lich in WFRP kinda sucks. Sure, you have all your skills and spells and shit, but you're reduced down to just D8 magic points. That's terrible.

Elementals would get the kibosh in WFRP at the same time as elementalism; don't look for them in 2nd edition, as well as most of the demons given here - particularly the demons of Law and the elementals of life and death. Later editions would let you have rules for summoning Rat Demons and Daemonic Siege Engines and things though, so that's not all bad.

Mine is the spikiest codpiece of all!

FrankT:

One thing that I think bears mentioning is how quickly player character archery scales to meaninglessness. It takes over a hundred hits with a basic missile weapon to fell a bog octopus. Your bonus attacks and strength that you get for being a badass player character with a bunch of advancements simply don't count at all. Low level characters have to huddle and fire arrows and sling stones with the hope that enemies will drop before they can close to melee range, but the high end stuff can't be meaningfully threatened by missile weapons without dozens of archers being deployed. The really high end stuff is simply immune to missile fire altogether.

AncientH:

Which, to be fair, was pretty much how it was in the battle game of the time. Firearms could potentially help a bit, but unlikely since for the vast majority of monsters the stats and special abilities were just ridiculous. Your average human hero is not designed to go toe-to-toe with an Ogre and come out alive and/or with all their limbs. This is something that comes as a surprise to many first-time players, rather like D&D'ers that go for a vacation in Call of Cthulhu land and decide to fight the monsters, then find themselves rolling up a new character as the Deep Ones make hats out of their skin.

I had to do that.

It also doesn't help that in this game magic weapons are rare. As in, you could go an entire campaign without seeing one. The best weapons are made by other people (Elves, Dwarfs, Chaos) and they do not want to share. There are no real rules for making your own, because even if you are a wizard (hah) who gets up to be a high enough level (double hah), you're in for some weird quests-for-ingredients with no guarantee of an outcome. The lack of magical weapons in WFRP is so bad, I think Zoats went extinct just so people could claim their magic maces.

The great mace of a Zoat has a 25% chance of being inscribed with a Rune of Cutting and Smashing (see the Magic Section). Any creature with a Strength of less than 4 suffers a 20% penalty to WS when trying to wield a Zoat mace.

Wait. Can't we just give them the mace and live in peace?
I can't. It was a gift from my brood-mother.

[Red_Rob]

The Fimir are notorious because they more or less originated in this book, with very limited tabletop adaptations, and this is easily shown by the fact that they get a full-page write-up and a full-page black-and-white illustration. Anyway, the models must not have sold very well because these guys got abandoned by both games fairly early on.

Oh, I think there was an entirely different reason for canning Fimirs...

The Fimir were created at the behest of Games Workshop's then-owner, Bryan Ansell who wanted a race "to be as distinctive of Warhammer as the Broo are of Runequest"... Fimir society is divided into a caste system, consisting of Meargh, the Dirach, the warriors, and the Shearl. The Meargh - also known as witch-hags - are the leaders of Fimir colonies, as well as the only females... However the Meargh is sterile and therefore unable to breed. So as to replenish their numbers the Fimir kidnap young fertile human women to use as breeding stock.

Uh-huh, that's what you want people to think of when they think Warhammer. The one-eyed rape monster. I wonder why that didn't catch on?

As 3rd edition drew to a close the focus became less on the older gamer and more towards the mid-to-late teens demographic, and as such it may have been thought that a race which reproduced via rape was not appropriate for the new target markets

Yeah. Hide your kids, hide your wife, the Fimirs are coming!

[Lago PARANOIA]

Was WH's grimderpy je ne sais quoi established in this book or is this just supposed to be another interminable 'low fantasy' setting in the vein of Game of Thrones?

If it's the former, can we have some grimderpy examples -- like Inquistor Tyrus's ridiculous witch trials?

[Koumei]

Presumably, GW started up during the reign of Thatcher, and so in those very dark days, Britain (and by extension GW) thrived on black humour and tongue-in-cheek edgy grimdark.

[Voss]

The Fimir are notorious because they more or less originated in this book, with very limited tabletop adaptations, and this is easily shown by the fact that they get a full-page write-up and a full-page black-and-white illustration. Anyway, the models must not have sold very well because these guys got abandoned by both games fairly early on.

Oh dear. Nope. Fimir didn't originate in WHFRP. They were in definitely in 3rd edition WHFB, which slightly preceded WHFRP and most of the basics of the mechanics (barring the conversion to % and non-RP stuff) and background come from the 3rd edition of Battle. I believe the background of the Fimir happened in 2nd, but got, uh, redacted for third, due to some excessive rape content. Which seems strange, because of Slaanesh later, but early days and British censorship is pretty wacky and inconsistent. The other big issue with the fimir was a design cock-up. The minis produced were big guys (little less than ogre sized, on 40mm bases) and they weren't supposed to be. They were intended to be 25mm bases, and one of the few early 'original' creations of the studio (if taking a weird swamp-rape-monster spin on a celtic legend can be called original). But because of both issues, after 3rd (and WHFRP 1st) they said fuck it, and canned them.


Zoats had a more interesting existence, as they survived to be transferred into 40k, were their own thing, then suddenly became tyranid creatures and then got eaten and buried.


@Koumei. Maggy was awesome. She's why renters in Britain pay taxes on apartments and not the owners. Apparently if you tax renters, it will 'encourage them' to buy their own homes.

[Username17]

Oh dear. Nope. Fimir didn't originate in WHFRP. They were in definitely in 3rd edition WHFB, which slightly preceded WHFRP and most of the basics of the mechanics (barring the conversion to % and non-RP stuff) and background come from the 3rd edition of Battle.

Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition came out in 1987.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay came out in 1986.

You're just factually wrong here. The Fimir essentially debuted in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the next year they got put out in the third edition of Fantasy Battle, two years after that they were in Heroquest, and they didn't receive anything more in the history of ever. And when Warhammer Fantasy Battle got a 4th edition in 1996, they were gone.

Was WH's grimderpy je ne sais quoi established in this book or is this just supposed to be another interminable 'low fantasy' setting in the vein of Game of Thrones?

If it's the former, can we have some grimderpy examples -- like Inquistor Tyrus's ridiculous witch trials?

You don't get any of the stupid "millions dead" grim derp that 40k was all about. Instead you get a bunch of Monte Python style comedy about how shitty the dark ages are. A lot of stuff is apparently researched by watching Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky. So you get extensive entries on dying of the plague. Entries on medieval psychiatric surgery. Using leeches to bring down fever. Did I mention dying of the plague?

WFRP is mostly a game which is supposed to simulate Jabberwocky. So you play a comically unprepared cooper's son or something, and everything around you is covered in mud and falling apart. Then you get forced to fight a monster. The thing where you actually stay comically inept for much longer than the game could reasonably be expected to run is, I feel, an error.

-Username17

[GâtFromKI]

The thing where you actually stay comically inept for much longer than the game could reasonably be expected to run is, I feel, an error.

I'm not sure. The main competitor of WHRPG was AD&D, in which you needed to accumulate a ridiculously huge amount of xp to level up. I think it was the same in MERP, etc.

I think at that time, the idea was: "a campaign may go on for twenty years (IRL), therefore our advancement system must support twenty-years campaigns". We know today that it's fucking ridiculous (and D&D3 aknowledged that fact by highly reducing the number of orcs you have to kill each level), but it was the beginning of RPGs, we didn't know better.

[Lago PARANOIA]

WFRP is mostly a game which is supposed to simulate Jabberwocky. So you play a comically unprepared cooper's son or something, and everything around you is covered in mud and falling apart. Then you get forced to fight a monster. The thing where you actually stay comically inept for much longer than the game could reasonably be expected to run is, I feel, an error.

-Username17

That's fine and all, but that still sounds on the surface 'too plausible' for SERIOUS ROLEPLAY in the vein of Call of Cthlulhu; that setup is too much for a Game of Thrones protagonist, but sounds right up the alley of a GoT extra.

I was looking for more outright camp or some other form of blunt and/or witless accidental parody. You know, like the ridiculously understaffed WH40K hulks or Khornate Grey Knights. Unless the disease charts are so ridiculous that even a veteran of the 30 Years War would call them over-the-top?

[tussock]

The main competitor of WHRPG was AD&D, in which you needed to accumulate a ridiculously huge amount of xp to level up.

AD&D slowed down in the mid-high section, but until XP for gold became "optional" in 1989, characters rocked up to level 5-7 pretty quickly. Sure, you had to kill a lot of Orcs if they were all poor, but hitting the percentage for Jewellery levelled everyone up right there and then. Or you got that one million gp gem from the centaur, poor things.

[GâtFromKI]

AD&D slowed down in the mid-high section, but until XP for gold became "optional" in 1989, characters rocked up to level 5-7 pretty quickly. Sure, you had to kill a lot of Orcs if they were all poor, but hitting the percentage for Jewellery levelled everyone up right there and then. Or you got that one million gp gem from the centaur, poor things.

I have to admit, I started playing D&D with AD&D 2.