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[Zinoviev Letter]

Coincidentally enough I was just recommending Warhammer on a different board earlier today.

For me, the setting is one of the strongest features of the game. By which I mean that many of the standard tropes are there - from tolkein species to magic to adventuring heroes to loosely pseudo-medieval history - but it's all been twisted in unexpectedly nasty ways.

Yes, the characters can, and will, fight against great evil but that evil will often win, they may well be gruesomely dismembered in the process and the "good" they are fighting for is actually a myriad of shades of grey. Yes, they can become deadly warriors, but they may have to drag themselves up from being a vermin exterminator armed with a stick and a tiny foul tempered dog to get there. Yes, there are monsters and the like, but there is also a festering corruption within human society. Yes, they can become powerful magicians, but only if they can avoid being lynched or hideously mutated along the way, not to mention the very real danger of losing their sanity and souls playing with corrupt and dangerous forces. It's also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a game which tends to feature quite a bit of gallows humour.

Another strong point is the career system. There are hundreds of careers, from rat catcher through scribe, beggar, pit fighter, witch hunter and courtier through to noble lord, all integrated into the game world. Astonishingly it manages to combine that with an ease of character generation which should be a model for RPGs. A beginner can have a complete character ready in fifteen minutes.

One point I would add in warning is that if this is your player's first move outside DnD, you may need to warn them that just becaust it looks like DnD and shares many of the same concepts doesn't mean that it plays in quite the same way. Some things can be very different and a group which isn't prepared for that may not enjoy the experience at all. There's a post from years back on these boards where someone recounted a miserable first experience playing Warhammer in the following terms:

"I played a halfling, wanting to be a rogue. Randomly, I was a beggar. I had not one skill that was useful to an adventurer...
My wife also played a character. She had a Dwarf, wanting to be a healer. She rolled a healer type profession, and had a 50% chance of getting each of three healing skills or spells, or something. She got none. Her only 'ability' of any note as a healer was that she owned three leeches."

Now when I read that I actually burst out laughing but it put someone off the game for life . If you've played WFRP before it probably sounds like a situation with a huge amount of potential for entertaining scrapes as two misfits struggle to achieve their dreams - for some reason the notion of the two of them running a scam pretending to be qualified physicians keeps springing to mind. If you sat down expecting to find a dungeon and start lopping the heads off monsters and without warning found yourself running the above characters you might not find it so amusing.

That's an extreme example by the way. The 2e has balanced the starting careers (a little) more and you get two rolls to choose from, or you could just pick careers if the GM allows. Starting characters are normally as competent as DnD starting characters now, maybe a little more, at least at something. But there is no denying that it's a grittier game. A more likely problem is a combination of a GM and players both approaching a situation as they are used to doing in DnD and everyone getting killed in their first combat as a result. The sort of thing I'm thinking of is a GM throwing in what was intended as a kind of warm up combat encounter but which actually includes too many opponents for a combat system this lethal. And then players making a frontal assault, not having realised that the situation is different, and quickly finding themselves on the wrong end of those entertainingly hideous critical hit tables.

I should point out here, that the fate point system does give both players and GM a bit more leeway in adapting. A fate point is a mechanic a little like the "obscure death" rule in the original Dragonlance modules. When the character falls under a hail of orc arrows he might not die. Instead he could wake up to find himself tied up in an orc camp, with the orc's trying to light a cooking fire to start roasting him...

Overall I'd thoroughly recommend it. The system is intuitive and easy to pick up. There's little or no rummaging through the books trying to find some mechanic. The world is richly detailed. The tone is highly entertaining.

By the way, if you can pick up the Enemy Within Campaign I can almost guarantee that you will love it. It's widely and correctly regarded as the one of the greatest sets of adventures ever released for any rpg. It is out of print and was for first edition anyway, but the books come up on ebay regularly. Converting from first edition would take practically zero effort. (It would be more effort to convert them for DnD but it might work if you limited the magic available and were very, very miserly with experience rewards - has anyone tried this?).