WFRP 4th Edition - How the game has evolved.

[TheSword]

I'm not sure edition bashing adds anything positive to this thread

Not bashing anything. I actually enjoyed 3rd and think that Witches Song, Eye for an Eye, the precursor to Lord of Ubersreik and their version of Enemy Within are really good adventures. I think a lot of 4e adventure writing seems to be cued of their style.

You just can’t really argue with the fact that they totally ditched the rules from the 1st two editions and converted the game to a board game style with playable cards and special dice. I actually quite like rules cards I think we could do with some for 4e (see my other thread on the matter) My point was that every edition of WFRP have been very different either in style (1st to 2nd) or rules (3rd and 4th) and therefore unlikely we would see an evolving 4.5 as we might in D&D.

I love WFRP in all it’s incarnations In case you couldn’t tell

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

I just get triggered by 'it's a board game' comments. Must be PTSD from the D&D-edition wars. What you say makes sense

Still wish they'd do a compiled/revised edition. I think it's hard to get into the game when rules that really improves the game and fixes things are spread over multiple books.

 

[TheSword]

I just get triggered by 'it's a board game' comments. Must be PTSD from the D&D-edition wars. What you say makes sense

Still wish they'd do a compiled/revised edition. I think it's hard to get into the game when rules that really improves the game and fixes things are spread over multiple books.

There is actually a good unofficial errata document the community have produced with the blessing of the designers. It references their own comments on rules. It’s probably not so much for beginners but useful for where people want to look stuff up. We could definitely do with a 5-6 page rules update for the changes to base rules though.

I’ve asked the question. You never know.

 

[GreyLord]

Not bashing anything. I actually enjoyed 3rd and think that Witches Song, Eye for an Eye, the precursor to Lord of Ubersreik and their version of Enemy Within are really good adventures. I think a lot of 4e adventure writing seems to be cued of their style.

You just can’t really argue with the fact that they totally ditched the rules from the 1st two editions and converted the game to a board game style with playable cards and special dice. I actually quite like rules cards I think we could do with some for 4e (see my other thread on the matter) My point was that every edition of WFRP have been very different either in style (1st to 2nd) or rules (3rd and 4th) and therefore unlikely we would see an evolving 4.5 as we might in D&D.

I love WFRP in all it’s incarnations In case you couldn’t tell

I played WHFRP 3e but never bought the rules myself. They were a step TOO far for me. Other's ran it though, so gave me a break from being GM. There are fans of 3e that are very enthusiastic about it.

In some ways, I think 3e actually was far more roleplaying intensive (you can see the genesis of the FFG Star Wars and Gensys systems in it, which are VERY roleplaying intensive in many ways) in how the game ran with the dice and interpretations.

I, of course, prefer other versions, but there are those who love WHFRP! I think my experience with it made understanding how FFG Star Wars work much easier. I love FFG Star Wars (though I also know those that hate it as well) as an RPG.

 

[TheSword]

I played WHFRP 3e but never bought the rules myself. They were a step TOO far for me. Other's ran it though, so gave me a break from being GM. There are fans of 3e that are very enthusiastic about it.

In some ways, I think 3e actually was far more roleplaying intensive (you can see the genesis of the FFG Star Wars and Gensys systems in it, which are VERY roleplaying intensive in many ways) in how the game ran with the dice and interpretations.

I, of course, prefer other versions, but there are those who love WHFRP! I think my experience with it made understanding how FFG Star Wars work much easier. I love FFG Star Wars (though I also know those that hate it as well) as an RPG.

The saddest thing is that due to the format - game boxes - a lot the adventures are lost to posterity. There was a very narrow window when FFG I think knew it was winding down WFRP but still had the licence where they sold pdf versions but it was narrow I managed to get a few. Very hard to find any of it now. I spent a long time trying to find Eye for an Eye to no avail… until I found out they were reprinting it for 4th!

 

[TheSword]

Even in its original incarnation The Enemy Within Stands as one of the greatest rpg campaigns of all time and frequently makes the top 5 list (if not the top) when the question is asked. When cubicle 7 reprinted and revised the series it opted to publish a Companion Book to stand alongside each Campaign Book. Each Companion Book is full of articles, similar to the Archives of the Empire but all relevant to running the campaign as well as general adventures in the Old World. Its worth noting that Cubicle 7 was able to get one of the original writers Graham David to write the reprints so the books feel really authentic and true to the originals (if not truer… look at that art!) There will be no spoilers in these posts from me!

The First Part is the Enemy in Shadows and aficionados will know that Cubicle 7 combined the prologue and introduction originally called the Enemy Within and the first full part Shadows Over Bogenhafen. It’s fitting therefore that the first chapter of the companion details the many puns scattered though the naming conventions of the First part. From Castle Reikgard named after the popular anti-perspirant to the noble line of Von Saponatheim’s in Bogenhafen.

Chapter two is larger a lore download of Sigmar’s Empire, detailing the Electoral Provinces of the empire, the electors, the estates, the guilds, taxes, law and order, and the people. You might think with would overlap with with the first chapter of Archives of the Empire mentioned earlier but while that book focused on the province and places, this book focuses on the power structures and lifestyle rather than a gazetteer of places.

Chapter three focuses on the empires roads, the coaching houses that ply them, and the inns that cater to their customers

Chapter four looks at mounts and vehicles and has stats for all sorts of beasts of burden and mounts, costs, movement rates, rules for driving and mishaps that might happen en route. It also explains how these vehicles like coaches and carts might function in combat.

Chapter five puts forward a suggestion for rules to improve the narrative of travel. This will come as no surprise to folks who follow C7’s work as they have extended travel rules in most of their systems. Weather tables, encounter tables, options for endeavors to conduct during long weeks on the road and simple rules to determine if the players arrive in style or worn down.

Chapters six covers the road wardens of the Empire. Protecting travels from bandits, beasts and worse. With four sample NpCs all with art and their own detailed personality and story.

Chapter seven offers some alternative reasons to go to Bogenhafen catering for folks who have already played the adventure before. Again several amazing fully detailed NPCs are described including Rembrandt Haube, the bandit who robs from the poor to give to the rich. Funnily enough laws against banditry have been significantly lessened in that part of the empire. This sections contains what the book calls Shadow Cast. NPCs like Rembrandt who can either be added to the main campaign or added into other adventures. Categories include bounty hunters, entertainers, highwaymen, outlaws, and town troublemakers, Bawds and Bunko artists, thieves racketeers, and servants… you get the point. There are between 1 and 3 NpCs for each category, fully statted with backgrounds and hooks.

Chapter 8 is a deep dive into mutants in the with expanded mutation tables and rules (for a hundred or so mutations most with mechanical effects).

Chapter 9 details a mysterious cult that I won’t detail here but offers stat blocks, structure, rivals, new talents, a new chaos career, a lot of spells and rules for Tzeentchian magic as well as general chaos spells and casting with Dhar.

Chapter 10 details a side quest that can be dropped into any adventure during travel. While chapter 11 and 12 detail full adventures each a dozen or so pages long. The Pandemonium Carnival and The Affair of the Hidden Jewel.

The end papers of the book include 6 sample player characters suitable for starting the campaign for those that want to skip character generation. While the front papers include full and beautiful maps and illustrations of the river trader the Berebelli (Pronounced Beer-belly) which the PCs may find themselves on.

All in all an amazing first companion book - choc full of lore, stats, ideas and expandable rules for DMs. It only gets better from here!

 

[TheSword]

Death on Reik (which my own group is part way through) is the second part of the excellent Enemy Within campaign and expands the campaign considerable featuring some of the best set pieces I’ve seen. No spoilers here however. I’m just going to focus on the companion book that you can buy with or separate to the main adventure.

Another page of Easter eggs and naming conventions forms the first chapter. My favourite being the dwarf engineer Isembeard… if you get it you get it.

Chapter Two brings back a much loved part from 1st edition… extensive rules for herbs. Finding them, preparing them and 21 different varieties in some cases with multiple uses. This is some serious Athalas shiz here and give herbalist characters, druids, rangers et al, a very useful and lucrative use of their skills. It’s areas like this —- skills and crafting that WFRP really takes strides ahead of 5e. It’s worth saying the pictures are full colour illustrations and just beautiful.

Chapter Three includes some deleted scenes that wouldn’t fit in the main book, including a mysterious cargo and a VIP NPC the party might meet.

Chapter Four looks at the Empire’s rivers in much the same way the previous companion looked at its roads. This includes descriptions and maps for toll houses and locks along with random encounters you could use.

Chapter Five has rules for river navigation, using the Boat Handling skill. Damage to boats including critical hits, repairing them, and various hazards of sailing a river barge. 5 sample river boats with illustrations and stats are also given.

Chapter six looks at the River Wardens that patrol the rivers. Their operations, HQs, sample NPCs with illustrations and backgrounds. Not to forget ideas for encounters with patrol boards.

Chapter Seven expands the list of NPCs you meet on the road. This time including Charlatans, Grave Robbers, Hunters, Nobles, Pit Fighters, Stevedores, Cooks, Wizards and Physicians. As before, each has a page or so of hooks, ideas for integrating in the campaign, an interesting story and full illustration and stat block.

Chapter Eight looks in more details at the folk that make their living on the river. Each covers a different type of boat you might come across, who might crew it and what their story might be. Hopefully by now you’ll have spotted there are at least 20+ full NPCs that can be dropped into any campaign in this book.

Chapter Nine covers the Imperial Semaphore service. Which may or may not feature into Death in the Reik. How the towers are built, how they work and four adventure seeds based on the theme including a tower besieged and a group opposed to the towers on principle.

Chapter Ten has rules for pimping your barge with a wide range of customization from iron plating and luxury cabin to steam propulsion and volley guns. Some players will go wild with this.

Chapter Eleven has extensive trading rules with a lot of lore behind it as well. Community trading modifier as well as a setting specific guide to supply and demand for every town and city on the Reik and plenty not on it.

Chapter Twelve covers wreckers, smugglers and pirates with another five NPCs and lots of plot ideas. You might have noticed by now that these books don’t include standard NPCs stat blocks. Instead you get a fully worked up character with hopes dreams ambitions and plot hooks, an illustration and a stat block you can use as a template. There is so much value in that.

Chapter Thirteen includes river monsters, river trolls, sirens, naiads, Reik eels, stir pike and amoeba along with a host of new creature traits

Chapter Fourteen covers waterborne diseases like The Gripe and Cavity Worms. Yes they are as bad as you would expect.

Chapter Fifteen covers a second chaos cult very different to the one covered in the first companion book. It still includes new spells, NPCs and a new Career - The Warrior of Tzeentch.

Chapter Sixteen returns to an old favourite - the cruise ship Emperor Luitpold. Detailing the ship, it’s routes, the crew (as full NPCs) maps of its main areas and three adventure outlines.

Lastly chapter Seventeen features another reprint - Vengeance of the Gravelord. A revised and re-written adventure formed from part of the original module, Carrion up the Reik. It’s very ouch expanded and gets continued in the next companion forming a multi part set of side quests that can continue through the campaign or be spun off into another adventure entirely.

Endpapers include another pre-gen character leveled to be appropriate for this part in the campaign

In essence this is a sourcebook to the rivers of the Empire as well as supplementing the main adventure book. Hopefully now you can see what C7 have tried to do with these companions. Other publishers could learn a lot from this I think because these books are golden! Incidentally the castle in that beautiful piece of art is Castle Wittgenstein… one of the best details and most evocative places I’ve had the pleasure of running. No spoilers but it was an absolute blast running that!

 

[Neonchameleon]

Another interesting thing worth acknowledging is the effect the new edition has on difficulty and progression. I think this gets at the heart of why I really like WFRP 4e and find it so much more enjoyable.

Under 1st & 2nd edition the higher you got your Weapon Skill, the easier it got to hit. To the point where it was very unlikely you would miss. The game balanced this by having tougher creatures, more armour, more wounds and better parrying. D&D has a similar solution. To hit rolls increase much faster than AC and so the solution to this is more wounds and abilities that mitigate damage. Both systems could turn into a bit of a slog as PCs tried to hack away at monster wounds while trying not to lose their own reserves.

WFRP 4e however doesn’t need to do this as fighting against a high WS foe with just a few wounds can be very challenging as they don’t need huge wound reserves. You can still chip away at them though with successful hits and crits but your hits will deal less as their skill means you won’t get big bonuses from SLs to damage and so that damage doesn’t turn into the city-levelling stuff we see in D&D.

Just to say thank you. This is literally the first thing I've read about WFRP 4e that makes me want to get it - and oddly isn't something that I picked up on when I looked into it when it first came out despite checking rules changes. As someone who owns all three previous editions and has affection for parts of all of them (yes even 3e) while finding other parts exasperating what else does 4e do better than 2e (or 1e for that matter)?

 

[TheSword]

Just to say thank you. This is literally the first thing I've read about WFRP 4e that makes me want to get it - and oddly isn't something that I picked up on when I looked into it when it first came out despite checking rules changes. As someone who owns all three previous editions and has affection for parts of all of them (yes even 3e) while finding other parts exasperating what else does 4e do better than 2e (or 1e for that matter)?

Happy to oblige.

So one of the big changes I like between earlier editions and 4th is the way advancement happens. In 1st Ed and 2nd Ed career completely controlled the limits of your advancement. If you're a Wizard's Apprentice you're limited too +15% WP and you buy that in 5% increments of 100 XP each. If you want to get better than that, you need to change career to one of a limited number of other careers right. In this case probably Wizard, but maybe scholar or scribe. This provides very clear paths for development but is also pretty constraining. Power is limited by the chain of careers you need to progress through to get to the really punchy stuff. Except we know this didn't really work and some careers were much much more powerful than others.

In 4e power is balanced by diminishing returns. Firstly you don't need to purchase in steps of 5% you purchase individually a point at a time. Secondly the cost of advances increases the more you take. For instance increasing an advance in strength the first five points costs me 25 XP each point. The next five cost me 30 XP, the next five 40 XP, the next five 50, then 70, 90, 120, 150 etc. Careers say what skills and abilities you can develop but not how high you need to develop them. It the diminishing returns that set this effective limit. The end result of which is that now you can play a Bounty Hunter and keep on getting better and better at Bounty Hunter stuff without being forced to arbitrarily forced to switch to Vampire hunter or Targeteer in order to progress. At the same time if I'm a gribbly power player Guard who decides to throw all my advances into Toughness I'm going to benefit at first. But once I get to +20 advances I'm going to find I could put +15 into other skills for putting another +5 into toughness.

The second element of advancement is that the distinction of base and advanced careers is gone. Every career has 4 levels and entry level for instance Troll Slayer and three more levels of that career. In this case Giant Slayer, Dragon Slayer and Daemon Slayer. Each layer opens more talents, a wider range of ability scores, and adds new skills. You can only move up a layer if you have completed the layer below which means buying one talent, putting 5 more advances into each ability stat and each skill at that level.

There aren't career exists, instead you can progress to the entry level of any other career. If it makes sense and you have the advances, your GM might let you move to a higher level. For instance a 2nd level Road warden might move to a 2nd level River Warden instead of having to start as a 1st level River Recruit. Interestingly you can also train in skills and talents that aren't on your career if you find the right trainer, or it makes sense. This costs you a bit more experience than it would normally but worth it in some circumstances.

To summarise, still very flavourful, but much more flexible and with the opportunity to play the character how you want to, rather than being constrained by artificial limits. Happy to answer any questions.

 

[TheSword]

The third thing I really like that isn’t in earlier editions is the meta currency of Fortune and Resolve. WFRP has a reputation for being very swingy with extremely awful things poised to happen to you character at any moment. The thing is, you have to be a bit unlucky for that stuff to actually happen. Fortune and Resolve act to balance that danger as PCs. You can regain both and spend them at will to affect the game.

Fortune allows you to reroll one test and take the second result even if worse… or nudge a result by one SL (which might mean you win an opposed test). You get all your fortune back at the start of the game session or at a specified regularity (we play 2 hour games so we refresh every other game)

Resolve let’s you ignore psychology until the end of your next turn (fear, terror, frenzy, hatred etc)… or remove one level of one condition from you immediately. Considering that conditions include burning, blind, poisoned, fatigued, prone and even unconscious it’s a very useful thing to be able to remove. You get resolve back when you act according to your characters motivation which might be something like promote the faith of sigmar or fight chaos… or make money.

You might be wondering where Fate is? Well Fate and Resilience sit behind Fortune and Resolve as spendable currency that you don’t get back. You top your Fortune points up to your Fate total so spending a point of Fate is like spending Fortune and never getting it back. You can use it to save your life and avoid death - but be out of the encounter. Or you can use it to completely ignore one source of damage - an explosion, a terrible wound etc.

Resilience is like Fate but instead you can replace any one dice roll with a result of your choice… or prevent a mutation happening. Choosing a number is really good my players have used it twice… once to get a crit and an amazing hit on a daemonette and one time to pass a very unlikely pray test to gain a miracle from Sigmar that made a big impact on his characters arc.

Ultimately these meta currency are really useful and allow players to take more risks and also survive the vagaries of luck that comes with critical hits, bleeding eyes and severed wrists. I think they’re great and I just wish more of my NPCs had them.