What are the sources for Warhammer Fantasy Role Play?

[Doug McCrae]

Yes, there is a Pellinore influence. It is inevitable given that most of the Pellinore writers fetched up at GW: Jim & Phil, Paul Cockburn, Tom Kirby, and Mike Brunton (aka Fiona Lloyd and various others - he wrote a lot more of IMAGINE than anyone knows) plus Carl Sargent later. But I think it's going too far to call the rulebook Pellinore II. Here's why:

The ex-TSR UK folks arrived piecemeal: Paul and Tom first, Mike a few months later, Jim & Phil last. By the time Jim & Phil came the rulebook was almost done.

The vast bulk of the rulebook was based on the work of Rick and Hal, with occasional ideas thrown in by Bryan in the same drive-by management style as "write a CoC adventure for WFRP." Rick had collected everything into a first draft which I edited and developed, filling in gaps and bushwhacking through everything ever published for Warhammer to make sure nothing was missed (which is why we see monsters like the Life and Death Elementals, based on old Warhammer minis, that fell by the wayside as the Warhammer mythos coalesced).

You're right that at this stage, WFRP didn't really know what it was going to be. The Warhammer mythos as a whole was still at the red box second edition stage, with odd and sometimes contradictory snippets of background scattered across the Citadel Compendium and Journal, miniatures ads, and the backs of mini boxes. Third edition, the orange hardback, was the first to try to pull everything together, following on from WFRP.

SoB fulfilled its purpose, but I don't think anyone expected it to set the tone for the entire game, and turning the Complete Dungeon Master series into the Doomstones campaign was seen in some quarters as an attempt to redress the balance and get back to the dungeon.

We were a fashionably cynical bunch at the GW Design Studio in the Thatcherite mid-80s, and sick of D&D's "shiny" fantasy with its perfect teeth, chrome-plated armour and Fabio hair. Films like Jabberwocky and Monty Python and the Holy Grail were big influences, as were Rick and Hal's offbeat (and often disturbing) senses of humour. I think these were the major forces at this point.

The nations were already set by the time I got to GW. As for the careers, it seemed that every day Hal would come in with three or four more, based on people he'd seen around Nottingham - like the Bawd or the pavement artist that became an Entertainer specialisation. We ended up with about twice as many careers as were ever published - most of them very grubby and many too silly for words.

Death on the Reik, to my mind, owes a lot to a UK D&D module called B/X 1 (later B10), Night's Dark Terror. It's a primer on campaign play, written to bridge the gap between the Basic and Expert sets. Jim & Phil wrote it along with Graeme Morris, who got out of the games business when TSR UK folded. I think it is DotR that most people think of when they recall the Enemy Within campaign - that and the memory of sewer mishaps in Bogenhafen.

Of course, since Jim & Phil had also worked on Pellinore there were influences from that quarter, but Pellinore wasn't yet dead. It survived in Paul Cockburn's short-lived GamesMaster Productions zine, and was never intended to become part of WFRP.

Power Behind the Throne is high-level political intrigue with very little sewage involved, and Something Rotten in Kislev takes the campaign screaming down a side-alley for reasons that have been explained elsewhere. Finally, Empire in Flames was written and published in a great hurry to bring the campaign to an end.

So that's my two penn'orth. Yes, Pellinore had an influence, but as far as tone and style were concerned WFRP was already moving in the direction of "grubby fantasy." The "grim and perilous" (another of Bryan's over-the-shoulder pronouncements) was what it morphed into as we went along.

Source

 

[CapnZapp]

D&D might be the outlier here. Compare with RuneQuest, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Tunnels & Trolls, which I think all achieve consistency of tone. RQ, EPT, and WFRP are all world-specific and the writers knew much more about history (or religion in the case of Greg Stafford) than Gygax did.

Yes all of these games ultimately came into being by people studying D&D and going "I can do that better"

 

[aramis erak]

Dungeons & Dragons is a major one. Michael Moorcock and possibly also RuneQuest for the concept of Chaos. The real world geographic analogues are fairly obvious, I think, but what real world historical period or periods does WFRP draw on?

per the articles in WD, the basis is early Renaissance Europe, mixed with liberal Moorcock, Lovecraft, and some Lieber, and D&D; the tolkien influence is supposedly via D&D.
The look of the orkoids was very different from that of D&D and Tolkien in the era.
They also borrowed from 70's horror, sci-fi, and fantasy.

Their orcs were different, and don't match anything prior I've read.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Real world places and history, fantasy from Moorcock, Howard and Lovecraft, The Brothers Grimm, and creative minds that may or may not have been on drugs. Personally, feel it was just the designers being from Europe and not having to be politically correct at the time of creation.

 

[aramis erak]

Personally, feel it was just the designers being from Europe and not having to be politically correct at the time of creation.

it's amazing how much ground the PC movement has gained.

 

[Umbran]

Please be advised, if you drift into a discussion of political correctness, this will not end well.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Please be advised, if you drift into a discussion of political correctness, this will not end well.

Guess I should have said being labeled devil worshippers of the early 80s

 

[Bluenose]

Yes all of these games ultimately came into being by people studying D&D and going "I can do that better"

Possibly the rules did, but both Glorantha and EPT had setting material in existence before D&D appeared.

I suspect the "strong identity" of many settings is helped because they simply didn't have so many writers with their own vision of "how things should be" or the editors were more inclined to reject "things that don't fit" than was the case with many D&D settings. It's much easier to maintain a strong "identity" when you use fewer writers and don't have an intense production schedule that means you simply have to get "product" out even if it's not entirely satisfactory/ready.