Warhammer: The Old World RPG Offers A New Take On The Empire

An easy way in for people less familiar with the lore.
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The Warhammer brand is one of the few gaming IPs that has a similar cultural cache to Dungeons & Dragons. It has decades of lore that span multiple games and eras of the world. Celebrities have started to discuss painting (or neglecting) their armies. When Games Workshop released the Warhammer: The Old World miniatures game early in 2024, they wanted a fresh take on the setting that would appeal to potential customers who are new to the grim setting.

Warhammer: The Old World The Roleplaying Game, from Cubicle 7, looks to do the same on the RPG side of things. The game boasts a fresh take on the classic setting with a streamlined system meant for fast play. Cubicle 7 gave me access to an advanced PDF of the Player’s Guide for this article and allowed me to ask some questions of the design team.

“We wanted people less familiar with the lore to have an easy way in,” said Dominic McDowall, Game Designer and CEO/co-founder of Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd, “so each character has contacts. Your contacts give you advice or assistance, and also ground your character with background elements that tell you how you fit in. Besides that, we also designed the game to be easy to get your head around - simple to learn, and with a satisfying breadth and depth using those core principles”

“We considered how to make the game as accessible as possible at every step of development,” said Pádraig Murphy, Senior Producer at Games Workshop. “Even if you don’t know the name of every god or have a map of the Empire memorised, you will find the game invites you in. As Dom mentioned, contacts work really well for this. Focusing on one town, the port of Talagaad, also allowed us to show off the setting without immediately overwhelming new players and GMs. All of the depth of the setting is there once you’re ready for it, of course — this is Warhammer after all.”

Warhammer: The Old World The Roleplaying Game is set a few hundred years before its older darker sibling. Things have not gone to Hell in a handbasket like they have in Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, but you can see the basket in the process of being woven. Chaos cults and magical anomalies might be more rare but there’s still plenty of conflict in the air. There is no clear leader ready to lead the empire, which means all the city states are jockeying for power. Its through the cracks caused by these rivalries that Chaos begins to take hold.

Elements of the new game will seem familiar to fans that have played the original. The stats and skills are more or less the same. Characters still are built through class-like careers and encouraged to roll for random elements. While the company spins up content for this new line, it seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult to convert some of the more low key adventures of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play to use with this game.

“The ratcatcher was non-negotiable!” said McDowall. “One of the things that’s always important for us is capturing the feel of the setting we’re working on and reflecting that through our design choices.”

Combat and magic remain dangerous propositions. As players take injuries and summon unknowable power, they rack up a dice pool that’s rolled on a chart filled with the sort of awfulness expected in a Warhammer game. These dice can be disarmed if time is taken to bind wounds and discharge those energies but they can also quickly stack up during a battle and cause some unpleasant moments for player characters.

“We knew we wanted the possibility for players to suffer a grisly injury or two!” said Murphy. “We also wanted to keep the idea of degrees of success, and to make sure players had a chance to roll some dice when they were attacked to parry a blow or dive out of the way. Beyond that, the star of the show for me is the setting — the World of Legend is such a rich and rewarding world to explore, both as a developer and a player.”

Characters are given pieces that connect them to the setting and let them learn about it at their own pace. They get contacts, relationships and assets like businesses or holdings. These aren’t the amoral drifters expected to steal a dead man’s identity to kick off a grand campaign. These characters have homes, jobs and people they care about and, hopefully, fight for.

Which isn’t to say that this game is Warhammer: Animal Crossing. The players are linked by a Grim Portent which shows them the grave future that lurks in the dark spaces of the world. Perhaps they saw a Chaos ritual on the edge of their little town. Maybe they were drawn to a cursed location by a friend who didn’t make it out alive. They know that something's rotten in the Old World and they’ve got to stop it, whether for the greater good or simply to save their own skins.

“It’s a new take on a classic setting,” said Murphy, “with a snappy system and dynamic combat. It’s a great and accessible way to get your friends into a Warhammer Roleplaying Game if they’re not familiar with the setting, or if they aren’t normally into roleplaying games.”

“It's a great opportunity to explore a new era with its own flavour too,” said McDowell. “The new take on familiar elements mixes things up in ways you might not expect. Don’t take Sigmar’s ascendency for granted - invoking his name outside of the Reikland can land you in deep trouble if the witch hunters have recently rolled through town!”

Warhammer: The Old World The Roleplaying Game is due for a physical release in Q1 of 2026. Fans who pre-order the game can get access to early PDFs as they are completed.
 

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Rob Wieland

Rob Wieland

Like classes, careers in OW are designed so you can stay in them and advance, rather than having to go through the career paths of 1e and 2e.
If you are comparing them to the classes of D&D then a Fighter cannot become a Magic-User without changing class. But in TOW a Boathand can remain in the Boathand Career but become a Wizard. Which is why I don't consider the Careers of TOW similar to classes.
 

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I love careers as presented in 1e and 2e. They are part of the core appeal of WFRP and what sets it apart from D&D and many other fantasy RPGs.

On saying that, for people who find them not to their tastes, both 4e and OW use careers more like D&D classes. So, you can stay in your career and generally they are cooler from the get-go. As such, this negative view of careers should not be an impediment to either of those iterations of WFRP.
1e (and I suppose 2e) had several careers that formed natural paths, like Seaman to Mate/Navigator to Captain. In many cases you'd start with one basic career and then move into another basic career that offered this kind of progression (Pedlar to Trader to Merchant). My impression of 4e is that this is built into the careers themselves, with some padding added to give all of them four stages (most 1e versions only had two or three stages). 4e also allows you to pump your skills and stats as much as you want with just the basic career – advancing to a different one opens up new options and gives you a higher status, but in theory a basic Pit Fighter could build up their Melee skill to like 90% without ever becoming something like a Judicial Champion.
 

Hm I was actually hoping that they'd re-use or refine the Wrath and Glory system for this.

Sacrilege, I know, but my players love it. Half of them are former players of Dark Heresy 1e and WFRP (all editions up to 3e).
 

1e (and I suppose 2e) had several careers that formed natural paths, like Seaman to Mate/Navigator to Captain. In many cases you'd start with one basic career and then move into another basic career that offered this kind of progression (Pedlar to Trader to Merchant). My impression of 4e is that this is built into the careers themselves, with some padding added to give all of them four stages (most 1e versions only had two or three stages). 4e also allows you to pump your skills and stats as much as you want with just the basic career – advancing to a different one opens up new options and gives you a higher status, but in theory a basic Pit Fighter could build up their Melee skill to like 90% without ever becoming something like a Judicial Champion.
Yes in 4e you only have to leave a career if you want to be able to do something drastically different. It is also easier or less XP to move from a similar careers like starting off as an apothecary and becoming a physician as opposed to starting off as a soldier and becoming a mage.
 

Careers in TOW honestly don't matter, they give you a unique talent that you can't usually get any other way but every skill and every other talent is learnable by every character as long as you meet the pre request. Now you keep the unique talent that each career gets if you move to a different career, career skill bonuses you do not, so if you want to be able to make potions as an over night activity as opposed to just a down time activity then you have to become an apothecary. The other thing that you can only change by changing careers is your wealth.
 

This definitely was a problem if you came to the game from Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

I did not and received my setting information from WFRP 1st Edition and along with the system thought every character was meant to be a second away from death by goblin.
These are very good points. I had 0 experience with WFB when I first encountered WHFRP1E and have never played it, so I wasn't jonesing for a guy riding a griffin.
 

1e (and I suppose 2e) had several careers that formed natural paths, like Seaman to Mate/Navigator to Captain. In many cases you'd start with one basic career and then move into another basic career that offered this kind of progression (Pedlar to Trader to Merchant).
Yeah, that's how 1E worked. There were a number of careers that were dead ends with the anticipation that you'd move on but a number did have a natural progression. Seaman to Mate to Captain is a good example. Exactly how you wanted to play it was up to the GM, of course.

I tended to like the idea that you had to seek out different careers for the better advances but I ran a city-based campaign (set in Middenheim) where the PCs were part of the city. So one of the PCs started out as a guard of some sort and worked his way up. Another started as a Wizard's Apprentice and eventually became a Wizard. etc.
 

Careers in The Old World are really just careers, as in the thing you do between adventures in order to survive and maintain your place in society. They have a slight impact on advancement (in that they determine which characteristics are slightly cheaper for you), but their biggest impact is your social standing and monetary situation.

That being said there is some use in changing careers to get career exclusive talents (you do not lose your own).
 

I like the way that movement and range works. It was a system borrowed from Imperium Maledictum. The scene is split into zones so a combat in might have four zones - the tap room floor, behind the bar, the balcony and the kitchen. Weapon ranges are sorted by zones, so is movement. If you’re in the same zone you can attack in melee and then become engaged with that combatant. It basically allows for much easier theatre of the mind combat and smaller scale maps than the 1” grid.

On the flip side, I’m not a fan of the simplification. I like WFRP 4e’s crunch level and granularity once Group Advantage is adopted. I want more skills not less. I want a nuanced social system. I want quirky spellcasting.

I probably won’t get the base rules but will definitely be getting any adventures they release to convert to 4e.
 

If you are comparing them to the classes of D&D then a Fighter cannot become a Magic-User without changing class. But in TOW a Boathand can remain in the Boathand Career but become a Wizard. Which is why I don't consider the Careers of TOW similar to classes.
That’s not what I said though. I was only comparing them to classes in that you can stick with them and advance rather than having to career hop like in 1e and 2e, which was the what the poster who I quoted said they didn’t like. You don’t seem to disagree with that statement, and are instead having an entirely separate discussion from my comments that you quoted.
 

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