Enemies Unknown - A Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Old World Bestiary review

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Old World Bestiary

Published by Cubicle 7 (Black Industries 2005)

Design and Writing by T.S. Luikart and Ian Sturrock

Development and Rules Design by Chris Pramas 

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition's bestiary appropriately reflects the spirit of the game: familiar tropes from a murkier perspective. Patching up the core rulebook's lackluster adversary section, Old World Bestiary provides rules for most of the vicious and strange creatures that populate the tabletop wargame. 

Cubicle 7

In many ways it's a standard take on one of the classic RPG staples but the book is set apart by its framing. Divided between a player and game master section, the former is presented through an in-universe document, Perilous Beasts. An assortment of rumors and scholarly debate, with a healthy dose of ravings and hearsay, it collects what characters in the setting know about the beings inhabiting dark corners of the world.

Even the more authoritative sections are shrouded by uncertainty, with a letter at the end calling the entire work into question. 

It's a brilliant literary device and one that fits the lopsided, "Ratcatcher" tone of WFRP perfectly. Information that would be common knowledge to most players is often unclear at best to

Everyday Heroes and Villains: A Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition Review

Cublicle 7 (John Sibbick)

While Dungeons & Dragons struggled with Satanic Panic driven controversy throughout the 80s, famous British wargaming property Warhammer took a very different approach. Published in 1986 by Games Workshop, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay invited players to explore "A grim world of perilous adventure." That doesn't even begin to describe the horror and bloodshed the system captures or the all too human adventurers that stands against certain destruction.

WFRP 1st edition was released while the mass combat game Warhammer Fantasy Battle was still in its early years. At that time, it was simply known as Warhammer and much of the game's background, rules, and identity was still in flux. Even three editions by that point, the game was an interesting mix of Roleplaying elements and more contemporary wargaming mechanics. WFRP 1st edition would end up bringing a lot of clarity to Warhammer Fantasy as a whole. Besides the wargame aspect, it also proved to be one of the most atmospheric RPG systems ever published and my all time favorite.

The usual Warhammer tropes are all in force in WFRP. Reality is poised to be destroyed by the extradimensional forces of Chaos, who take the shapes of gods and daemons. Besides the direct threat they pose, their plans have left mortals at each others throats. WFRP frames this conflict in a fantasy setting that's a mixture of real world history, Michael Moorcock's Elric series, Tolkien fantasy, Conan, and the other usual suspects.  

WFRP 1st edition was very much a setting driven game, with most of the background information is restricted to games set in the "Old World," which roughly conforms to Medieval Europe geographically and culturally. While the scope was somewhat limited, what they did cover was well explored both in and out of game.

This might not sound very original but what set WFRP apart from the rest was the presentation of these well worn inspirations. There's a strong punk atmosphere to early Warhammer, as traditional fantasy tropes were placed in a corrupted world that drew inspiration from Thatcher England and Cold War fears. Most importantly, WFRP 1st edition was all about playing the little guy. You didn't make heroes, you made characters who could be heroes.

That distinction makes all the difference in the world.

WFRP 1st edition is a game where no matter how strong or experience a character is, nearly anything can kill them: goblins, wild animals, carriage crashes. Meanwhile, the more supernatural threats and the corrupt institutions that rule over the Old World represent an ever greater danger.

The inherent risk of the setting is reflected in a rule set hellbent on tearing life and limb away from the characters. Most of the mechanics stem from a percentile system. For an action to succeed, a player just needs to roll a d100 die below the relevant characteristic, after difficulty modifiers (+10, -10, so on). Easy to learn, hard to actually pull off, much like the rest of the game.

A Twist of Fate

Cubicle 7 (Tony Ackland)

The way you build characters in WFRP is a major contributor to the overall lethality of the game. It's also my favorite part of this system. As I said before, you're making potential heroes. You start by picking one of the four available races, Human, Wood Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling. They're all what you expect.

I often hear people say Elves are too powerful in WFRP 1st edition. They certainly have some notable advantages compared to the other options but in my experience it doesn't matter much. Frankly any mechanical advantages are nullified by the unforgiving nature of the game and the setting's harsh cultural norms.

Game Master Guidance: Not Everything Needs to be Connected

A storyteller will often find themselves tempted to create elaborate, overlapping stories. The current popularity of “cinematic universes” and other interconnected settings shows there’s a demand for them. However, it’s very difficult to pull off. Only a handful of settings manage to create a true mythology, Lord of the Rings probably being the best example. Even the more competent “linked” settings end up bogged down by confusing storylines, absurd retcons, and inconsistent mechanics. A regular lament of Star Wars novel and comic fans is that every other person across the galaxy apparently knows Han Solo. The simple answer is that having dozens of writers handling the same setting over the course of decades is going to cause some consistency problems. But the deeper issue, and the one that GMs should be wary of, is the urge to connect everything.

               As in any form of storytelling, that doesn’t mean nothing can be related. If the events of your campaign are entirely isolated, there won’t be a real narrative arc. Even worse, the game will feel like a Three Stooges-esque procession of isolated incidents. The inverse is just as bad. If every little thing the party does ends up being directly connected, it can quickly become contrived. Additionally, it will make the game’s world feel small and cramped. If everything the party encounters circles back to the main storyline, then it will quickly seem like nothing exists outside of the player characters’ own narrative. As with most things in storytelling, extremes are to be avoided. For a GM, that means being able to tell when to hold on to something and when to leave alone. A good rule of thumb is that the more removed something is from the main plot, the more likely it is that it should stay away from it.

               A story being long or elaborate doesn’t automatically make it good. Ray Bradbury might be best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 but most of his greatest works are his short stories. Similarly, the self-contained “monster of the week” episodes of the X-Files are more fondly remembered than the tangled, alien conspiracy focused “mythology” plotline that incorporated the entire show. There’s something to be said for a story that can offer a satisfying resolution in a relatively short timeframe. That brevity can lend it an impact a longer story might just lack. That’s why so many writers argue it’s harder to write a short story than a “regular” one. But that shouldn’t intimidate a game master. You have the players to help carry the story forward. In my personal experience, my group have most the “one and done” sessions the most.

On a more practical note, GMS of any experience level can attest that it’s much easier to plan a session than a campaign. Even the loosest groups will have to keep track of all sorts of elements, whether they be characters, events, enemies, or anything else. By letting certain plotlines end or fade into the background, you’ll save yourself a whole lot of time. It’s easy for storytellers to get caught up with crafting endlessly self-referential narratives. That’s doubly so for a medium as interactive as RPGs, where a GM fears removing something that the group might want to interact with later on. It arguably takes more skill and more effort to step back and decide what needs to be left alone or cut out altogether. It’s even harder for a GM, who likely has their “audience” seated nearby. Or at the very least, in the same groupchat as you. But a GM should realize that no matter how difficult it might be, they can’t let their campaigns turn out into an impenetrable Gordian knot. It will save everyone a lot of trouble in the long run.

Unlikely Inspirations- Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

                                                        Bantam Books

I’m the sort of Game Master that provides the players a lot of input in the story. That leads to a good amount of improvisation on my part, which in turn can lead to a somewhat disjointed narrative. But real life never follows a rigid narrative arc. So that means mean seemingly disparate events over the course of a campaign can’t link up to have a larger meaning. Plenty of books adopt this sort of approach but Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is closer to Roleplaying Games than most other examples. The book links up short stories written across his career, the only constant being the use of Mars as a setting. However, the repetition of certain themes, characters, and concepts, along with the stories written to unify the others, gives the anthology a surprisingly coherent storyline. The Martian Chronicles taught me that as long as a GM can keep a few fundamental elements consistent, they don’t have to worry about the individual sessions of a campaign forming a more conventional plot.

               While each story has considerably different characters, circumstances, and tones, they all share a common setting. Each story helps build up Bradbury’s vision of a habitable Mars and the strange, wondrous beings that built it. Alternatively, they establish the circumstances on earth that brought Mars’ human colonists to the red planet. Most of the stories also share themes about exploration, colonialism, technology, and nuclear war. The way in which The Martian Chronicles builds a larger narrative out of smaller, self-contained stories forms a close parallel with the way many RPG campaigns play out. It also shows that one "whole" narrative isn’t necessarily more effective or meaningful than a more fragmented one.

               In addition to offering insights into how to run a campaign, The Martian Chronicles features some strong ideas for them. While only a few stories feature direct violence, each one has significant stakes and an eerie atmosphere to accompany it. The Martian Chronicles helped teach middle school me that there’s more ways to convey threat in a story than just an adversary or some other form of direct harm. Just because science fiction can features monsters, ray guns, and the like doesn’t mean it absolutely has to. Imagery like 50s style American towns built over Martian cities and automated houses that run even after the end of the world also gave me a sense of what an unconventional, colorful but still familiar setting could be. The Martian Chronicles had a considerable influence over me as a kid and its impact extended to how I run RPGs.

Short Fiction- Fantasy Action Roleplay System

I recently took a short fiction class and I ended up writing a short piece trying to encapsulate the roleplaying game experience. Or my roleplaying game experience, at the very least. Hopefully I wasn't too far off.

Fantasy Action Roleplay System

“The troll is… Jeff, pay attention…”
A half minute passed before Jeff looked up from his phone. He had tuned out at some point during the group’s thirty minute tangent about which Nightmare on Elm Street sequel was the most tolerable. He had managed to ignore the in depth explanation of the series’ sexual subtexts that forced the group to abruptly turn their attention back to the actual game. Jeff looked over the table, feeling even more regret. Dice, pencils, and sheets were scattered across a table far too small for a group of six. Half of it was covered by a fold out screen, decorated with the images of various fantasy creatures with 80s haircuts painted in earthy tones, unified by an inexplicably green tinge. Beneath a crooked elf and some three armed reptilian was text with a stone-like font, “FARS: THE FANTASY ACTION ROLE SYSTEM.” It left whatever was happening on that side of the table a mystery to all but one out of the five of them.

Dan insisted that was the point of it.

Jeff had known Dan for some time, though admittedly not very well. They had something vaguely resembling a friendship in high school, as they had managed to end up in the same homeroom class three years in a row. They had gotten lunch together a few times and Dan had invited Jeff to join him in the dimly lit Latin classroom full of CRTVs where students played video and card games after school.

Jeff had declined and later felt guilty about it. As far as he could tell, Dan didn’t have that much going on in his life and the smell of the room and its occupants wasn’t that bad.

To Jeff’s surprise, Dan ringed him up a few months after graduation. The latter had essentially disappeared in their senior year, seen only manically scribbling in notebooks far away from any potential disturbances. Jeff told him he had decided to take a gap year.

“Yeah, I’m doing something like that.”

With the formalities out of the way, Dan explained he was hosting a game of “FARS.” After a lengthy explanation of the alleged superiority of the system and his unique take on it, he got around to telling Jeff what it actually was.

“It’s a Roleplaying Game. It’s like a video game but pen and paper. I make a story and you have a character that acts it out. You roll dice when you want to do something complicated to see if you’re successful or not. I do the same for everyone that isn’t your character.”
Jeff hesitantly accepted the offer, even if didn’t actually make sense to him. It was only to finally overcome the longstanding guilt about the Latin classroom affair.

Over the next few days he received a series of emails from Dan. The first had a document titled FARSBACKGROUNDDAN. Jeff let it sit a few hours until opening it to find that Dan had taken it upon himself to rewrite the entirety of FARS elaborate “lore,” which he had felt a need to explain earlier.

Jeff felt like someone had emailed him a severed body part. He got only a few pages into the gargantuan document, stopping after realizing the complex metaphysical dynamics he was trying to parse existed only to explain where goblins came from.

“Yeah, Dan, I read it. Sure, it was cool, I guess.”

After that Dan insisted on meeting with him at their hometown’s library, in order to prepare for the game. The only sort of pre-anything Jeff had ever done before a game involved heavy drinking. Arriving at the agreed upon time, he found Dan seated in the library’s long ignored VHS section, which the fluorescent lights seemingly refused illuminate.

Jeff had never seen Dan outside of his school uniform. Judging from what he wore now, he must have preferred the restrictions imposed by the dress code and didn’t know what to do with this newfound freedom. Dan wore a graphic tee with a character so far from Jeff’s own interests he couldn’t even place what medium it came from.

Admittedly he couldn’t remember the last nonfiction book he had read of his own free will but he suspected that wouldn’t have made a difference.

Dan rushed through their niceties and rushed straight to pulling a hardback book from his satchel. It had never occurred to Jeff to put pins on a bag. Dan’s had so many it looked like some kind of nightmarish neon mushroom patch.

Jeff turned his attention to the book after Dan excitedly smacked it onto the ancient plastic table. It was literally rough around the edges and emblazoned in ancient, exaggerated art. The only thing keeping the book together was so much duct tape that the spine looked mummified. It was much older than Dan but Jeff only wondered what all the pages were for.

“We’re gonna make your character now. Don’t worry, I’ll handle the hard parts.”
Over the course of the next hour, Dan asked him a series of increasingly unclear questions and explaining the consequences of his decisions. Every so often he would roll a dice, briefly explaining the significance and quality of the roll. All the while he filled out a piece of loose leaf in his indecipherable handwriting. Admittedly Jeff knew he wouldn’t understand even if he could read it, so it didn’t really matter.

About halfway through, Jeff entered something akin to a transcendental state, broken only by Dan’s last question.

“Alright, now you’ve got a pretty decent Rhark Skirmisher.”
Rhark? Jeff thought that couldn’t be right and Jeff had misspoken.

“All you need to do is come up with a name and background.”
“Um, yeah.”

Dan promptly packed up his stuff and left the library, leaving a confused Jeff with a scribble covered page. Unable to make the slightest sense of it, he turned back to the “lore,” as Jeff had insisted on calling it.

Rhrark are centaurian sharks, hailing from the under-depths of…

Jeff squinted at the screen. It didn’t matter how antiquated FARS was, there was no way a shark centaur was a major part of the setting. But that meant that Dan had felt the need to add it. That wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.

Eventually Dan sent him the date and time for the actual game, a full three weeks after he had agreed to it. Admittedly, Jeff was excited for it. Regardless of the more questionable details, it seemed fun enough to him. And Dan had obviously put quite a bit of thought into it. Most importantly, if he went to this, he never had to think about the Latin classroom thing ever again.

When Jeff showed up another person waited outside of Dan’s garage. He wore a heavy metal shirt from one of the subgenres that took pride in illegible band logos. He smoked from his vape at regularly intervals, in a motion reminiscent of a “Drinking Bird” in its frequency and manner.

Dan hadn’t mentioned that other people would be involved.

“Jeff, the troll.”
“Yeah.”
Dan gestured to a chunk of lumpy metal placed at the center of a hand drawn floorplan. In the right light it did in fact look like a troll, mainly thanks to the club and loin cloth sculpted directly on to it. Usually it just looked like something you righted a too short table leg with.

“Jeff, you still haven’t used your ‘Hunger Frenzy’ ability yet.”

“Right, that.”
The man he had met at the garage, Ted, chuckled to himself. He seemed to have a grasp on FARS gameplay that Jeff lacked. However he hadn’t said more than two sentences at once and his katana wielding character quietly sulked away from anything that didn’t involve combat. Jeff squinted at his character sheet and picked up one of the twenty sided dice. Higher rolls were better, except when they weren’t. He was certain he’d figure it out eventually, especially considering he’d already been in Dan’s basement for two hours.

“Listen, I mean, realistically what has this troll done to me.”
“He’s guarding the amulet.”
That sounded important to Jeff and he vaguely remembered that it came up a few times. Dan had to speak for every character that wasn’t the players but didn’t feel the need to differentiate his voice in any real way. Jeff quickly lost track of who was clearing out barns and who was shattering the boundaries of reality in the game’s story.

“Alright then I just run up and get it.”
“He’s guarding a room that leads to the one that has the amulet in it. It’s not here.”
“Alright can I just sneak around him then?”

“He’ll follow you.”
Jeff glared at the lead troll. He was fairly certain he’d have to make a bunch of dice rolls if the situations were reversed. Sam piped up

“Trolls are a hivemind, right? And since the hivemind is under the sway of Garroth, they’re irredeemable.”
Dan still faced Jeff, though he made a strange face before mumbling a confirmation. Sam seemed to be the only one who actually understand his elaborate take on FARS. At the very least, she could keep track of the seemingly endless elf variants. However Dan seemed to fear Sam, as if her mere presence posed an unacceptable threat to his role as “gamemaster.” Dan’s younger sister spoke for the first time in the game session. It suddenly occurred to Jeff that despite meeting her several times before, she had managed to avoid actually talking to him.

“Then we don’t have to fight them, we just need to talk one out of it to deal with all of them.”
Jeff was relieved that at least someone was on his side.
“Yeah, exactly. I mean he’s not really hurting anyone, he’s spent like the last decade in a cave.”
Sam interjected

“This specific troll might not have but the other trolls have. They’re basically the same entity stretched across a bunch of different bodies.”
“Yes. Sam is right.”
Jeff had never seen Dan so anguished. Nonetheless, he didn’t see a reason for his cartilaginous centaur not to try something other than whacking things with a sword.
“Alright, I’m going to try talking to it.”
Dan made a dice roll behind the screen.
“Your character takes six damage.”
“I didn’t say what I—uh the Rhark was going to tell the troll.”
“It doesn’t matter, he takes advantage of the opening you gave him.”
“I didn’t even speak yet…”
Jeff scribbled a six next to the other numbers gathered on the left hand corner of the sheet. Dan had never got around to explaining how he was supposed to apply the damage he receiving to his character sheet. For now, he just wrote the amounts down until he could figure it out. Ted finally spoke

“I’m going to slice it with my katana. That stacks with the agility bonuses I get for being an Ice Elf.”

Ted didn’t roll so much as drop the dice. It was a twenty, something Jeff was repeatedly told was good. Ted always seemed to roll it. Dan cleared his throat
“In a spray of dark ichor, the troll falls dead.”

Ted looked very pleased with himself. He was the only one at the table who was. Dan shuffled the stack of papers hidden by the screen. He methodically read off of one of them.

“Your party passes through the chamber, having defeated the troll. Now you proceed to the next chamber, faced with a rune inscribed door.”

Another two hours later, the party had killed another troll and the amulet was apparently missing. Or something like that. Ted left immediately and Dan’s sister returned to her room. Sam spoke at length to Dan about the complexities of his take on FARS. He sighed when she finally left. Jeff hoped he could do the same as Dan started gathering the various game materials.

“So, did you enjoy it?”
“As much of it as I understood.”

Dan looked content with that answer. Jeff finally felt relief. The whole Latin classroom ordeal was finally resolved and he could stop feeling guilty about it.

“So, same time next week?”