Designer’s Notes
d esIgner ’ s n oTes
T here’s only one RPG for which I can tell you the exact date I first gave it a try: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay . I was a freshman at New York University. For some reason, I had gotten it into my head that I’d stop gaming once I got to college. Finding a good group of people can be a challenge and I was more interested in the NY punk scene than trying to locate gamers. Luckily for me, I practically tripped over NYU’s nascent game club. I was returning to my dorm after a punk show at CBGBs and there in the common room were about a dozen people roleplaying. I watched them for a bit and when there was a break in the game, I introduced myself; by the next week I had joined the Society for Strategic Gaming. We played various RPG and board games that fall and at semester’s end most everyone went home for the holidays. A few of us were left in the nearly vacant dorm and we were looking for something to do. Dave had gotten a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and the first installment of the Enemy Within Campaign , so we decided to try it out. Pat, Gene, and I made two characters each and we played all evening long. It was December 23, 1987. I know that because I still have the character sheets for those adventurers, faded photocopies with rusting staples holding them together. On the back of my Elf Outrider, I started writing down amusing quotes from our sessions. The page starts with this notation: 12/23 the first session . The game was an instant hit. When the rest of the group got back from Xmas, we told them they just had to try it. Soon the whole club had the WFRP bug. We usually met once a week on Sunday nights in Hayden Hall, but soon we were playing extra sessions during the week. There were several occasions when members skipped studying for important tests or blew off doing term papers so we could play more Warhammer. I can’t really speak for the rest of the group, but fate ultimately proved I made the right choice. After all, 16 years later I got the amazing opportunity to design the second edition of what was still one of my favorite RPGs of all time. You hold the results of that effort in your hands. — a f aTeful m eeTIng — I t turns out December is a good month for WFRP and me. On December 11, 2003 I was attending GenCon SoCal with my company, Green Ronin Publishing. That evening we had a meeting with Marc Gascoigne of BL Publishing and Simon Butler, the newly appointed head of Black Industries. This meeting was the culmination of two years of negotiations with Games Workshop. After about an hour of conversation and questions, Simon said, “We’d like to work with you.” And that’s when this process really began. A month later we were whisked off to Nottingham for a week of meetings at GW headquarters. We mapped out a strategy, a process, and a schedule. We met with key people like Alan Merrett and John Blanche. We got to know Simon (another old punk, as it turned out) a lot better. By February I was back in the States with the most important job I’d ever had in the game industry staring me in the face. Now that the fate of WFRP was mine to influence, what exactly was I going to do? — f IrsT s Teps — I n some sense, the first decision was the easiest. Do we update the old rules and just throw everything out and start again? I knew right away that I wanted to keep key elements of the original game, the career system in particular, so from the beginning it was a matter of updating and streamlining more than starting from scratch. The only thing I wanted to jettison outright was the old magic system. That had always been meant as a stopgap, but somehow it was a stopgap that lasted for nearly two decades. WFRP fans had long been dissatisfied with it and a much clearer picture of what Warhammer magic was all about had developed over the years in the miniatures game, books, and novels. I wanted to create a magic system that reflected Warhammer magic properly, one that made it perfectly clear when you used magic you were manipulating nothing less than Chaos energy (with all that implies). I sketched out and rejected several different ideas before coming up with the system now in place. The new rules are, as one playtester put it, “Faustian” and that’s exactly what we were striving for. There’s power to be had, but when Chaos is involved, nothing is certain. But now I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The first two things I tackled were Characteristics and Skills. The old stat line had quite a few Characteristics derived from the minis game of the era (such as Initiative and Leadership) that seemed either unnecessary or redundant. I streamlined those down to the Profile you see now. I also added in things like Insanity Points and Fate Points to the Profile, so all the key numbers for a character could be taken in at a glance.
Skills were the next challenge. The original game had quite a large number of skills, except many of them (like Fleet Footed and Very Strong) weren’t really skills at all. They were more like special abilities. To make things more clear, I decided to break them out into two categories: skills and talents. I was able to fold the standard tests into the skills, so everything would work the same way and with the same rules. I also added rules for Skill Mastery because the original system was binary (you either had a skill or you didn’t) and the only way to get better at a skill was
to increase your Characteristic. It’s now possible to be an excellent Navigator, for example, without having Einstein’s IQ.
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