Designer’s Notes
Skill Mastery was important for another reason: I wanted to slow down the rate of advancement. One common criticism of the old rules was eventually every non-spellcasting character became a warrior. I didn’t want characters blowing through three careers quickly and then running out of options. With Skill Mastery, going into multiple careers with the same skill became a bonus. I also decided to make advances on the Main Profile come in 5% increments instead of 10%. Thus not only it harder to zip through a career, it also allowed me more flexibility in designing the careers. Another old WFRP saw was so-called “naked Dwarf syndrome.” The basic problem here—certain Dwarf characters in the original rules were tougher unarmoured than humans in plate mail—was easy enough to fix. I just made armour more effective and kept an eye on the Toughness advances of key careers. This worked hand in hand with the streamlining of dice use. The old game used all the different polyhedral dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20) for reasons that had more to do with history than good design. I wanted to try a design using only d10s and the change in armour worked quite well with that idea. Now Dwarf Slayers are tough, and rightfully so, but they are not 4’ tall tanks anymore. — T he h earT of wfrp — T o me, the career system has always been the heart of WFRP and I definitely wanted to preserve that. However, I had seen my share of problems with the original system. You had some careers, like Roadwarden, that only had one skill, while others, like the Outlaw, could have up to 15. While I did want a character’s Starting Career to be at fate’s whim (hence the random roll), I didn’t want some careers to be blatantly awful. It’s no fun to be the guy playing the useless character, who only gets to watch the other players have all the fun. To that end, I tried to make the Basic Careers similar in the number of advances, skills, and talents they had. There remains a great deal of difference between them, but now you know every Starting Career has at least some redeeming features. With the Advanced Careers, I want to create distinct paths that could be used with different styles of play. Now, for example, there’s a Master Thief career young cutpurses can aspire to. Or if politics is your thing, you can become a Courtier or a Guild Master. The Warhammer World may be grim, but that doesn’t mean every campaign is going to be about fighting. I wanted the careers to support a broad array of character types. I also wanted to show off a bit of the other cultures, which is why there’s at least one career keyed to each core race and nation of the Old World. This book is definitely Empire-focused, but I wanted new players in particular to get a sense of the wider world. Setting, of course, is absolutely crucial to WFRP so we had to make some hard decisions early on about how much to cover in the core book. Although reviewers rarely admit it, we do not have an infinite amount of time and space to spend on each book. We knew when we started that this one was going to be 256 pages. It thus made sense to make the core of WFRP the Empire. Future books will, of course, flesh out other nations and races. The real challenge was to get the tone right. Of course, there are literally thousands of people with different ideas of what is “true” about the Old World. We tried to evoke the setting not just with rules, but also with fiction, art, and graphic design. John Blanche was particularly helpful here, providing much inspirational reference from both the real world and other Warhammer projects. We were also lucky to get the talented Dan Abnett to do the opening fiction piece. That really kicks the book off with the right mood and sense of place. — p ullIng I T a ll T ogeTher — T hey say that in war no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The same can be said of game designs and playtesters. What’s in your head is never as clearly explained as you might like to think and some things that seem like good ideas on paper just don’t work out in play. Thus the playtest process was key to getting WFRP into the shape it’s in now. Our response to the open call was amazing, with groups the world over getting involved. There were also many internal groups at Green Ronin and Games Workshop. As you can tell from the playtester credits in the book, we had quite a lot of help in getting it right. The development stage of the book was also where our relationship with Black Industries really blossomed. Simon Butler, Ewan Lamont, and Kate Flack were all key in making the book gel and we’ve developed an excellent working partnership. Which isn’t to say that we always agree, but our vigorous debates helped make sure that game was one we could all be proud of. Once Hal Mangold, Green Ronin’s Art Director and primary graphic designer, started putting together PDFs of the nearly finished book, we could really see how all the elements were working together. — T he o nCe and f uTure wfrp — I t is now December 13, 2004 and we are less than a week from going to print. December strikes again! I have a real feeling of accomplishment, but I’m afraid there’s no time to get all teary-eyed. I am already deep into work on follow-up products for the WFRP line. Now in the past WFRP has not been the best supported RPG out there, but things are about to change. You should see at least 8 WFRP books per year. By this time next year there’ll be as many new books done as were released in the previous decade. That means there’s never been a better time to be a WFRP fan. I hope you enjoy this game. More than that, I hope you play it. The Old World has a lot to offer and we’re just getting started. Chris Pramas Green Ronin Publishing December 13, 2004
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