Halfway Station: Review: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition

"Ayup, the fields are lush round these parts, as it ‘appens. It’s the Pegasi, see. No need to buy manure for fertiliser, it falls from the ‘eavens, like a gift from the gods. Mind, you don’t wanna be standin’ underneath the ‘erds when they fly over. Messy. Very messy." - WFRP4

I have a love-hate relationship with WFRP; I have 1st edition but haven't done more than glance through it, loved 2nd edition, and hated 3rd edition. Where on the spectrum will the Fourth Edition fall? Let's find out...

In a Nutshell: Grimdark clockpunk RPG set in Warhammer's Old World. 352 page PDF from Cubicle Seven Entertainment Ltd, available here for $30 at time of writing.

Published 2018. Good Lord, it's seven years old already. I need to stay in more, or possibly focus more tightly on fewer games. Anyway...

Core Mechanic

When your character tries to do something, roll less than or equal to the relevant characteristic or skill on percentile dice to succeed. If the level of success or failure matters, compare the tens digits of the roll and the characteristic or skill to see how well you did.

At over 350 pages, I can only skim the surface in a single blog post. The chapters are:

Introduction (18 pages): What an RPG is, what kind of RPG this is, dice you need (2d10), how to use the book. An art-heavy introduction to the setting, with different fonts to show which paragraphs are Imperial propaganda and which are more pragmatic assessments.
Character (22 pages): Basics of character generation; species (the usual Tolkienian suspects), class (social class, not character class), career (limited by class), characteristics (more or less the usual, but with the addition of Weapon Skill and Ballistic Skill as befits the Warhammer world, average value is usually 30 or so), motivation (guides roleplaying), skills and talents, trappings (gear, determined by class and career), name (with examples for the various species), physical description, ambitions (you get experience points for achieving these). How advancement works (spend XP to buy better characteristics and skills or change career).
Class and Careers (71 pages): Careers are the backbone of character advancement in WFRP, and here are 64 careers split into 8 major groups by social status. Each career offers different characteristics, skills and talents to buy with your XP at each level; once you have collected the set, you can pay to start a new career, or a new level therein. This chapter also speaks to status; how to maintain it, how people react to it, and so on.
Skills and Talents (32 pages): This chapter details the various skills (specific areas of training) and talents (special abilities - feats, advantages, edges, what have you), and what you can do with them. As usual for WFRP, skills are divided into Basic (which you can use untrained) and advanced (which you cannot). There are almost 50 skills, some of which are 'grouped', meaning they are actually a cluster of skills; for example Language is a grouped skill, with individual languages being effectively specialisations within it. This is the only game I know with a Consume Alcohol skill; that tells you something about the setting. I also liked the Secret Signs skill, covering clandestine markings left by members of various groups. Talents typically allow you to do things like cast spells, reverse the order of dice once rolled, ignoring penalties, inflict extra damage with an attack, and so on. I liked Beneath Notice, which makes those of higher status ignore you, and Well-Prepared, which lets you magically produce a small item you bought earlier. There are a lot more talents than I remember from previous editions, but maybe that is just my memory.
Rules (43 pages): Tests of various kinds; simple, extended, opposed, the usual variants. What would now be considered 'safety tools', but in a concise and manner of fact format. In combat, characters act in descending order of their Initiative characteristic, and can both move and perform an action on their turn; actions typically require a test of some kind, including attacks. If you hit, the hit location is found by reversing the order of the dice, and the damage is the weapon damage plus your success level minus the target's Toughness characteristic and armour. There are two metacurrencies, Fate and Resilience; Fate points let you reroll a failure or improve a success, and can be permanently expended to cheat death; Resilience lets you remove Conditions or ignore critical wounds; in both cases the temporary and permanent versions have different names. Naturally, since this is Warhammer, you can collect Corruption points and win prizes in the form of physical or mental mutations, and suffer from a range of disgusting diseases. Much of this chapter is various combat options and edge cases, and this is also where most of the optional rules live.
Between Adventures (10 pages): This entire chapter is optional, and covers downtime between scenarios. You get a random event, spend money acquired during your latest escapade, and work on an Endeavour, such as consulting an expert, commissioning or crafting an item, investing in a business, studying a mark, fomenting dissent, or training in a skill your career doesn't normally let you learn. At the end of downtime, any money you haven't used disappears in a dramatically appropriate manner.
Religion and Belief (27 pages): Details of the principal human gods; cults, rites and penances, holy sites, strictures. Lesser, provincial gods are touched on but not detailed; the same goes for the religions of the elves, dwarves and halflings. This chapter also includes lists of Blessings (minor acts of clerical magic which are not obvious to most observers) and Miracles (major acts which are entirely obvious), both of which require a suitable talent and a successful Prayer test; different gods grant different blessings and miracles. The descriptions are pleasingly concise.
Magic (30 pages): Descriptions of the Winds of Magic; the eight principal Lores and their Colleges, each attuned to one of the Winds; elven and dark magic, hedgecraft and witchcraft. Then we're into the rules of magic. There are four kinds of spells; petty (simple cantrips), arcane (available to all magicians), lore (specific to one's chosen college), and chaos (available to any who consider their soul a fair price in exchange for dark magic). Casting a spell is a Language (Magic) check, aiming for a Success Level higher than the spell's Casting Number; unusually, a critical success incurs some sort of minor miscasting effect as the spell becomes overpowered. More powerful spells require extended tests, allowing you to gradually build the required Success Level, but a fumble results in a major miscasting effect, which you can also get from circumstances where you would get multiple minor miscastings. Next, various minor rules such as the use of warpstone and grimoires. Finally, a lengthy spell list, whose individual spell descriptions are pleasingly concise. Ones I particularly liked: Produce Small Animal (e.g. rabbit from hat), Protection from Rain (magic umbrella), Mundane Aura (makes caster seem non-magical), Cauterise (fire wizard equivalent of healing, leaves scars).
The Gamemaster (18 pages): General guidance on what the GM does and how to do it, both before and during sessions, and a welcome section on which key rules are especially necessary or helpful; game preparation, notably the first session in which PCs are created. This segues into the travel rules, and rewards - most often XP, rarely Fate and Resilience points.
Glorious Reikland (21 pages): A gazzetteer and timeline for the Reikland, heart of the Old World and the PCs' likely home nation. Connectivity between locations focuses more on rivers and canals, and less on roads, than I remembered, but maybe that's just me. Politics and political positions within the Reikland. A sample estate, that of the Barony of Böhrn. This chapter also includes a number of short adventure seeds.
The Consumers' Guide (22 pages): Coinage, cost of living, counterfeiting and clipping coins (you can tell it's Warhammer, yes?), availability, various kinds of trading and bargaining, item qualities, encumbrance, and finally the trappings (gear) themselves; weapons, armour, containers, clothing, accessories, accomodation, food and drink, tools, documents, transport, poisons, hirelings and so on. While a methodical and extensive list of items, this is as much a chapter of rules relating to equipment as it is to a list of said equipment, making it more interesting for me than normal - as a rule, my eyes glaze over at the equipment chapter of any RPG.
Bestiary (34 pages): A selection of generic 'starter' opponents - NPCs, animals, monsters, and whatever the hell squigs are - with notes on common variants and how to customise them. I am partial to the mixture of horror and dark humour evinced by WFRP monsters, so found this section amusing.

...and we close with a character sheet and an index.

What I Liked

The acknowledgement that we all have our own take on the setting, and the optional rules for tailoring the base game to one's particular vision, including abstracting tracking money and simplifying armour. These are the parts I like best.
Options for both deliberate (I can't really call it point-buy) and random character creation.
Gear determined by other steps of character creation.
How PCs retire from adventuring and the impact on later PCs.
The in-character quotations scattered through the book.
The Small but Vicious Dog is still there as part of the Rat Catcher's trappings! Yay!
The Between Adventures chapter is one of the better approaches I've seen to handling downtime. Nicely done.
The setting, and the NPCs and beasts which inhabit it.

What I Didn't Like

The size and complexity of the character sheet. I prefer it if the whole character can fit on a 3"x5" index card. (That's getting harder as I move to more complex games, but it's still just about doable for my favourites.)
There are a lot of different conditions characters can pick up in combat; I counted a dozen, ranging from Ablaze to Unconscious.
Hit location. I find this generally complicates matters and slows down fights without introducing enough extra fun to be worthwhile. At least in WFRP you don't need a separate dice roll for it.

What I Think

When I first started playing WFRP, several editions ago, I was put off by the gunpowder and skaven everywhere. I've grown used to them over the decades, mind, and now see them as integral parts of the setting. I've become very fond of the setting over the course of multiple campaigns played in it.

The short and long term ambitions would lend themselves well to solo play as they are effectively plot threads and the spines of story arcs. Some of the talents are highly entertaining, and I might purloin them for use as SWADE Edges.

Overall, the two defining characteristics of WFRP remain; the extended minigame of navigating the web of careers to get the PC you want despite where you started off, and wizards casting gradually riskier spells until eventually they blow themselves up. Good times.

I like this one; it has a very similar look and feel to WFRP2. I'd definitely play it, and would consider running it.