How do you create a new roleplaying game set in Warhammer’s Old World, when Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying has done such an excellent job with the setting already? That was the challenge facing the team at Cubicle 7 when they began work on the new Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game, a title set in the same world of grim and perilous adventure as WFRP, but 250 years earlier.
CEO Dominic McDowall-Thomas and senior producer Pádraig Murphy explained their vision for the game in an exclusive interview with Wargamer. The launch of Warhammer: The Old World RPG is “getting pretty damn close now”, Murphy says, though the team can’t quite commit to a date. The line will open with a player’s handbook and a GM’s guide very close together – welcome news after the drawn out DnD release schedule – followed later by a starter set and GM’s screen.
Over the course of our conversation, the pair set out their vision for the game. There’s going to be a blend of familiar Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay motifs with a novel ruleset, and a particularly grounded sense of place, which they hope will make it easier than ever for newcomers and old hands alike to start roleplaying in this gritty, grimdark world.
Murphy calls the Old World itself “the star of the show”. For him, the setting is “what calls out, even when all the dice have been forgotten: you want to go back to the Old World and you want to experience that sort of grim and gloriously bloody setting”. If you’re unfamiliar, think of it as a fantasy version of renaissance Europe with a hidden world of Lovecraftian cults gnawing away at the veneer of civilization.
The Old World time period is the current version of the Warhammer setting that license-owner Games Workshop is supporting with new rules and models. As a much newer version of the world, it has far less content than the older Warhammer fantasy setting: less of the map has been filled in, and the lore is far less established.
This all means that players will come to the Old World fresh, whether they’re brand new to the setting or grizzled WFRP veterans. The quest to get players grounded in the setting as fast as possible underlies many design decisions that Cubicle 7 has made which differentiate The Old World RPG from WFRP. The most obvious is a totally new rules system.
The rules
The Old World RPG abandons WFRP’s venerable D100 dice system. “I love the D100 system, but all game systems have their peculiarities”, McDowall says, “and I think a degree of complexity comes with D100”. Early in development he and Murphy spent a long time looking for a dice system that was “quick to get your head around”, so people could “understand what was going on and be able to use it as easily as possible”.
The pair settled on a D10 dice pool system. A character’s statline will actually be very similar to WFRP, with familiar values like Strength, Toughness, Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, and so on. It’s close enough that Murphy promises a conversion system that will let you move characters between the two games – typically, you just need to put a zero onto the end of an Old World RPG character to move it into WFRP. Stats will even be compatible with the Old World miniature wargame.
Skill checks will be simple to resolve. “The characteristic is the number of dice that you’re rolling in your pool”, McDowall says, “and the [character’s] skill is your target number”. Murphy adds “we’ve got a much smaller skill list” than WFRP, “less than 20 skills” – though they will be familiar to WFRP players.
“It just gets you rolling dice and counting successes”, Murphy says. Players can quickly determine for themselves “I did the thing, or I did it really well, or I didn’t do it at all”. It’s a big break from WFRP, but as he says, “WFRP exists, and continues to exist – we didn’t need to make it again”.
It’s a simple enough core rules system, one that’s designed to shut up and get out of the way, and rolling big handfuls of dice is certainly on theme for a Warhammer game. But being simpler than WFRP doesn’t mean that The Old World is dumbed down. For a start, combat is going to hurt.
Combat
Combat is “one of the things that we’ve kicked around for a long time”, McDowall says. It was a really key element for the team to reflect the themes of the game in the mechanics, set the tone and establish the world the characters live in. The resulting system puts more weight on storytelling than number crunching, where combat is brutal and the risks aren’t always clear.
“We looked at all the stuff that we liked in WFRP’s combat and tried to build on it”, Murphy says, “so you’re still dealing with opposed rolls” where both the attacker and their opponent will roll dice, “with ties going to the attacker in most cases”.
Whether you’re rolling to strike or parry, “when you get hit the first time, you’re staggered, you’re on the back foot”. Your characters are “competent, but pretty much ordinary people”, and they don’t have a stash of hitpoints or wounds to protect them. Should you be staggered and then staggered again, “in most cases that leads to an injury”.
That means rolling on an injury table, similar to the luxurious critical hit charts in WFRP: teeth go flying, skulls are cracked, and limbs come off with sprays of claret. If you’re already carrying injuries and get injured again, “you roll more dice on the injury table”, Murphy says, which of course means “you get worse injuries”.
McDowall expands on this: “for a gritty game, [health] shouldn’t be a quota of hits you can take and then your character’s dead – if you get hit, you feel it, but there’s no artificial limits to how many bruises you can take”. “There’s always a chance you’re going to be okay and it’s just a bloodied face”, Murphy adds, “but as you throw in more D10 to this injury table, you’re very quickly getting towards these grim and grizzly amputations, decapitations, and death”.
“As a player, you’ve got the choice of eyeballing that and deciding where your risk appetite is, how far you’re going to push it with your character”, McDowall says. But you won’t have the false certainty of hitpoints to guide you – just a growing list of all the terrible things that have happened to your character.
Your connection to the world
More so than any of the other Warhammer RPGs that Cubicle 7 makes, The Old World campaigns have a very strong tie to a specific location. If you’re playing the game out of the core rulebooks, that will be Talagaad, a town near the mountain-ringed city of Talabheim in the centre of the Empire of Man.
“One of the steps of character creation is to roll on some tables to see who your contacts are within the town of Talagaad”, Murphy explains. These contacts are “are all Talagaad specific people, NPCs with their own goals and agendas and connections to each other”.
McDowall says “we wanted to make sure that people had, right in front of them, ways that they could get involved with the game straight away without having a lot of existing knowledge”. Murphy recalls that during playtesting, as soon as players knew the premise of the scenario and were off the leash, “the first thing everyone [did was] say ‘I want to talk to my contact, I know the local Kizlevite gang boss, he definitely knows something about this’”.
There’s a parallel to the RPG Blades in the Dark, a game of criminal hijinks which gives every player a starting contact and the mapped out city of Duskvol to interfere with. Blades has a pretty much permanent spot on our guide to the best tabletop RPGs, but it does rely on the players and GM alike having ready access to information about a whole interconnected city, which makes it a real challenge for a GM to shift the action to a new location.
Apparently, The Old World isn’t quite so tightly bound to Talagaad. McDowall says that during development, the team recognised that “the best way of explaining the system was with a complete worked example of our setting”. But “it’s tagged so that if you want to create your own setting then it’s really easy for you to do that”.
The players’ contacts “all have an archetype”, Murphy says, “there’s a noble, there’s a heretic”, and so on. If you want to run a game in Nuln or Marienburg or anywhere else, “a GM who knows what they’re doing can make up these 20 contacts and they’ll immediately have a framework for a really intriguing game that will tie their players to that setting”.
And as you can see from the character art, there are options for creating a wide variety of characters: a Bretonnian Knight Exile, a Halfling, Imperial Dwarf have all already been shown off.
Player characters will also have more practical connections to the starting town throughout the campaign, whether that’s Talagaad or a setting brewed up by the GM. This starts with the choice of career for the character. The careers list isn’t quite as broad as the 64 available in WFRP, but sits at a still-respectable 30 or so – and yes, rat catcher is still there.
“In WFRP you start in a career and then, very quickly, after a few adventures your career is now ‘adventurer’ in one form or another”, Murphy says. “That’s fine, that’s a focus of the game, but we wanted to take our careers and make sure that they remained quite relevant for a while”. As well as the inevitable adventuring you’ll get up to, your character will continue to develop a life as a rat catcher, wizard, or whatever else.
Careers come with assets, be they “your farm and two acres that you’re trying to feed your family off”, an alchemist’s shop, or the rat catcher’s small but vicious terrier. They’re a source of strength for your character. But as anyone who has watched John Wick knows, having something you care about also means having something you can lose. Which brings us to probably the most interesting part of the new RPG.
Grim Portents
The era that The Old World RPG is set in “is as close to a gilded era as the Warhammer world gets” McDowall says. The powers of chaos are at their lowest ebb, and though the Empire of Man has no single ruler, it has yet to suffer the catastrophic damage of Asavar Kul’s reality warping invasion, which lurks not far off in the future.
Murphy expands: this is an “era where all the little powder kegs are being stocked and everything is being piled up high and no one seems aware that there’s a spark that could set all this off”.
“We were thinking about what that would feel like, where adventure would come from”, McDowall continues. All the horrors of the Old World are there, but they’re “having to be a lot more careful, to move more slowly, working through others and sending out their tendrils”.
What if “as an ordinary citizen of the old world, you stumbled across something, something that couldn’t afford you shining a light on its dark activities”? Something that, once you know it exists, will make your life a living hell. That’s the Grim Portent, the BBEG of your Old World RPG campaign.
“You’ve seen something, it’s seen you, and it is never going to rest while you still draw breath”, McDowall says. Unless the characters “lie down and die, they’ve got to oppose this, and they’ve got to be very active in doing so to have a chance of surviving”.
Murphy says that early readers have likened the setup to thrillers and folk horror, and we can see how that fits. The players find the edges of a deadly conspiracy, or a Thing That Shouldn’t Be, and their only hope for survival is to learn more about it and fight back as best they can. And as in all good thrillers, the more they fight back, the more they make themselves a target…
The GM Guide contains several Grim Portents for Talagaad, and the networks that they operate through. “When we were looking at how it would all fit together, we wanted to have really intertwined plots”, Murphy says, “something that feels like a living breathing world”.
Multiple antagonists could be trying to manipulate the same groups. “Maybe in the university you’ve got scholars studying away at the lore of Khemri”: one faction might be speeding up their research to expose them to a particular arcane secret, while “a completely other enemy faction is shaking them down for artifacts to sell to the highest bidder through a criminal network”. As the players delve into one conspiracy, they uncover another – and a new big bad that’s going to make them suffer.
The Grim Portent should also make this an easy campaign to launch. “You don’t need to get the players to engage with a plot or an adventure because the adventure is coming for them, they don’t really have a choice in the matter!” McDowall jokes. Your character’s assets and contacts are all vulnerabilities that enemy forces can use to hurt them: your farm could be sacked, shop vandalised, or vicious terrier John Wicked.
There’s no question of how the party will know one another, either: discovering the Grim Portent is effectively a session zero. “Even if the players were feeling that their characters wouldn’t necessarily know each other beforehand, by the end of session zero they do”, McDowall says, “they faced a common threat and they’re in this awful situation together”.
Reader, we are eager for this one. WFRP has been ticking along nicely under Cubicle 7’s stewardship, editor Alex has been playing in an Age of Sigmar: Soulbound campaign for years, and the campaign of Warhammer 40k RPG Imperium Maledictum I ran last year is one of the highlights of my GM career – the studio has a good track record, albeit a slower pace of releases than we might want.
Hopefully we’ll have more to say about this soon. We were lucky enough to play a preview session of Imperium Maledictum, GM’d by Murphy, before it launched – as soon as we’re able to test The Old World RPG, we’ll let you know what we think.
Source: Wargamer
