Honestly, we were a little shocked when Modiphius announced it was making a Wolfenstein tabletop RPG. Captivating though the videogames’ gallows satire and rabid gunplay are, it’s not an experience that seems easily transplanted to dice driven, tabletop story crafting.
After we caught up with the game’s lead designer, Evie Moriarty, at last week’s UK Games Expo, however, two things became clear. First, the team is deeply enamored with the source material. And, second, they’re gleefully focusing their gameplay on one thing: “mowing down hordes of nazis”. If nothing else, they know their target audience.
Moriarty – best known to us as lead designer on the excellent skirmish wargame Fallout Factions – admits she isn’t a lifelong fan of the Wolfenstein games. But she’s spent several enjoyable months diving into their bombastic, butt-kicking parallel histories for this RPG, and it shows.
“For me, there is this really interesting balance between ludicrousness and vicious satire that works really well,” she tells Wargamer. “It also has its head screwed on in terms of the treatment of the nazis and fascism – for a game that’s mostly about a very large, wide man killing things, remarkably, they really nail it.”
We won’t all be playing as B.J. Blaskowicz (Wolfenstein’s iconic human truck of a frontman), but capturing his on-screen essence has, rightly, clearly been a focus. “It’s a running joke in the studio where we were trying to explain to people who don’t play the games who the main character, Blaskowicz, is”, says Moriarty.
“The answer”, she explains, is that “he’s just the widest man in every scene he is in – not necessarily the tallest, not necessarily the coolest, not necessarily the most handsome, but always the widest. And he uses that wideness to great effect”. Oddly profound, that, we thought.
But a successful Wolfenstein RPG needs more than wry enjoyment of the series’ cartoonish protagonist. It needs rules and gameplay that faithfully adapt the videogames’ iconic formula: a mix of blood-soaked, bullet-spraying chaos, brutal stealth executions, and suicidal death-charges into crowds of unsuspecting cyber-fascists. For that, Moriarty tells us, Modiphius’ trademark 2D20 roleplaying system needed some careful reworking.
“I wanted to not just rest on our laurels and just do the same thing,” she says. “I wanted to take what was awesome and cool about 2D20 and then work out ways of tweaking it, enhancing it, honing it down to its very core in order to be as punchy and as direct as possible – because that’s what Wolfenstein is, right?”
A game about killing nazis
First and foremost, Moriarty and her team needed to absolutely nail the fighting. “Wolfenstein’s a game about killing nazis,” she tells us, “so there’s a lot of work put into the combat system to really make it punchy, fun, and arcade-y, and give a lot more tactical options that are easy to grasp”.
“We wanted combat to be as it was in the videogames, like 70% of the experience,” she adds. “You should be going ‘oh, hell yeah, we got a combat now’; that should be a point of excitement. And so we had to do a huge amount of work to really overhaul, tweak, and enhance that combat system.”
The main ingredient is the Stances system, intended to mimic videogame Blaskowicz’ fluid transitions from sneaky, to expert soldiering, to manic, all-or-nothing kill frenzy. “At the start of each turn you choose to be in mayhem, tactical, or stealth stance”, Moriarty says, “which reflects some of the choices in the game”.
“Mayhem is really good at running around fast, shooting people in the face, spraying bullets widely. Tactical is more about focus, taking cover, taking precise shots. Stealth is about blending into the background, doing takedowns and stuff – and you fluidly move between these.”
“Some characters do better and worse in different stances”, says Moriarty, “but ultimately every character is going to be in every stance some of the time”. Picking a stance is intended to be a quick, but satisfying tactical choice every turn, she adds. “It’s very open, very simple, it’s just three options, but they have such a dramatic impact on what you do.”
The 2D20 system’s core player resources – Momentum and Threat – also needed a re-tune, Moriarty says. “They’re there to be this kind of narrative tool that’s very expansive and quite loose,” she explains, but “for Wolfenstein, that’s not right; for Wolfenstein it should be direct, you should know what you’re doing at every step”.
So in this game, says Moriarty, “threat is earned in very specific ways, momentum is earned in very specific ways, and it’s spent in very specific ways. As the GM, you can only spend threat to do very specific things, and you’re often prompted to do it.” It sounds more limiting, perhaps, than Modiphius’ other 2D20 adaptations – but, as every storyteller knows, limits can be powerful and freeing when they’re applied conscientiously.
“It’s not a radical departure,” she says, “but it’s a lot of small changes that produce a very different feel… it’s much faster, it’s much more directly action”.
Joining the Resistance
So we know what we’ll be doing in the Wolfenstein tabletop RPG – but who will we be while we’re doing it? Moriarty hasn’t revealed the whole picture yet – but she gives us some detail on how we’ll create our Resistance fighters.
The game “isn’t class-based, strictly”, Moriarty says. “Instead, what you’ll do is you’ll choose a Role – which is like what you do in the resistance, generally – and then an Approach, which is how you kill nazis.”
“So you might, for instance, be a scout sniper, or you could be a heart bruiser. These two halves sort of slot together, and that’s what creates your character archetype,” she adds. “Each of those gives you a Talent that you start with… and we’ve made those starting talents really big and impactful.”
“For instance,” she says, “one of the talents for the Ghost is that, at any point in the session, once a session, you can go ‘I disappear’, and your character is entirely removed from the game; you’re gone.
“And then, at any time, you can say: ‘I’m here now, I’m back’, and you are placed back into the scene – no matter what’s happening – through a mechanism, like you drop out of a vent or you appear behind someone, and that’s very narratively powerful.”
Managing those big, thematic powers does create some “more burden on the GM”, Moriarty concedes – but she says “we’ve anticipated that”, and consequently made the RPG’s GM guide as thick as B.J. is wide.
“This is the biggest GM handbook we’ve ever written,” says Moriarty proudly. “It’s packed with tens of thousands of words of advice and tools, and modular things to like build adventures, encounters, and everything. Every event we’re writing has these prompts of: ‘here’s how we deal with this’.”
Making a game in a nazi America
Unsurprisingly, Moriarty tells us adapting a 45-year-old first person shooter videogame series into a tabletop roleplaying game involved “immense amounts” of world-building work. “I love the games, but the games are, effectively, very direct, down-the-line shooters,” she says. “The world building is very tangential, or in the form of found documents and stuff.”
But she’s confident in the job they’ve done, and are doing, climbing that mountain. “We filled out an enormous amount of background information here, and really fleshed that world out in a way I think people find really becoming,” she says. Machine Games – developer of the current run of Wolfenstein videogames – has “signed off on the vibe and intent”, she adds.
Naturally, Moriarty is conscious of the inevitable connotations between Wolfenstein’s fictional, Third Reich-controlled USA, and the worrying turn towards fascist politics and authoritarian government in the real America of 2026. “We can see recurrences and we can see echoes in various forces and things in the world,” she says. “I’m a big lover of history and these things are not one-off occurrences.”
But when it comes to creating the TTRPG, her firm line is that exploring the Wolfenstein games’ specific alternate-history source material is more valuable than any potential satire on the current American administration.
“It’s a difficult line to walk,” she tells us, “because on the one hand, obviously these games are fiction, and it’s about a world where the nazis won the Second World War, and you’re fighting to liberate America from the literal nazis”.
“But, at the same time, there are unique, specific things about nazism and the nazi movement, and I think playing with those specifically is interesting in of itself.” That, it’s worth noting, is something publisher Modiphius has form doing: one of its early breakout games, Achtung! Cthulhu, is a prominent modern entry in the ‘weird war two’ genre.
“I know there’s going to be a push for us to make sweeping comparisons to the world,” says Moriarty, “and people can make whatever they want”.
“But from our perspective as creatives,” she says, “the question of what an actually nazi America – as in, like, an actual 1940s nazi America – actually looks like is genuinely compelling, interesting, and unlike anything in the room”.
From what we’ve heard, at least, this game certainly has potential to be unlike anything in the room. But to find out for sure, we’ll have to wait a bit. The Wolfenstein tabletop RPG is scheduled to start crowdfunding on Kickstarter in Fall 2026, meaning we can expect it to ship to backers sometime next year and get to retail a little after that. In the meantime, we’ll just have to get down to the gym and work on those lats. One day, maybe, we’ll be as wide as B.J.
If you’re curious about the Wolfenstein TTRPG, your best choice to get more info is to join the free Wargamer Discord community – Moriarty herself is one of a fair few game designers who hang out in our nerd treehouse, and while she’s probably far too professional to give away any Resistance Secrets, you never know…
Interview by Mollie Russell at UK Games Expo 2026; words by Alex Evans.
Source: Wargamer
