Warhammer RPG 3rd Ed articles

I really enjoy the Warhammer Fantasy setting. It's a rich setting, much darker than your typical RPG fantasy world, with a cruel sense of humor and potentially disfiguring critical hits. The main influences on the setting are probably the historical Holy Roman Empire, the Film Noir genre, and Monty Python And The Holy Grail. I love the 3rd Edition, because it features some very clever and unique mechanics, but I simultaneously kinda hate it because those same mechanics clearly weren't playtested enough before release.

I've spent a lot of time blogging about the game, and making new content for it. It's about time I make a giant index linking to all of it:

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New Cards:

Player-ready cards:

• Social Actions for a variety of different situations and character concepts
• Racial ability cards so you have all the rules for your PC's night vision and Grudge right there at your finger tips.
• 4 new Ranald blessings converted loosely from 2nd Ed.
• 4 new Bright Order spells converted loosely from 2nd Ed.
• Simpler Horse - a house ruled version of the horse rules, so they aren't such a terrible liability for knights. 
• Bodyguard and Charcoal Burner careers converted from 2nd Ed. Warning: bad art and not so great card design.
• 4 Condition Cards that should have been in the main game, but weren't.

NPC & GM-Only Cards:

• NPC Social Talents for use spicing up Social Encounters.
• Orc Talents and racial ability reminder cards.
• Misc. NPC Talents for a variety of scene and NPC types.
• Fast, Swift, or Speedy are 3 different ways to handle fast-moving enemies.
• Pilgrimage of Fingers secret society sheet and membership ability cards.
• Dwarf  "Monster Group" Card and Dwarven Ruffian NPC Stat card.
• Hurl Poison Globe, a new action card for Skaven Poison Wind Globadiers.
• Push Them Off The Pier  a very specific NPC action for a scene on the docks.
• Monster Keywords whose explanations were foolishly omitted from some creature cards in the Creature Vault, here laid out like Talent cards.
• Tannery Location Card (buried in the middle of the post).
• Von Kaufman Patronage card for use with The Enemy Within.
• Middenheim NPC cards for use with 3rd Ed's version of The Enemy Within. 
• Witch-Hunter's Court organization card for use with The Enemy Within (buried in the middle of the post).
• Realms of Chaos cards reminder cards for vital elements the optional epilogue to The Enemy Within.
• The Missing Stuffed Crocodile Stats  from Book 4 of The Enemy Within

Strange Eons is the program I used to make most of the above cards. This post talks about it, but weirdly all the image links are broken. Hmm....

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Dice Analysis:

I spent a lot of time analyzing the dice of this game, and making cute little charts. The big surprise? Red dice suck more than you expect. Purple dice don't suck as much as you think they do. The numbers don't lie.

• Black and White do not cancel out.
• Purple Is The Two Black and Two By Three try to pin down the purple dice. Are they worth 2 or 3 black dice each?
• Troll-Feller Strike analyzed in both stances.
• Stance Matters
• Balancing Delay vs Exertion , how the GM is the final determiner of whether green or red is better.

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House Rules and Miscellaneous Thoughts:

• Brainstorming about Observation checks and how to avoid spoiling your mysteries before the players even roll.
• Core Clues an older post on how to use Gumshoe's style of clue-finding in Warhammer.
• Magical Sight - thoughts on how to make it a little more flavorful and interesting.
• Simpler Horse - a house ruled version of the horse rules, so they aren't such a terrible liability for knights.
• Simpler Healing Rules written before the Player's Guide patched one of the major flaws with the original rules.
• Here's how bad the original healing rules sucked.
• Mandatory Career Completion is a house-rule to fix a problem with the game. The Player's Guide eventually came up with a half-hearted fix for the problem as well, but I think my solution is probably healthier for the game.
• Opposed Checks House Rule - I used this for a couple of one-shots a few years ago,  and lately wish I'd implemented it for my ongoing campaign.
• Ideas towards a Warhammer Lite 
• Balancing Delay vs Exertion , how the GM is the final determiner of whether green or red is better.
• Actions Wanted was an early brainstorming session of cards I felt the game could use. I might still make some of these one day.
• Character Creation is more complicated than it needs to be.
• The most generous running rules in gaming history.
• 2nd Ed had a better career system.
• Opposed to Proposed Opposed and Munchkin Opposition in which I dissect a common house-rule, and in the process figure out the really good reason why Opposed Checks work the weird way they do in WFRP3.

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Product Reviews and Analysis:

What's New In These Reprints?

• Page-by-page analysis of the Creature Guide.
• Page-by-page analysis of the Player's Guide, and a blurb about the most important new rule it brought to the game.
• Page-by-page analysis of the WFRP Gamemaster's Guide.

In a nutshell: The Creature Guide is really worth buying for all GM's, the Player's Guide is over-priced but features critical bug fixes that make it grudgingly worth it to both GMs and players, but the GM's Guide is a terrible waste of money and should be avoided.

First & Last Impressions

• The Hundred Dollar RPG was my first impression of the game in hand, but as yet unplayed. 
• My first actual play report which is still fairly review-y. 
• The End of Warhammer 3rd, a post-mortem review of the things I loved and hated about this edition of the game, from the vantage point of the day they announced it was being retired.
• Nit-picking and praising The Enemy Within Part 1 and Part 2

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The Enemy Within Campaign Logs:

I've run The (New) Enemy Within for well over a year now. Early on, I was making detailed posts about the plot developments. Eventually, I gave up on blogging it, mostly because it's hard to chronicle a mystery plot as GM without accidentally spoiling the mysteries.

• Enemy Within Character Creation
• Enemy Within, Session 1
• Enemy Within, Session 2
• Enemy Within, Session 3, Part One and  Part Two.
• Enemy Within Session 4.
• Enemy Within Session 5.
• Half-Dead, in which the PCs have to kill the mother of one of their own. Repeatedly.
• Von Kaufman Patronage card for use with The Enemy Within.
• The last session of Book 3.
• Final Thoughts and Advice on The Enemy Within:
•  GMs should play up the humor, not the grimdark.
• Books Two and Four need some work.

GM's looking to run The Enemy Within will find many useful tools in the "NPC & GM-only Cards" section near the top of this page.

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Warhammer Hybrids:

Here's where I steal individual mechanics out of Warhammer, to build entire other games from them.

• Ideas towards a Warhammer Lite  
• Wham Trek was Snits and Awful Green Things using warhammer dice. It was weird. 
• Boons and Banes for other systems - using a single customized blank d20 to capture the feel of this whole subsystem and port it over into any other game you'd like.

Everhammer

• Everhammer full rules is a game of Everway using Warhammer 3rd's dice and crits.
• Everhammer 2nd Session Report
• Everhammer Rough Draft - the initial germ of the idea.