Myth vs GD vs SoB part 4: Game-Length and Pacing

This is the fourth post in an 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and in this post I'll examine how they compare on issues of game-length and pacing.

 Link to first post in series.

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Game-Length

If time is an issue, Myth can accommodate you. One of the main game play modes in Myth allows the players to control precisely how long the game will last. Convenient stopping points pop up about every twenty minutes when "free-questing", and you’ll never have to worry about leaving the board set up till next time. The other two game modes (Story quests and Slaughterfield) are much less flexible than this, but Stories are organized into discrete Acts of reasonably predictable game length. 3 hours will give you a very respectable play session, and if you know going in that you’ve got a tighter deadline you can free-quest instead.

GD’s average session length is shorter, but beyond your control. Often the exact number of turns the game will last is dictated by the scenario. Each scenario has a listed duration (usually around an hour). The scenarios I've played took longer than listed, but we were still learning the game and that probably slowed us down.  The short play-times don't count set-up time, which could be an issue.  If you run out of time, it would be a horrendous chore to record the board position to pick it up again later. If time is short and you can’t leave the table set-up until next time, GD could be prove problematic.

I’ve only played Shadows of Brimstone once, so I don’t really know how long it will take on average. Our demo was a very satisfying game experience in a couple hours. You can certainly tweak decks and tokens to speed things up, but it’ll be tricky to do so on the fly and would probably feel more like cheating than comparable decisions do in Myth. On the other hand, stopping points (pauses without monsters in play) occur every five minutes, easy. You could wrap up for the night at any of those pauses. It would complicate campaign play and require some note-taking if you didn't want to just start over at square one next time, but it's doable.

And The Winner Is:  Galaxy Defenders wins for now, though I'd originally called it a tie between GD and Myth. Shadows may well beat them both when it comes out, if the missions and campaign system is no more complicated than what I could see in the demo.

In theory, Myth features the most flexibility to wrap up early without headaches or hassles... except for when poor Lair placement or a multi-wave Quest suddenly bogs the game down. The biggest time-sink/pitfall is in Lair placement and/or failing to prioritize the destruction of a Lair.  If you ignore the Lairs entirely, they will s...l...o...w...l...y wear you down. Once you've learned that lesson it's easy to avoid, but it takes 2 or 3 hours to learn it in the first place.

Ultimately, game length matters most if the game runs out of steam or fails to engross you for its whole length, so perhaps we should talk about pacing...

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Pacing

Myth scores highly on the twin-axes of play speed and player interaction, which are usually at cross-purposes to one another in other (especially competitive) game designs. "Turns" are quite short, and you almost never have to wait for anyone. There’s a bit of a learning curve where your first couple Hero Cycles will seem longer since you’ve never read the cards before, but by the end of the first session you’ll be chugging along at top speed. Group attacks and area effects resolve remarkably fast. Heroes can mow down scores of minions with a single die roll (as minions always have a single hit-point). It feels very epic, and requires very little “memory” or tracking of variable NPC stats. The turn structure is a little complicated, but cards stay out as a marker of who's done what this turn, so you can always tell exactly where you are. There’s little risk of losing your place when the pizza guy knocks on your door.

GD is a little slower overall. The custom dice are a big help in that they really reduce the math and make each individual die roll much faster.  Separate attack and defense rolls though does mean an extra step or two to every action, so it roughly evens out. Monsters in GD rarely go down in a single hit, and you’ll find yourself tracking wounds and energy on all the miniatures. It’s not bad, but it does seem a little clunkier (and less epic) than Myth. You face fewer monsters over all, but each one requires multiple attacks.

Shadows seems to be comparable to GD. Each player’s turn is longer than in Myth. Attacking a single minion takes at least two die rolls, and you’ll often have to keep track of wounded monsters. One-hit-kills of the smaller monsters are more likely than in GD, but there’s not much chance of wiping the board in a single roll like can happen in Myth. I expect Shadows will have the most down-time and waiting of the three, and yet it’s still overall a quickly-moving game. I do have a little concern about losing your place in the turn if there’s an interruption or delay, and I suspect the game could benefit from some sort of turn tracker to keep that from being a problem. Luckily, it could be as simple as using a single large off-color d6 to count down initiative as we move through the turn sequence.

And The Winner Is: Myth seems specifically designed to minimize down-time and keep everyone involved at every moment. This makes for an exciting pace and constant action, except when a player needs to slip off for a potty break.

New Chapter Quests for Myth

In the game Myth, most of the Realm Tiles you explore need a Quest card of some sort. There's a bunch of them in the main boxed set, but if you play frequently, you'll quickly have to start repeating them. To head that off at the pass, I've made a few of my own.

Here's five new stand-alone Chapter Quests.  On average, they're a little less complex and involved than the ones in the main game. That's intentional, I wanted them to be good quick-inserts that could happen in the middle of an Act or Story Quest without disrupting the flow too much or raising a lot of questions.

Consider these first few a proof of concept run. Or at least a work in progress. I know they're kinda ugly.
The colors are taken from a photo of a card out of the main game, but they turned out a bit dark and murky.
They'll do for now, but they really drain your ink supply if printed in quantity, and may be hard to read in poor lighting.

I actively avoided using icons from the game itself. There's a stack of lame rationales behind that decision: My camera sucks and the icons are tiny, I don't have a scanner, my copies of photoshop and quark no longer run on my current OS so I had to use clunkier programs, etc, but mainly I was lazy and uncertain if I was going to make more than 2 or 3 of these so it wasn't worth the effort to make them any better.

I could probably claim it's also because the icons on cards in the game seem to be a small part of the confusion regarding the game. So I figured I'd just spell everything out in English whenever possible. Technically that's true, but in all honesty, the lame reasons were foremost in my mind.

After making about 20 cards, I decided that I really was going to print at least some of these eventually. That meant I needed to increase the contrast and cut down on the ink consumption. I really reduced the amount of color, and they're a lot easier to read for it.




This gave me an opportunity to tweak the layout a bit while I was at it. Honestly, I'm not convinced that the official cards are organized in the best way. I feel the originals jump around too much.  I moved the success / failure results down into the exit flavor text, and I think it makes them much easier to comprehend.

I'll probably post the rest of the cards over the next few days, alternating with my "MvGDvSoB" threads. Most of the cards will be the earlier, uglier, format. I may eventually recreate them in the nicer version, but probably not until after I've had a chance to playtest them and make any obvious corrections they need.

Feedback is always appreciated, and that goes double if your constructive criticism is about the mechanics or gameplay rather than the crummy layout that I'm obviously displeased with.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 3: Flexibility and Customization

This is the third post in an 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and here's how they compare on:

Flexibility and Customization

Customization of your overall game experience is where Myth really shines. Players decide game length, difficulty per tile, which quests to use, which of three game modes to play, whether or not they're ever going to fight their least favorite monster again, etc. How many and which monsters are in the room? Myth provides you with a range, not a precise answer, and you tweak that sliding scale depending on how much challenge you want, and what seems to fit the narrative. You are your own GM, and you get to adjust everything on the fly. If you’ve got a little creativity, Myth gives you a ton of tools and options to explore. Existing quests have a lot of variety, and it's pretty easy to add your own ideas to the deck if you've got the cards sleeved. (Speaking of which, I've made about 20 new quest cards that I'll be posting to this site sometime soon.) All this comes with a couple caveats: some folks find Myth too unstructured and nebulous, or feel that making the decisions Myth asks them to is tantamount to cheating. Myth's philosophy is pretty unique.

Galaxy Defenders really relies on detailed scenarios, and it’s hard to eyeball how they will play out before you try any specific scenario. It’s also much harder to make your own scenarios for GD than for Myth, and all that hidden information makes customizing an existing mission a little tricky unless you're really familiar with the particulars. Scenarios feed into each other in a specific (branching) order, with expectations of equipment and level-ups happening at a precisely controlled rate. It’s a very scripted experience. In classic RPG terms, I’d be willing to bet that Myth appeals more to people who like to GM, where Galaxy Defenders appeals more to those who prefer to be players in the RPG party. If you do want to add your own content to GD, the unique components (equipment and abilities are printed on thick hexagonal and trapezoidal tiles, not standard cards) makes it a little harder.

Shadows of Brimstone falls somewhere between them. You can easily choose to alter or ignore certain decks and Other Worlds to tailor your game, so it’s more immediately flexible than GD. You can just wander into the mines and face whatever you draw, but at the demo I played the designer heavily implied there were going to be additional more complicated missions in the final game. Accessories to the game include blank cards so you can insert your own ideas into the pot. However, there’s a lot of hidden information and decisions made by random card or token draw. By default, SoB just doesn't give you nearly the level of control that Myth’s free-questing and realm tile setup allows. All your customization has to happen between games, where as in Myth it can be done on the fly.  In SoB, the decks function as your GM, in Myth you are your own GM. Which means that if Myth seemed just a little too unstructured for you, SoB’s tighter dungeon-generation system will probably be very appealing.


And The Winner Is:  Either Myth or SoB, depending on your personal tastes. Both are more readily adaptable than GD, but that comes at a price. They rely on random card draws instead of GD's carefully scripted adventures. You get flexibility, but at the cost of sometimes have to deal with incompatible card draws. Myth has a built-in solution to that problem (the players are specifically empowered to disregard the cards if they want) but that could itself lead to analysis paralysis or just rub some player's sensibilities wrong.

Myth vs GD vs SoB part 2: Set-Up Time

This is the second post in a 8-part series comparing specific elements of three big kickstarted cooperative miniatures games: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Project Gremlin / Ares, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog Productions. I've played all three, and here's how they compare on:

Set-Up Time

All three games mentioned here take a little bit of time getting minis, board sections, and decks out of the box and set up to play. Many of the dungeon-crawls that went before them put all the set-up and prep work on one player, who was GMing or at least playing the villains, but these three new games upend that paradigm. You're all working together, and there's no secret map that only one player can access. Assuming someone at the table has read the rulebook, and you've all played a good demo that answered the major questions, how much time and effort does it really take to set up when playing for your second time?

The short set-up time is one of Myth's strong suits, especially when compared with the standard for these sorts of big-box dungeon-crawls. With Myth, you have the ability to start play almost instantly (as long as you already know the rules, which is far from guaranteed with Myth) via the “free questing” mode. Free-questing, which is my preferred play mode, starts with any single terrain tile and drawing any one quest card to go with it. You dive right in and are playing within seconds. The Slaughterfield game mode is also immediate action with no delays, starting a few seconds faster than free-questing.  Only Story Mode requires any set-up at all, and even then it's pretty fast and simple due to the nature of the game components and the very simple diagrams in the rulebook.


Galaxy Defenders takes a lot of set up, including custom-building the close encounter deck, building/stacking the event deck, and laying out complicated and precise arrangements of lots of little 2x1 terrain objects according to a map image that has to be carefully referenced before play can begin. This takes a lot more time and attention than even the most complicated story-mode scenario in Myth. GD's set up is actually kind of a burden. Getting something wrong in the board or deck set up can really mess up the scenario. The game works well, and all this prep allows the scenarios to offer quite a variety of play experiences, but you certainly need to budget set-up time into your plans for the night.

From what I can tell, Shadows of Brimstone will fall somewhere in between, but much closer to Myth than to Galaxy Defenders. The one game of it I've played had a lot less rigid scenario structure than GD. SoB uses card draws to build the map as you go (somewhat like Myth but with randomness instead of player choice) and you always start on the same entrance tile. That's all pretty speedy. Our mission had an end goal to reach, which was triggered by revealing exploration tokens (one of which is drawn with every new tile). This seemed quick and random, but it's unclear to me if individual sessions require any amount of customizing to the pool of exploration tokens, or if there are other missions that get more complicated. Character creation and leveling-up are both much more involved in SoB than their equivalents in Myth, and I suspect that will result in a slower start to the actual play of each session. Choosing new powers and spending in-game currency will take at least a couple minutes before you get to head into the mines to adventure.



And The Winner is: To whatever extent there can be a 'winner' of the "Set-Up Time" comparison, it's definitely Myth. The game is structured to have as few delays and as little down-time as is humanly possible.

Myth vs Galaxy Defenders vs Shadows of Brimstone Part 1

This weekend, I went down to Card Kingdom in Ballard to play demos of Flying Frog’s upcoming Shadows of Brimstone cooperative miniatures game and Dark Gothic deckbuilding game. It was a lot of fun, and made me feel a lot more confident about that big ol’ Minecart I bought.

This means I’ve now played three of 2013’s big Kickstarter cooperative miniatures dungeoncrawls: Myth by Mercs/Megacon, Galaxy Defenders by Ares/ProjectGremlin, and Shadows of Brimstone by Flying Frog. It was a strong year for the genre.

That suggests to me a natural topic for a series of comparison/review posts. I'll be doing this in a series of posts each focusing on a different aspect of the three games, spread over several days, because otherwise it would be one giant wall of text... and for some reason I think you'll be happier reading several smaller walls of text. It's turned into an 8-part series.

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Character Differentiation and Advancement

Myth comes with 5 character classes in the box, and has another 3 characters arriving in the first wave of expansions in about a month. Each of the 5 classes plays very differently from the others. There’s a healer, a tank, and at least three different flavors of mechanically-distinct glass cannon. Character creation is super quick - any two Brigands (for example) start out with identical stats and equipment, with the only difference being which of two minis they use. As they gather items they’ll start to differ, but true variation between characters of the same class increments in very slowly, at roughly a rate of one meaningful alteration after every 3rd session of play. I haven’t played enough Myth yet to really have an informed opinion about this aspect of advancement, but at first glance it seems like progression is probably a little slower than ideal. It's probably okay if you really plan to play a single character in campaign mode for a very long time, but with 8 classes I'm tempted to swap out which character I play every so often. I may end up house-ruling the progression rate up  for my group after a few more sessions of play.

Galaxy Defenders has the same number (5) of classes in the core box, but the differences between the classes are somewhat less dramatic than in Myth. Stretch goals, if you got them, provided an alternate version of each class, and the differences between the main version and the alternate version are easily as pronounced as between any two GD classes. So you can have two Snipers that each start out mechanically unique. Character advancement is much faster in GD than in Myth, as well, so two characters with similar starting points will very quickly diverge. Leveling up is still done in small increments, so you’re not radically boosting your power all at once, but you’ll see some sort of minor improvement or specialization every time you play (and usually this happens in the middle of the action). It works well.

Shadows of Brimstone comes with 4 classes in each of the two versions of the core box set, and there are half a dozen more beyond those 8 if you got the various stretch goals. The four classes I've seen each plays distinctly differently from the others. Two characters of the same class also start out as unique and distinct individuals right out of the gate. Your class determines a bunch of stats, and at least one set special power for the character. Then you get to choose one of 3 optional starting abilities for that class. After that choice, each player is dealt one random “personal item” that helps define them further. In our demo, the saloon girl had a bowie knife and the gunfighter had a hand mirror, which absolutely defined how we approached these roles. This was an unqualified success, as you became immediately invested in your unique character. Since it was a single demo, I couldn’t see much of the campaign-level character advancement process. There’s an XP system and in-game money. PCs at our table earned between 225 and 475xp in our couple hours of play, and I'm told you need 500 xp to level up. Leveling involved some sort of “feat tree”, with each class eventually unlocking a total of 16 or 20 different powers if you played long enough. Character advancement seems pretty deep.

And The Winner Is: Shadows of Brimstone provides the most in-depth character customization by a long shot, and does it in a very flavorful way.

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Customer Service

I'll be following up with more side-by-side comparisons of various other elements of the games in my next few posts.

Until then, I wanted to take a quick moment to specifically call out the great customer service I got from Ares / Project Gremlin, the makers of Galaxy Defenders. When they shipped our game + stretch goals to us, 3 of the miniatures arrived broken. One was missing an arm, and two others had snapped off their bases. My wife sent a photo to the folks at Ares, and within a few days they'd mailed off replacements for the 3 broken figures... packed in a box with another dozen other figures and promo cards just to be cool. That was very generous of them. I figured we were just going to have to glue the minis -- and that would have been fine -- but they went above and beyond.

Myth: Great Game, Horrid Rulebook

Our copy of Myth arrived last week. It was a Kickstarter we backed last year, and should be available on retail soon-ish. Myth a big cooperative dungeoncrawl game with lots of bells and whistles (and cards and minis). It's in the same genre as HeroQuest or MageKnight Dungeons or the more recent Galaxy Defenders, but I feel it's a vastly superior game to any of those. (Though, to be fair, the only thing I have against Galaxy Defenders is its plodding and fiddly set-up before play.)

Here's a quick run-down of the things I really like about Myth:

• Fully Cooperative: There's no GM. Everybody's a player, and we're all working together. There's no need for someone to run the monsters, or set up the dungeon, or be otherwise adversarial to the rest of the group. Everybody has the same amount of plot-knowledge, and the same goal.
• Flexible: Play duration is in your control, and game play starts almost immediately. Set-up of each board is quick, fun, and collaborative. You can decide on the fly just how long a game you want to play. Somebody having to leave early doesn't anticlimactically ruin your entire session, and you should be able to easily bargain with them "how about we just finish this tile we're on and then we call it end of Act?"
• Engaging: The turn structure is unique, and very clever. Things are happening all the time, and everyone is constantly involved in the action. You're never sitting around waiting for someone else to act. No one can dominate the game, because there's built-in mechanisms to keep everyone contributing at roughly the same activity level. Stealing the spotlight in consecutive turns is punished in a dramatic but enjoyable way. It's genius. The only place this "all hands on deck" turn structure breaks down at all is when a PC dies - but odds are good that a PC death will be followed quickly by either resurrection or a TPK, so I'm cautiously optimistic the downtime even in those circumstances will be short. Honestly, I'd love to see this turn-structure converted for use in an RPG in place of traditional Initiative systems.
• Elegant: The dice mechanics are robust and quick. An area-of-effect blast on half a dozen minions, or a mass attack against a hero surrounded by minions, can both be handled in seconds with a single die roll each, but still feature meaningful depth and variety of results. It's a game that can handle 4 or 5 PCs facing off against dozens of badguys at once without ever hitting a speed bump.
• Toys: There's so much in the box. Not only are the fancy physical components numerous (40 miniatures, a stack of beautiful map tiles, a bunch of decks, etc), but there's multiple game modes and a lot of quest-cards that create interesting scenarios to play out. The game feels like it has depth and replayability aplenty, with lots of eye-candy to keep you entertained along the way.

It's an excellent game. I've played it four times now, and I'm really diggin' it. Can't wait to break it out again.

Yo Momma Is A Crawla

All those praises having been said, the rulebook is wretchedly awful. It's beautiful to look at, but really hard to read. It jumps from topic to topic and back again without warning (but at least it has a better-than-average index). There are several topics, however, that never get addressed in the rules. They skulk silently between the pages waiting to ambush you.

For example:

• Poison and Stun: These two status effects are caused by various cards (poison shows up a lot more than stun), but are never actually defined in the rules. Luckily, the rules do have a "Damage Over Time" status and a "Prone" status that can fairly intuitively be used for Poison and Stun respectively.  An easy fix once you're aware of the problem, but an ugly surprise if the first time it crops up is in the middle of a play session.
• Combo and Optional: These two keywords appear on a number of player cards, but really aren't defined anywhere in the rules. The Archer character and the Brigand character both rely on those two keywords, and the consensus on the forums is that they mean completely different things in the two decks. To feel that I understood it at all, I had to read the rulebook cover-to-cover, then read two FAQ threads (one on BGG, the other at the publisher's forums),  then watch a couple gameplay videos, then re-read relevant parts of the rulebook.
• Stretch Goals: There are plenty of cards, and charts in the rulebook, that reference things that aren't included in the base set. It's often not immediately obvious what expansion-product you'd have to buy to fill in these holes and complete the chains. That's no problem if you bought the "Captain level" Kickstarter pledge which includes nearly 1 of everything for a very reasonable price... but folks buying this piecemeal at retail are probably going to experience some frustration and confusion.
• Action, Reaction, and Interrupt: These are pretty simple concepts in most games, and people can usually intuit what they mean. Not in Myth. As it turns out, "reaction" and "interrupt" are horrible names for what these cards do, and using those terms actually makes the game harder to teach. The rules themselves are straightforward, but the nomenclature is misleading.

There's a huge number of other minor complaints, but those are good examples. It's all stuff you'll eventually figure out, and since it's a cooperative game no one's getting an unfair advantage out of the confusion... but damn is it annoying to have critical terms and mechanics go undefined in the rules, and to have such inconsistent templating and phrasing on the cards.

All of this could/should have been caught with a just a single blind playtest before they went to print, or by any editing pass, and it blows my mind that such obvious holes and murkiness slipped through the cracks. It's like all the time that should have been used for editing and playtesting just went into art assets and layout... but at least it looks sweeet.

Dwarven Hospitality

Here's a Warhammer 3rd "monster group sheet" I made for an encounter with a bunch of dwarven ruffians. It works just like the monster group sheets from the Creature Vault. It's intended to model a bar fight, protest rally, mob enforcers, or just any time the PCs stick there nose in where the dwarves don't think it belongs. I just felt the game was lacking in group sheets that might be of use in situations other than epic battles to the death.

The built-in progress trackers here are shorter (or move much faster) than those found on the comparable cards from the Creature Vault, because I find those official trackers never get anywhere near their end before the fight is over. It should be possible for either tracker to reach its end in just 2 or 3 rounds of conflict.

Here's some flavor text to help the GM figure out ways to work this into the game:

And here's the actual Dwarven Ruffian creature card:

It's basically just the standard Ruffian card from the Creature Vault, plus the NPC racial modifiers from the Creature Guide and a couple of minor tweaks (such as changing the Stance to Conservative).

The artwork of the wickedly-scarred dwarf was taken from http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2012/12/role-playing-game-portraits-month-ago-i.html and used without permission. It's an awesome picture, and I couldn't resist.
The card frames were cobbled together from various Warhammer fan sites and Strange Eons plug-ins.

What's "New" in the WFRP Game Master's Guide?

This is my third installment in an ongoing series about the "Guide" books for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition. This time, I examine the GM's Guide.

What's 'New' in the Player's Guide
What's 'New' in the Creature Guide

In the first two chapters, I was pleasantly surprised at just how much new content was hidden away in these "reprints", including important fixes and optional rules to cover some of the rougher areas in the game system. Overall, I was thrilled with my purchase of the Player's Guide and the Creature Guide.

I'm gonna get straight to the point: the GM's Guide not nearly as good as the other two. It has barely any new content, and I kinda regret spending money on it. Is it a better version of the GM's rules than what comes in the core set? Yes, but just barely, and mostly just for new GMs. It's certainly not worth spending the $40 MSRP on if you already have 95% of the content. I got mine on sale for $27, and it still feels like I overspent.

What follows is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of what's new, and where exactly the old stuff came from. New content will include a page reference, so that it's easy to track down and read the only things that have changed. When possible, I'll also call out whether these are clarifications, new or optional rules, GMing advice and examples, or simple typo fixes. As with the previous posts, I'll use bold to mark any major changes or revisions... but there aren't very many in this book.

Chapter One: Game Mastering 101

Originally published in the Tome of Adventure from the core set.

• pg 12: Advice: There is a single new paragraph, giving several modest suggestions on when to use the Party Tension Meter.

Chapter Two: Episodes & Acts

Originally published in the Tome of Adventure from the core set.

• pg 15: Clarification (bordering on a New Rule) concerning Rally Steps: GMs are specifically empowered to veto or restrict some common Rally Step options if it fits the narrative or situation. This is mostly common sense, but it's nice to see it spelled out in case the GM is uneasy about Rally Steps in general.
• pg 17: Advice: NPC Villains' big prepared speeches should happen during Rally Steps, because then they can't be interrupted.
• pg 20: Example of a 3-Act Episode in flow chart form. In this example, the 3 Acts could be either 3 or 4 scenes, depending on decisions the PCs make.
• pg 21-22: Clarifications and minor expansions to previously existing example 3-Act Episodes. Rally steps are clearly marked. Extra options and complications are mentioned. There's also a discussion of what happens if the players choose not to bite the plot hooks. If you're running a "Hostage Negotiation", "Ambush", or "Mistaken Identity" scenario in your campaign, this would be quick helpful read.
• pg 21: New Terminology Sidebar: Several new paragraphs giving explicit definition to terms pertaining to time and duration, such as Acts, Phases, Rounds, etc. When you look at threads on the FFG forums where people express distaste for or confusion about the 3-Act Structure, I've found that the people complaining almost always use "Act" to mean what FFG uses "Episode" to mean, and vice-versa. That linguistic confusion may be coincidental, or it may be that there's an underlying misunderstanding about the terminology that's making this part of the game more problematic for those GMs. If you're having trouble with any of those related concepts, I'd really recommend reading this sidebar.

Chapter Three: Game Master Resources

Originally published in the Tome of Adventure from the core set.

• pg 23: Advice: There's a one sentence warning here about giving out too much XP.
• pg 24: Clarification: There's a single new sentence here weakly linking wealth to social tier. It doesn't add much.
• pg 26: Advice: There's one extra paragraph about interpreting story and narration out of the dice results.

Chapter Four: The Progress Tracker

Originally published in the Tome of Adventure from the core set.

• pg 30: Additional Example of Party Tension Meter use. This makes specific mention of Tension increasing when a spell miscasts.

Chapter Five: Campaign Play

Originally published in the Tome of Adventure from the core set.
No new content.

Old, but still worth grumbling about: Pages 33 & 46 of the GM's Guide have two similar but contradictory optional Morale systems. This isn't new (they were on pages 29 & 43 of the Tome of Adventure), but it is frustrating. It's an example of how FFG missed an opportunity here. If they'd consolidated these two systems into one, they could have built various cards and powers that referenced and played off of them. That's the sort of new content that could potentially have made the GM's Guide worth buying. I imagine FFG felt leaving both optional meant giving the GM the freedom to improvise. In reality, however, leaving them both optional meant leaving them both unsupported, and giving the PCs no reliable way to impact enemy morale. No attempt has been made to ingrate player-accessible mechanics like Fear and Influence into these systems. The suggested math of page 46 also creates a morale track so ridiculously lengthy that it would only matter in the largest, most epic battles. But, I digress...

Chapter Six: Enemies & Adversaries

Originally published in the Tome of Adventure from the core set, in a slightly different form. One and a half chapters from the ToA have been rolled together into a single chapter here. The order of the info has been shuffled around, but it's basically just a big copy-paste editing job. In addition, a single page from the GM's Toolkit has been shoehorned in at the end of this chapter.

• pg 47 & 48: Clarifications on enemy stats, and an explanation of how creature cards work. This is technically new, but the exact same information can also be found in the Creature Guide. 
• pg 49: New Rules on using A/C/E defensively, and also on Initiative. I'm tempted to label this a clarification, as opposed to a new rule, because it was already somewhat implied in the previous version. These new options for A/C/E use also appear in the Creature's Guide, along with a number of other A/C/E options there that aren't repeated here in the GM's Guide.
• pg 50: Minor clarifications in the sidebar about NPC stat lines. If you found NPC stat blocks (or creature cards) to be confusing, this sidebar will likely answer your questions.
• pg 51: The Nemesis rules from the GM's Toolkit are reprinted here. Note that it's only the rules for Nemesis NPCs, not the rules for the Organizations that they lead.

Chapter Seven: Corruption Rules

Originally published in the Liber Mutatis from the Winds of Magic boxed set.
No changes.

Chapter Eight: Disease Rules

Originally published in the Liber Infectus from the Signs of Faith boxed set.  I would have loved to see this chapter overhauled, but they reprinted it without changes.

• pg 64: A "bonus" page with new fluff text. Cute, but meaningless, and set in a huge font so 10 sentences fill an entire page. It's a little annoying that they throw in half-assed filler like this, but couldn't find room to put in the other half of the A/C/E rules or the other half of the Nemesis rules or any of the other things they left out of the book. Oh, well, I suppose you could at least use this page as a prop, if your campaign's villain was sufficiently cartoonish.

Chapter Nine: Faith In The Old World

Originally published in the Tome of Blessings from the core set.  (This chapter probably should have been in the Player's Guide, not the GM's Guide, as it mostly deals with things all the PCs would know about the setting.)

• pg 66: Correction: The sidebar here corrects an omission in the Tome of Blessings, where the equivalent list of gods there neglected to mention Taal.

Chapter Ten: The Imperial Cults

Originally published in the Tome of Blessings from the core set.  (As with the previous chapter, this would have made more sense to put in the Player's Guide, as it's immediately relevant to anyone playing an Initiate, and is all information that should be common knowledge to any human PC.)
No changes.

Chapter Eleven: Other Faiths

Originally published in the Tome of Blessings from the core set.
No changes.

Chapter Twelve: Corruption & Heresy

Originally published in the Tome of Blessings from the core set.

• pg 88-89: "New" artwork for the symbols of the ruinous powers. Actually, I think it's old art, that's been sitting around for a decade or longer and used in earlier editions of WFRP. It's line-art, instead of full color. It's got some retro appeal, but I'm not sure I understand why they went to the trouble of swapping it out.
• pg 91: Alternate flavor text in a thematic insert about witch-hunters. The old one (from Tome of Blessings) was from the perspective of a farmer. The new one is the words spoken by a witch-hunter and is much darker in tone. I think it's an improvement, but again it's unclear why such changes were warranted here and not in other chapters.

Chapter Thirteen: Magic Theories

Originally published in the Tome of Mysteries from the core set.
No changes.

Chapter Fourteen: The Colleges of Magic

Originally published in the Tome of Mysteries from the core set. (Much like chapters Nine and Ten, I feel this one really belonged in the Player's Guide. Anyone making a Wizard PC would want to access this info, especially the part on page 101 that directly affects an Apprentice Wizard's starting equipment.)
No changes.

Chapter Fifteen: The Eight Orders

Originally published in the Tome of Mysteries from the core set. (Again, this probably belonged in the Player's Guide because it's of vital importance to anyone thinking of playing a Wizard.)
No changes.

Chapter Sixteen: Forbidden Lore

Originally published in the Tome of Mysteries from the core set.
No changes, unless you count the goofy extra page:

• pg 123:  A "bonus" page with new fluff text in a huge font to fill space. At least this one's an amusing read, unlike the similar filler content on page 64. 

Chapter Seventeen: An Eye For An Eye  (**SPOILER ALERT**)

Originally published in the Tome of Adventure from the core set.
SPOILER ALERT: The stats on a number of NPCs have changed, and discussing those changes will no doubt reveal plot details. Potential players should skip down to the appendices so the plot isn't ruined.
Overall, the changes have potentially made the adventure a little easier on the PCs if they do a good job of recruiting allies. PCs with a "Kill 'em all, and let Sigmar sort them out" attitude may have a slightly harder time.

• pg 135: Minor Clarification: The game effects of a Superior item are now printed in the adventure text so that new GMs don't have to go look it up when a major NPC (Lord Rickard Aschaffenberg) uses one.
• pg 136: NPC Stats Changed: Dr. Stefan Sieger's attributes changed, and he gained some skill training.
• pg 136: NPC Stats Changed: Sister Sonia's attributes changed, and she gained some skill training.
• pg 141: Redundancy: The sidebar about Korden's Hammer has been altered to include it's game stats, since GM's using this Guide instead of the core set may not have the equipment card that describes it. This is rendered immediately redundant since the main text already had all the stats listed on the very next page of the layout... but I imagine having it here in a sidebar probably makes it easier to find the stats should you need them in the middle of a fight. That's a good thing, then.
• pg 143: Typo Fix / NPC Stats Changed: There's a critically injured NPC (Hans Kurtz) in the adventure, and the original text had their injury adding white fortune dice to their rolls. This reprint wisely corrects that to black misfortune dice, so the injury is a penalty not a benefit.
• pg 144: NPC Stats Changed: Captain Blucher gained training in Weapon Skill.
• pg 149: New Art. A very gor-y picture of beastmen replaces the monster stat bar that had been at the top of the page. Monster stats have moved to the following pages (and been expanded somewhat).
• pg 151-154: Easy-access monster stats and actions: These are reprinted from the Tome of Adventure, but they are much more conveniently located in this edition. The content of pages 151-154 had been located on pages 67, 55, 51, and 57 of the Tome of Adventure. Having them all together will no doubt make the fight scene run much faster for GMs that don't have (or choose not to use) the cards from the Creature Guide.... but it could have been made much faster and easier even than that. Many of the named PCs have special skill modifiers mentioned on pages 135, 136, or 144, but those modifiers aren't mentioned on the generic NPC summaries on page 151, so you'll still have to flip back and forth between four or more pages in the middle of a fight to track it all.  Even worse, the stats for the daemon on page 154 neglect to mention that it can fly. One of it's actions heavily implies it can fly (or at least jump really well), but the actual description of the Flight power and its mechanical effects were at the bottom of page 56 of the Tome of Adventure, which didn't get reprinted in this version.  It's only two sentences that are missing, but it's silly that they weren't reprinted especially since page 154 has about a quarter-page of blank space at the end.  Here's the missing sentences from the ToA: "Flight: A fury does not need to perform a manoeuvre to disengage from opponents before moving. It can move away from engaged opponents as if it were not engaged with them, unless they also can fly. 

Appendices:

This section begins with charts that are basically the various decks from first few releases, lain out in table format for use with percentile dice. It's an interesting tool, and no doubt goes a long way to making the game more portable. Tables A-1 to A-5 incorporate cards from the core set, Winds of Magic, Signs of Faith, and the adventures The Gathering Storm and Edge Of Night. Personally, I'm not so thrilled with these charts because I find the cards to be handy reminders that are much more convenient than looking up critical wound effects in a rulebook (and writing them down on your character sheet) in the middle of a fight scene.

It's also worth noting that the tables are significantly more dangerous than the decks are (with the possible exception of A-1), because each table ends with one or more "roll again twice" entries.  Rolling in the high 90's is pretty much to a death sentence (more so on some charts than others). 

Table A-1: Critical Wounds (pg 156-157)

• pg 156-157:  Noteworthy Absence: The critical wound chart lacks the Severe Wounds later printed in the Omens of War expansion. As a result, A-1 is the only one of these 5 charts that is less lethal than the corresponding card deck (provided you have all the cards from expansions).

Table A-2: Insanity (pg 158-159)

Table A-3: Miscast (pg 160-161)

Table A-4: Mutation (pg 162-163)

Table A-5: Diseases (pg 164-165)

• pg 165: New Chart: Disease Symptom Keywords. This is a secondary chart that supplements Table A-5. I found it so useful I needed to call it out specifically. It provides a very helpful overview to all the possible symptom effects, and makes it clear just how dangerous diseases are in this game. This is all pretty opaque when you're reading the main disease rules, but the high lethality becomes much clearer as you pour over this chart and table A-5.

Conditions

This is a chart of Condition cards from the core set, the Adventurer's Toolkit, and two adventures (The Gathering Storm and Edge of Night). 

• pg 166:  Noteworthy Absence: The list of Conditions bizarrely lacks the Condition cards from Signs of Faith and Winds of Magic, despite their content being on the charts before it, and despite one of those conditions (Nurgle's Rot) being detailed in Chapter Eight. It's an odd oversight.
• The rules for Conditions are only briefly summarized here, and fleshed out in greater detail in the Player's Guide. The logic behind that decision escapes me.
• pg 166: Clarification/Errata: The Frightened Condition has received errata that is either a clarification or a major change of functionality, depending on how you interpreted the vague phrasing of the old version of the card. The new version (available as either this chart in the GM's Guide, or in card format from the Game Master's Vault) is much improved.

Location Cards

Includes the text from all the Location Cards found in the core set and the GM's Toolkit, but not from any of the other supplements.

Index

Seems pretty thorough, and easy to use. Well done.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Campaign Log

• pg 174  New Campaign Aid: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Campaign Log. It's an interesting, but brief, form for scribbling down your plans for a campaign. I could see it being very useful early on to help you get your thoughts together. It's also potentially helpful in the later stages of a long campaign when you have a lot of plot-threads and NPCs to keep track of, but by then you'll probably need more than 1 page of notes.

---

TL;DR:   Overall, there's nothing really great about this book, and almost nothing new either. The few changes that did seem major to me can be found in other products:

• There's new A/C/E uses, but they can also be found in the Creature Guide, along with a number of other new uses for A/C/E.
• The Frightened Condition was revised, but you can also get that new version of the card by picking up the GM's vault. Depending on how you were parsing the text of the card before, it might not actually be a change.
• If the Disease, Miscast, Mutation, and Insanity decks aren't deadly enough for your group, you might find it useful to use the charts in this Guide instead. They have on average a 5% chance of getting you two penalties instead of just one. The chart for Critical Wounds is also nastier than the deck in the core set, but not as nasty as a deck using the new cards from Omens of War. If you absolutely hate having cards in your game, you may find these charts useful.
• There is a tiny smattering of new GMing advice scattered throughout the book, mostly about tension meters, rally steps and the three-act structure.

I'd say save your money. Spend it on the Player's Guide or Creature Guide instead if you don't have them yet, they are both better investments.

Roll20 is pretty cool (and my Scion campaign is a little creepy)

Of the four campaigns I'm currently GMing, only one of them is face-to-face. The other three all use Roll20 as an online host so I can game with friends in other states.

Roll20 is a pretty cool set of tools for running RPGs over the net. It's got audio, video and text chats, dice rollers and customizable tools (decks, charts, tokens, API scripts, etc) for automating your mechanics, and a virtual table top with live-updating for your maps and tokens. I'm pleased with it. It's still not quite as good as running a game in person, but the tools are good enough to almost consider using them instead of dice and minis at the tabletop. If you're going to be running a game online for some reason, I strongly recommend Roll20.

Here's a partial screen shot from yesterday's session.
The setting is Scion, but the rules are FATE. Tracking down a lead, the PCs broke into a Museum after hours. So I grabbed a map I found online of the Chicago Field Museum, and slapped it down on the virtual tabletop. The Curator of Antiquities had an eyepatch, so clearly that meant he was evil. :) They eventually caught him performing a creepy ritual with the bodies of mummified children, about which I had prepared a virtual handout with some disturbing images.

Skaven can't hit the broad side of an inn

My party of 4 PCs in the Warhammer Fantasy campaign tore through over 30 skaven last session.  Dead ratmen were scattered all around the inn they'd been staying at. Most of those were wimpy skavenslave henchmen, but it was still impressive. Even counting each stack of 4 henchmen as a single NPC, they were still outnumbered by 3-to-1 or so. Only two of the PCs ended up wounded at all in the fight, and then only lightly. Well done, players!

It was kind of remarkable just how badly the dice hated the skaven. Their basic "Cheap Shot" attack includes a Chaos Star trigger that lets the target make a free counter-attack. Again and again the skaven kept rolling this result, and each time it resulted in multiple dead henchmen in the middle of the skaven's turn. It was brutal.

A couple weird observations about specific skaven subtypes in the 3rd Edition of WFRP:

• Stormvermin aren't nearly as tough as I imagined them to be. They only get one action card beyond the basics, which limited their ability to hit well. They had good dice pools on the attack, but since I chose an action with a large recharge rating, it only got to fire off once in the whole fight. That particular one action ended up paired with a bad die roll, so it accomplished very little. They do have a lot more armour than lesser skaven do... but it turns out it's not enough extra for it to actually matter. 3 of the 4 Stormvermin ended up being one-shot kills, IIRC.  Instead of being added challenge, it just meant the PCs didn't waste any unused damage points.  At least the PCs got to be bad-ass monster-killers. That's okay.
• Poison Wind Globadiers are incomplete to the point of being unusable as-written. They have stats in the Creature Guide and Creature Vault, but no actions. The implication being the GM is expected to just have them use Basic Ranged Attack and their DR of 3. That means you'd be representing a vial full of poison gas as just a normal (kinda weak even) single-target attack that technically doesn't even use the Poison effect. It's odd. As written, their protective gear doesn't actually protect them from their own weapon either, since it only uses normal damage and no resilience checks. I realized the day before the game that there's no card representing the Globadier's weapon / action, so I cobbled something together.  It wasn't perfect, but it worked well enough for a single encounter. It was certainly the only real threat in this particular fight.

Memo to Myself: I probably need to make my PCs take Easy (1d) Corruption tests at the start of the next session. I posted the action above to the Warhammer Forums and got an immediate response of "don't the books say that one of the ingredients in the Poison Wind Gas is Warpstone?" Oops, yep, the books do say that.

• I specifically chose not to use the Clan Skryre tracking sheet during this battle, because in general the monster's "Party Cards" never matter. They all rely on progress trackers that are 7 or 8 spaces long but only advance 1 space per turn. Fights are usually over in 2 or 3 turns, so it's not typically worth it. This time, though, the fight was actually a little longer than normal, and Chaos Stars advance the track. I actually kinda regret not using it.