WFRPv4 is out ... in a preview ... in pdf

The WFRPv4 preview pdf is now out. I am reading through it as I write this ... well not really, it's on me iPad and I'm reading it between chores and patching up a bleeding finger. I'm still at chapter one, so it's difficult to give a proper review but so far I kinda like it.

Yeah ... "kinda". It looks fabulous, it reads well, what I've heard of the rules makes sense ... but I can't so far muster more than "I kinda like it". Hopefully that'll change. It as by all appearances a solid version of WFRP with the roots in WFRPv1 and WFRPv2, with a sprinkling of WFRPv3.

The most important thing right now is the chatter with Andy Law, who is fielding questions while he does maps and finishes the layout. The outreach from C7 has been outstanding the last month.

Anyways with the preview out we aren't that far from finished pdf. A couple months to the printed books arrive I fear, but them's the ropes.

I've thrown my gauntlet in with the Reddit and Discord crowd

I've tried out a few different places for continued WFRP discussion and have landed on the Warhammer Fantasy RPG sub on Reddit and in the Rat Catcher's Guild on Discord.

The Warhammer Fantasy RPG subreddit
The Rat Catcher's Guild on Discord

Of these I like the subreddit the best since it is a lot easier to have focussed discussions akin to those on a discussion forum. The Discord thing is a chat motor, and that is fine for that but I prefer the forum feel.

Anyways I'm there as AdolphusAltdorfer.

Snippets on WFRPv4 from the UK Games Expo

On the warhammerfantasyrpg reddit there's a post with info from the user known as The WFRP Companion, who apparently chatted with Cubicle 7 during the UK Games Expo.

Click here to read the post in its entirety.

My take on the info follows.

1. Setting will be 8th edition focus but generally should be backwards compatible.

That is to be expected. Even though Games Workshop razed the Old World to the ground, I always expected them to have WFRP stay in stride with the WFB setting.

I've never found there to be much of a problem maintaining backwards compatibility.

2. The rumour PDF is out this weekend is FALSE, no clue where it came from.

I will chalk that up to Cubicle 7 being vague with the statement "anticipated in June" and then people wanting and hoping for the game to be released and then that turned into a rumour. Although I must confess I haven't seen that rumour anywhere.

3. No era books planned, lots of modern places like regions of the Reik, Lustria, Ultjuan are more the focus.

A bit bummed by this but it is not surprising. An era book would have limited commercial appeal since only a subset of the players would be interested. Better to keep the player base in the same era.

4. Starter book is very distinct to core book, it's got simple rules and the adventure but the sourcebook on Ubrtsreik has lots of mileage.

About what I was expecting. I'm just baffled that this is coming out after the core rule book.

5. Conversion for 2nd to 4th isn't planned but they'll definetly consider it if they have time.

I take that as market speak for "not gonna happen". Also what we have heard so far the fourth edition will be second edition with some changes, so the conversion should be trivial.

I will convert all my WFRPv2 NPCs on this blog to WFRPv4.

6. No gnomes.

Heh, well not surprising. Gnomes were always tiny part of WFRP, after all ...

7. On Fimir it was, "I know the answer to that but I can't say".

Playing coy there, Cubicle 7. There's been other hints that the fimir are coming back so I think it's a foregone conclusion. But then again the fimir have already been covered by Robin Low in Warpstone, so I'm not pining for official support.

8. If they get to do Ulthuan Elf magic is a yes. They are familiar with fan sources on that note, like Swords of the South.

Cool. I guess. I'm not the least interested in knowing more about Ulthuan but if people want that more power to them!

9. Core rule book should very much be all you need, lots of spells he said.

Much like WFRPv1 and WFRPv2. Seems like a good strategy to have one book be all you need and then put out things that supplement that, like The Enemy Within and other stuff.

10. Advantage isn't capped. They used tokens to track it, dice would also work.

I'm not too keen on resolving advantage every round, nor of tracking it. For the players I guess it will be ok, I worry a bit how it would work for me as a GM.

11. TEW Director's Cut will be a prequel setting, still rooted in 1e, but modern otherwise. It will have lots of surprises for people who already played it, no word on specifics like Gideon the... person. Who's not anything else.

Prequel setting ... I wonder what that means? Could be that the assumptions of the campaign are mainly the same but as they are rooted in the WFRPv1 setting it will have to be set before the current WFBv8 setting.

Slightly contradicts the thing about "no era books", but I guess this will take place just 5 to 10 years before current setting.

12. The whole TEW end chapter is being redone - no Empire in Flames and probably no SRiK.

Here they dropped a bomb! Makes some sense as SRiK and EiF are mostly seen as the weakest parts of the classic campaign. But I am not convinced it's a good idea, what appealed to me was a new version of the classic campaign, not a new version of bits of it.

But then again, Graeme Davis can do no wrong in my book, so heave away, boys, heave away!

13. They might not be able to run a contest, as this needs GW approval. In fact, everything said online needs approval really. But they can easily help out with Five Page Fiction.

I'm not up to snuff on what this contest would be, the scenario contest maybe? And a fiction contest? Would be nice with an official stamp of course but I think the community should be able to pull this off themselves.

14. Told him about the Subreddit, Discord, and some personal WFRP conversion projects. Talked a bit about Vermintide - they're buds with Fatshark. Dom grew up with 1e, he's a huge fan.

Great thing that the guys at Cubicle 7 are fans. I know they've worked with some of the lads who worked with WFRPv2 and WFRPv3 and then mister Davis of course. So I'm  not worried about the quality of the game.

The communication on the other hand ...

Four characteristics confirmed

Looking through the latest news from Cubicle 7 we find that we have four charateristics confirmed:

• Weapon skill 
• Strength 
• Toughness
• Initiative

The only one I didn't really expect to make a come back was Initiative. I felt that in WFRPv1 everything centered around having a high Initiative. It simply became a characteristic that was a catch-all for too many Tests.

Given that Initiative is back, my guess is that it will be paired with an Initiative Bonus. Much like SB and TB we will have IB, and initiative order in combat will be determined by a roll of 1d10 + IB.

A guess as good as any in these times of foggy news from Cubicle 7.

Combat preview

Today Cubicle 7 dropped another "preview" of WFRPv4. This time the post talked about combat.

The roots to the new system is the combat system of WFRPv1 and WFRPv2. The stated goal has been to speed up combat by eliminating situations where nothing really happens in a combat round because of the low chances to hit.

There are a few nice morsels of information in the post.

Three characteristics are mentioned: Strength, Toughness and Initiative. Yes, that famous "Big I" makes a comeback! Hopefully it will be used more sparingly than in WFRPv1, where it ended up being used for just about anything that wasn't combat and became the most important of the characteristics. Strength and Toughness were in WFRPv2, but given the reintroduction of Initiative we might be looking at more influences from WFRPv1 than I expected.

As for combat the big new thing is Advantage. This can be earned during a battle and used to gain a +10% bonus on an attack test. Several points of advantage can be accumulated during a fight, and they dissipate when certain conditions are met. It seems be a more detailed take on "winning" in combat from WFRPv1. It'll be interesting to see how much "keeping track of fiddly bits" there is for the game master, but as the design goal has been to speed things up, I hope that's been taken care of.

Cubicle 7 works in mysterious ways - no WFRP launch at UK Games Expo

So you might remember the guys from UK Expo claiming to speak for C7 and announcing that WFRPv4 would launch at UK Games Expo?

 ---FROM THE VIDEO---

 "One of the things we can say, I know that Cubicle 7 are working on Warhammer 4 rpg and they've given us the rights to say today that that will be launched at the UK Games Expo."

 --------

The video is here, check at 19 minutes.

This has now been walked back according to grimandperilous.com.

I haven't found the clarification from Cubicle 7 that is mentioned in the linked post, but I guess that Jon Hodgson has now somewhere officially given information that identifies the UK Games Expo statement as being incorrect.

Now the game has been identified as the pdf being "anticipated" in June and the print version "anticipated" in July. I can't wrap my head around the "anticipated" thing ... sounds a lot weaker than "will be released" and more like "we put our hopes in that this thing will be released in pdf in June, but are choosing "anticipated" so as not to really promise anything".

The radio silence on this is baffling and confusing. I think that a somewhat more communicative stance from Cubicle 7 would generate a lot of positive chatter that would carry over to positive fan activity once the game is released. As it now stands when the last "preview" dropped, they said "more info coming soon" and we are now looking at over a week since then.

Yeah well, the game will be here some day. Stay tuned for more info from me about the game then.

Careers of the fourth edition

There have been some hints as to the careers of WFRP fourth edition. When the pre-order was announced, it was accompanied by three images of different careers. Also on the covers released as the first teaser are four adventurers with iconic looks. That gives us sixteen careers so far.

From those images and that number I presume that the career structure of this edition will be much like first and second edition.

I haven't seen the careers in the images identified anywhere, so my best guesses are found below using the careers from second edition as reference.

Bounty Hunter - Apprentice Wizard - Pistolier - Bailiff

Rat Catcher - Camp Follower - Explorer - Outlaw

Navigator - Envoy - Knight - Charlatan

Witch-hunter - Trollslayer - Noble - Zealot

WFRP fourth edition page count

Took to thinking about what little we know. One thing Cubicle 7 has told us is that the rulebook is 320 pages long.

At the moment I believe that the 320 page total of the core book is a result of taking WFRP second edition rulebook (259 pages) and adding The Old World Bestiary (131 pages). That makes 390 pages, but shave off the fluff section and we're down to 54 pages of beasts, and then we land at 309 pages.

We can remove 9 pages of beasts from the core rulebook, and that would give about 20 pages extra for fluff if C7 wanted to add some of that to the rulebook. So give or take some info here and there and we are in the vicinity of 320 pages.

We could also be looking at a combination of the second edition rulebook (259 pages), The Old World Bestiary (131 pages) and Sigmar's Heirs (131 pages). Cut out the beasts (9 pages) and the info on the empire  (14 pages) from the rulebook, add in the GM section of OWB and then add a slightly edited SH, you could land close to 320 pages.

The first one (core + OWB) seems the simplest. The second one (core + OWB + SH) is what I would have done.

Cubicle 7 starts the system previews

The other day Cubicle 7 started with their system previews. In keeping with the rollout so far, not much in the way of mechanics was gleaned from the information offered. Basically, there will be three ways of handling tests and the consequences of success or failure. And that's about it for the preview.

It seems to hew very closely to the second edition rules, as what is described in the preview can basically be found on page 88 and 89 of the WFRP second edition rulebook. Judging from that I am at the moment expecting the fourth edition to have basically the same rules as second edition, with some minor modifications.

This should sit well with the fans of first and second edition, although I have seen some posters express wishes for more experimentation and new takes. But we got that in spades with the third edition and that backfired with many old hands, so I firmly believe that Cubicle 7 will not take any such chances with this edition.

The next preview will be about combat. I hope we will get to know how the pc profiles look, and what statistics are used in the game.

Read the preview here!

WFRP: Cubicle 7 teases WFRP news

Cubicle  7 just minutes ago teased WFRP info on their Facebook page. So stay tuned to the internet, finally news is coming!

Maybe ...

/Magnus

WFRP: Fourth edition will launch at UK Games Expo

 A nice bit of news dropped through The BeastsOfWar YouTube channel, where they interviewed some chaps named Tony and Richard, who apparently are head honchos at the UK Games Expo.

The fourth edition of WFRP will be released at the expo, and that will be at the beginning of june this year!