Tabletop Spotlight: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 4th Edition
Return to the World-that-Was for some classic roleplaying adventures–fight threats to the Empire, win glory for Karl Franz, play a Ratcatcher and get your throat slit by Chaos Cultists in this terrifyingly grim and perilous game.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is a game in a class all itself. First released in the 80s, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has always captured the smaller parts of life in the Empire. With options like Ratcatcher and Tax Collector available to players, there’s a nitty-gritty to the game that you don’t find in most other roleplaying games. Life in the World-that-Was is nasty, brutish, and short. And heroes are forged out of common rabble, but only if they’re tough enough to survive.
And 4th Edition WFRP, by Cubicle 7 is a return to form for the game. It harkens back to that old-school flavor, while still keeping the game design fresh–but WFRP is in this interesting place, where it feels like the big draw of the system isn’t the game itself. Yes, the mechanics are good, but the mechanics aren’t the reason you play this game. The reason you play is the classes and the advancement.
The best part of the game is leveling up your character. You’ll take a character through a path that feels like an actual adventuring career. Each of the classes suggests its own narrative and has its own style and sense of humor–there’s a lot of depth to the game. A lot of different moving parts that you can fit together in unique ways. Each class has its own advancements, and when you’ve progressed enough, you can branch out into a select few others, and from there you can advance again into a new set of class. And so on.
And half of the fun is figuring out how you get from humble origins to the iconic heroic types of the World-that-Was. The game is very dense, very complex, but if you can get your mind around it, you’ll find the game is willing to take you along with it. WFRP is all about telling of life and heroes in Warhammer Fantasy, and it captures that feeling so incredibly well. Definitely check it out if you enjoyed the video–it’s available now from Cubicle 7 in FLGSes everywhere.
Happy Adventuring!
