BlogWFRP: the past and the future
by Server GoddessOver 20 years ago I read in a popular (back then) german RPG-magazine called Zauberzeit about a new british roleplaying game which was just published and had an awesome campaign consisting of several boxes with amazing handouts, maps and an extremely great story. What faszinated me even more was the fact that the game-world was not like the other roleplaying games I played back then. It had a gameworld that was loosely based on medieveal/rennaissance Europe and was still fantasy. So in addition to all European cultures it had the typical fantasy stuff like wizards, elves, dwarves and orcs. The most important thing for me was that its main background was placed in a country that was based on the holy-roman Empire. I thought ‘Wow! An english game with german background. Thats amazing!’. I was 15 and the game was of course WFRP. So I bought the game and the campaign and started reading. It was a challenge - my english was not good (to be honest, it was lousy) and there were so many things to read. But I tried and I never regret it. It was so different than anything I’d played before. Apart from the background there was this careersystem that worked so different from all other level based systems. Also the adventures where so different as they were no stupid dungeon-crawls like most of the adventures we used to play. You could even play a beggar or a student if you wanted. WFRP was indeed the first roleplaying game which redefined the term roleplaying for me. So I started to love this game and soon it was my favourite system. I still played other systems like AD&D, MERP, GURPS or Star Wars but WFRP became a constant in my rpg-live.
Since then a lot of things happened, both to me and to the game. I remember the time when Games Workshop decided the first time they won’t publish WFRP anymore and the game was continued by Flame. A couple of republished White Dwarf-articles in a companion, a few sourcebooks and a not so good dungeon-crawl campaign (Doomstones) Flame closed down and it left WFRP to its fate. Back then there was no internet around so it took me a year or two until I realized that there were no new products for my favourite game. But I didn’t care because we were playing an epic WFRP-campaign, in fact we had already played it for several years and we planned to play it next years. So what? While others got into storytelling games like Ars Magicka or Vampires: The Gathering which became quite popular in Austria in the early nineties my friends and I continued playing WFRP. We had already tons of houserules and tinkered around with the gaming system to make it fit better for our needs.
I think it was in 1997 when I discovered the internet and suddenly realized, that we were not the only ones in the world who still played the game. There were dozens of fanmade websites dedicated to the roleplaying game placed in the grim world of perilous adventure. And there was the WFRP mailing list, a place where avid WFRP fans were discussing about their favourite game. I joined the mailing list, the first years as a lurker, because I had no internet at home and was using my works email address. Around this time I learned that a new english company called Hogshead Publishing aquired the WFRP-license and was republishing old books. Great! The Dark Ages were over and my game was alive again. Back then I decided that I wanted to contribute something to WFRP. So I wrote several rather lousy adventures and started my project about monastic live in the world of Warhammer which I published in late 1999 on the WFRP-mailing list. Hogshead had just published on of the best WFRP sourcebooks ever, Marienburg: Sold down the River and now they annouced that they were working on Realms of Sorcery - the magic sourcebook which was announced since 1987! Nothing could be better, could it?
During the time on the WFRP mailing list I met a lot of people like Alfred Nunez, Anthony Ragan, Tim Eccles and others which over the years became good friends. But somewhen in 2000 something happened to the mailing list and most discussions became flamewars. Who doesn’t remember the MadAlfred-fanclub and the discussions between MadAlfred and Rev. Lepper. I realized that the mailing list had its climax and its popularity was waning. So I started with the plans for a WFRP-centered website. I contacted a lot of friends from the mailing-list and asked them if they would be interested in writing for my project. Nearly all said yes and I started with the work. Back then I had no idea how to make a website or set up a webserver. But I did not hesitate and the project was growing. In summer 2001 the project was nearly ready, all I was looking for was a good name. But I found nothing which sounded good enough - I had ideas like WFRP-magazine or Warhammeronline (funny, isn’t it?) but nothing was just right. It was a player from my WFRP-campaign and good friend Markus Widmer who suggested naming it ‘Strike to Stun’. And so it began. Basically I wanted to launch Strike to Stun on September 12th, 2001, but because of the events on the day before I decided to postpone it for a couple of days (I learned about the happenings in NY on the Mordheim-mailing list when Donato Ranzato wrote that a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center). When I finally launched StS on September 20th, 2001 it quickly became popular in the WFRP-community. Back then there were several ‘big’ sites for WFRP existing: Critical Hit, Warhammer Forever, the old Warhammer.net and others. I think it StS became quickly equal to this sites and was respected in the community. It was because of StS that Hogsheads boss James Wallis invited me to the Realm of Sorcery launch party in London where I met many of the people I knew from the various mailing lists like MadAlfred, James Wallis, Warpstone-publisher John Foody, TimCon-organizer Tim Eccles and Mordheim-author Tuomas Pirinen. I enjoyed the time in London.
In the following year I opened the StS-forums which were not as popular in the beginning because there were several other places where people could discuss about WFRP. The most important forum back then was Critical Hit. The WFRP mailing list was nearly abandoned back then with only a few mails every day. However it seemed that the community was not happy with the stuff Hogshead was publishing. Most of it was republished stuff (the Doomstones campaign, several rearranged sourcebooks/companions and the Enemy Within campaign) and it seemed that there was a problem with the publishing of the final part of the EW-campaign, Empire in Flames. There were rumours that GW did not want it to be published because the happenings were not GW-canon. There were also rumours that James Wallis was trying to rewrite the climax of the campaign. But this should never be released. In 2002 James Wallis announced that Hogshead will stop publishing WFRP and so the game was just back in the Dark Ages. But WFRP fans are WFRP fans and we had experienced this before. So the community took over again… Hogshead was not the last to quit. Merely a year later Critical Hit closed its forums and the whole community was without a place to discuss. From one day to the other the activity on the StS-forums rose by at least 2,000 %. It was back then when a competitor who run another WFRP-site found it fun to hack my forum-software, deleting some tables just to get more people posting on his site…
In April 2004 I was invited to GW-Headquarters in Nottingham by Specialist Games, mostly because of the Mordheim stuff I published on StS. Alessio Cavatore showed me around in the studio, I met the Perry twins and saw the first models of the Storm of Chaos-summer campaign. I realized that there is something cooking, because a guy there mentioned that they were roleplaying a game placed in the Warhammer world which is not WFRP… When I came back to London Tim Eccles checked if I had been brainwashed in Nottingham. No, I wasn’t - but I still think that Dwarves have no pikes because they are simply too small. In the same week there was the first Tim Con and I enjoyed playing several good games of WFRP and meeting other people I knew from the forum.
Then GW announced that they will publish WFRP again. The game will be totally redesigned by Green Ronin and published by a newly created division of GW called Black Industries. This news hit the community like a twin-tailed comet. A new version of Warhammer, after nearly 17 years and under control of GW again. That was indeed great news. Some people complained that it won’t be good because of Chris Pramas and Green Ronin, but to be honest I could never understand this complaints. I was relatively neutral towards WFRP. There were even rumours that GR only took the license for WFRP to get the license for the 40k RPG. Whatever was the reason, the next years saw a great number of very good supplements and adventures for the new WFRP v2. The new system was slightly different but still had enough of the old mechanics to be considered as a successor of the old WFRP. But it was clear that after 17 years the communities expectations were pitched too high. So not all people were happy with the new version, especially because of the fact that the game had adopted the new background of the WFB-canon, together with the Storm of Chaos, Arthurian Bretonnia and other nasty things. So it happend that the community split: those players who liked the new version moved to the Black Industries forum while the WFRP 1 fans remained on the StS-forums. So from one moment to the other StS became the place for the old-farts (as we were called by some people at the BI-forums). Nevertheless I continued StS and people kept posting on the forum, even if the posts became less. You could think about WFRP2 what you want but it cannot be denied that the last years have seen the publishing of a lot of great supplements for WFRP. Never before so many sourcebooks have been published, most of them of excellent quality.
When Black Industries announced in 2008 that they will stop publishing WFRP we were already used to this. Could something worse happen to us WFRP fans? I mean something worse than our game dropped by its publisher for the third time? I just wanted to publish the news on StS that the Dark Ages were back when I heard about the news that Fantasy Flight Games had aquired the WFRP & 40k license and planned to continue WFRP. Wow, there could definitely happen worse, I thought. FFG is a great publisher, not another small company like Hogshead was, so they might have enough manpower to continue the work of Black Industries/Green Ronon I thought. I thought! Because after more than a year of the FFG-era we just saw two new supplements of which one is just a recompilation of previous published material. Apart from that FFG concentrated on selling the remainders of the Black Industries publications without reprinting them and doing nothing else. Recently they announced that they will publish PDF versions of WFRP sourcebooks on RPGNow. But what does this mean? Will the old stuff be republished or will they be furthermore only available as online versions (with minimal effort for FFG). They even have a very strange information policy as the news about the RPGNow deal were on StS, Twitter and other websites before they officially announced it on their site. So what will the next years bring for WFRP? Will FFG publish new stuff or concentrate on reprinting the old stuff (or even only republish PDF-versions of old sourcebooks)? There were some rumours about a WFRP v3 in various forums but I don’t think the time is ripe yet. I have the feeling that FFG is not planning to do very much for WFRP in the next years though. Together with the license for WFRP they aquired the 40k license as well as the the license to republish other GW games like Talisman or produce even new ones like ‘Chaos in the Old World’. I mean they don’t even have the rulebook available. How should somebody who is interested in playing WFRP starting to play the game if he has no luck in getting a remainder copy at the local gamestore? Buy it on Ebay? I mean they could at least republish it on RPGNow. But they didn’t. At least not until now. This is the reason why some people think that there will be a new version of WFRP soon. Perhaps there is one, perhaps not. We will see what happens to WFRP in the future. Don’t forget, we are always prepared for the Dark Ages…
June 21st, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Whilst I have my concerns, I’m not despairing yet, FFG are clearly putting a lot into Dark Heresy and developing decent sourcebooks does take time.
Regarding the rulebook I have to ask whether it’s necessary to reprint it yet? I was in central London last week and both Orc’s Nest and Forbidden Planet had several copies of it. There are one or two other supplements that aren’t available and it’d be nice if they were, but the rulebook’s the really important one. I certainly do hope that pdfs aren’t seen as a substitute for reprints- that really would be a nightmare scenario.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:08 pm
If you have a local gamestore that has a copy, yes. But if you live in an area without a gamestore or just want to order it online you’ve got a problem.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:42 pm
”if you live in an area without a gamestore or just want to order it online you’ve got a problem.”
I sympathise with the former but not with the latter. They should get their fat arses out the door sometime. In any event, the world did actually turn before the internet came along and I’m sure that people eventually ge the chance to go to the shops. I appreciate that it’s not always convenient or an ideal situation though.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Can’t agree with you, Aldred. One can drag their fat arse across Poland to find out that a majority of WFRP supplement is available nowhere. Amazon, eBay, Leisure Games and a couple of other on-line shops offer the only way to get hold of these titles. And yes, in the pre-internet era English-language roleplaying games were in possession of those Poles who could afford to go abroad.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:23 pm
In that case I stand corrected.
June 21st, 2009 at 4:09 pm
For me, the supplemental books have left a lot to be desired. They may have great story but lack the other two pillars needed in such books. They lack a “How-To” section and a “Instant Go” sections. For people without a lot of time to set up campaigns these sections are not simply time and effort savers they are instruction manuals.
Take the supplement “Children of the Horned Rat” as an example. There is excellent descriptions of Skaven society and life with a short section of character creation. But there is almost no information about how to craft a Skaven encounter. How many do I put in an encounter if my players average 13 wounds? Or are in their third careers? This is rather important information. How do I balance the challenge against the perceived threat?
The supplement also lacks the “Instant-Go” in that it give careers for creating characters but what do those look like as encounters? They spent the last 90 or so pages describing the Skaven but give the GM almost nothing to turn that into actual game play. What are the stats and makeup for a simple scouting party? For those guarding the inner sanctum of the colony? What can be swapped out to make it harder? Easier?
That sort of information, which is readily found in just about every other game system supplement out there is missing from the WFRP ones. And I think it really hurts the game. It does almost nothing to help those trying to put together a fun time for their friends. Which really becomes a hard sell to those trying to get people into this excellent gaming world.
The future of this game is not in FFG’s hands. It is in ours. We need to be the ones talking to FFG about what we would like to see happen. What are the most demanded books and ask that they are fast-tracted for pdf publishing. What do we need to help us run our campaigns and see that sort of information gets into the books.
And for those of us who want to expand this into a larger hobby how about a little support. Would a media kit be too much to ask for if we want to run a game at a local convention?
How about a quick-start set of rules?
Or even reaching out the community to and create a directory of freely available adventures or even sanctioning an official living campaign?
June 21st, 2009 at 5:50 pm
“Take the supplement “Children of the Horned Rat” as an example… [snip]… But there is almost no information about how to craft a Skaven encounter. How many do I put in an encounter if my players average 13 wounds? Or are in their third careers? This is rather important information. How do I balance the challenge against the perceived threat?”
Personally, that’s precisely the sort of stuff I don’t want to see in a supplement. It bores the living daylights out of me.
Regards
Robin
June 21st, 2009 at 6:16 pm
“Personally, that’s precisely the sort of stuff I don’t want to see in a supplement. It bores the living daylights out of me.”
I never once said that it isn’t boring information. It is. It’s incredibly boring stuff.
What I said is that it is needed information. Needed to be able to craft something which keeps my players coming back. The number one anti-fun time is character death. I can pile on the monsters until the characters get eaten but that doesn’t make the encounter fun. It means I lose another session to character creation instead of using that time to getting them to tell their story.
Having that insight into how the designers of the game intended and tested their ideas is one more tool I have when crafting a campaign. And anything which helps in that process is something I want. It does not matter to me if it is boring.
June 21st, 2009 at 6:41 pm
“What I said is that it is needed information.”
Okay, fair enough, but I don’t agree it’s needed. Now, I’m not an experienced GM, but my attitude in part comes from the GMs who’ve run for me over the years. They hated this sort of stuff, too, and ran without worrying about it.
I also don’t believe in balancing challenges against character ability - any given situation should be realistic, and if that means the characters are outclassed, then they should run away.
Anyway, to me it matters a great deal if it’s boring, because if a book is boring then I’ve wasted my money, and I’ll think twice before I buy the next book.
Regards
Robin
June 21st, 2009 at 7:04 pm
“I also don’t believe in balancing challenges against character ability - any given situation should be realistic, and if that means the characters are outclassed, then they should run away.”
If you have players willing to do that, then count yourself blessed. I have rarely GMed for a group that was willing to do so let alone found a story situation where it calls for the characters to seek a fall back position. In almost every situation where I have stacked against the players heavily, they have gone through with their attack and suffered. They’re not being stupid, they’re just being heroic. Incredible odds and all that. Which is why we play, is it not? To be the hero?
In any case, I get that you don’t want this particular tool. That’s fine.
I do, though.
And just as such information would keep you from buying their books, the lack of this information is doing the same for me. I don’t have the time to craft all of this from scratch and this would go a long way to keeping me involved with their products.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:01 pm
“Which is why we play, is it not? To be the hero?”
Not necessarily. I play to be an active part of a story, making decisions that make sense for the character in whatever situation he finds himself in. I also want the GM to create credible rather than balanced situations.
“In any case, I get that you don’t want this particular tool. That’s fine. I do, though.”
Again, that’s fair enough. I’m not saying you’re wrong in wanting these things, but I have to push for what I want, too.
Anyway, I think we’re moving away from the Server Goddess’s subject.
Regards
Robin
June 21st, 2009 at 8:31 pm
[...] Przesz?o?? i przysz?o?? Na Strike to Stun ukaza? si? ciekawy artyku? Server Goddes w którym omawia ona przesz?o?? i przysz?o?? WFRP. Polecam lektur?. [...]
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 am
Hear! Hear! Robin.
h3lldr0p you’re looking for D&D 3E or 4E. This is WFRP. PCs that don’t run away die… they die of disease or from the blunt crushing trauma of an Orc chopp’a.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
or go insane
but you bring up a good point, WFRP has never been a game that is about balancing encounters or careers for that matter, esp with WFRP1e (which is actually my favourite edition for this very reason, that and the background).
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
I think that the role of fate, in both editions, prove that an adventurer is not a run of the mill character. They may still fall by the wayside, meeting a horrible death or avoiding th erole of a hero, but like it or not they are marked by the Gods and thus a hero.
June 25th, 2009 at 7:43 am
@all…
What you are talking about?
This is Warhammer. In the past more than 20 years we all fleshed out the grim world of perilous adventure on our own (more or less). We got some nice and not so nice supplements, yes. Why must the one or the other always swar his head off (this is bad, and that is not good). I thought we in the good old empire (germany) do that quiet often in every stage of live. Why do that in your hobby?
this is roleplaying. You the gm build up a story which can be fleshed out with the imaginations of both payer and gm.
Yes the dark age is about to come back… but wfrp is a dark fantasy roleplay. This will fit, will it?
So be patient. There will come the time that someone brings up new supps and adventures for warhammer. It will not die…
Praise Sigmar
Reiklander
June 28th, 2009 at 7:45 am
Balancing is not necessarily a “must-have” element of roleplaying, its just a question of playing style. WFRP is both heroic with its emperors riding on griffons and fighting the chaos and non-heroic with its dying in the dirty sewers due to infection.