More info on upcoming WFRP releases

The marvellous Jordan Sorcery has released an interview with Dominic McDowell and Padraig Murphy of Cubicle 7, which explores the future of WFRP and The Old World RPG, as well as touching more generally on developments in the tabletop RPG industry.

Takeaways for WFRP are:

• WFRP 4e is not going anyway (Padraig: “You’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands”) – there are years worth of content to come! They explicitly refuted the idea that the upcoming The Old World RPG will result in a lack of support for WFRP.
• The Dwarf book and High Elf book will actually be two books each – one each for players (more character options) and one each for GMs (e.g. how to create Dwarf-focused adventures).
• The Marienburg book is still coming, with involvement from Anthony Ragan now confirmed (he wrote the 1e Marienburg sourcebook, which I reviewed here) .
• They’ll be more digital stuff coming out as printing costs increase.
• Having said that, they allude to another compilation of digital-only stuff coming out in print (I guess in a similar vein to Reikland Miscellanea), and they’re certainly not saying “no more print stuff”.

And The Old World RPG is coming. Some tidbits:

• Sounds like this will be less complex than WFRP 4e to help onboard people
• It’s still early days and nothing is really set in stone. The idea is that products will (somewhat) follow the storyline of the wargame so you can experience that grand story arc from a more “in the weeds” level.
• It won’t be the same system as WFRP 4e but it will be recognisably similar (I think in terms of statistics, skills etc). They tentatively hope (without committing!) that you’ll be able to convert between the systems relatively easily, should you want to play The Old World adventures using the WFRP 4e system.

I feel like this is part of the answer to the question “why don’t they just produce The Old World sourcebooks for WFRP 4e”: recognising that 4e is a very crunchy system, and aiming to reach an audience that wants a game that is simpler to learn. That makes sense: presumably the hope is that the RPG will attract wargame players who don’t already play RPGs (or whose only experience is D&D 5e).

Back on WFRP, there isn’t much new information here, but the news that there will be two books each for the Dwarf and Elf books is interesting. I guess it means you can have GM-relevant stuff which you don’t want players to read while enabling players to buy a book to get new and exciting careers for their favourite species! And I’m delighted to hear that Anthony Ragan will be involved in the new Marienburg book – I absolute loved his work on the 1st Edition version. (And he’s very kindly agreed to be interviewed by me, so watch out for that in the next month or two!)

If you don’t already, I heartily recommend watching Jordan Sorcery’s stuff on Youtube. He has some great interviews with giants of the RPG industry, as well as retrospectives on old Games Workshop products (I recently watched the video on Space Hulk, which brought back some very happy memories!)