What is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay?

The howls of Beastmen echo the forests as a rain-soaked group of travellers quicken their pace. Hooded figures gather in a basement to enact strange rituals. In a back ally flophouse a hapless adventurer averts his eyes as the barber-surgeon approaches his ruined leg with a hacksaw.

Writing my post on “What makes a good WFRP adventure?” I realised there was a lot to say on the themes of WFRP. As I mentioned in that post, WFRP means many things to different people, so again, there are my own personal interpretations on what WFRP means. Having said that, I think that there is a lot of commonality between the three editions I’m familiar with (1st, 2nd and 4th).

Exemplified by first edition, classic WFRP is:

• Grim – it’s a world where you can reasonably expect to be wading through sewers, dealing with beggars and ruffians. Elves, foreigners and wizards are mistrusted. Superstition and misinformation is rife. PCs may well begin at the very bottom of the pile as ragpickers, ratcatchers, hedge wizards or the like.
• Perilous – Insanity and disease are dangers for any PC. Magic is highly risky. Combat is deadly and dangerous, even for experienced PCs; as a result dungeon crawls are the exception rather than the rule. When PCs are injured, healing is often realistically longwinded.
• Chaos-haunted – whether the PCs deal with humans corrupted externally (mutants) or internally (cultists), or with Chaos-spawned monsters (Beastman or Skaven), they are very likely to be tangling with the forces or results of Chaos.
• Darkly humorous – a classic component of WFRP is black humour, whether from situations or puns.
• Grey morality – genuine heroes are rare and humanity’s worst excesses are often encountered. As a rule, nobles are arrogant, politicians and priests are often corrupt, watchmen are usually unsympathetic. Greed is common, often leading to ruin – both for the greedy person and those around them. The world is not fair, and the innocent often suffer.
• Low magic – magic does exist and it is component of many adventures, but it is rare. Magic items are very uncommon¹. Wizards are fairly rare, and quite limited in how many spells they can cast due to the magic point system. Gods exist but rarely intervene in the affairs of mortals.

Classic adventures deal with the failings of humanity. As a general rule, adversaries are not Orcs and Beastmen, but humans – whether that is cultists, mutants, criminal gangs or politicking nobles. Not for nothing is the defining campaign of WFRP The Enemy Within – indeed, in its introduction, it draws the clear distinction between the Enemy Without (the hordes of Chaos massed in the Northern Wastes, whose return Old Worlders rightly fear) and the Enemy Within (the servants of Chaos hiding amongst us, striving to weaken the Empire from within and leaving it open to the assault of the hordes from the north).

A fine upstanding citizen, from The Oldenhaller Contract. Copyright Games Workshop 1986

As I noted earlier, WFRP came into being as the Warhammer world was still being nailed down. It was published a couple of years before Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness, the seminal tome that really properly defined Chaos, and as a result Chaos is relatively mysterious in first edition adventures. We don’t really know who Tzeentch is (he’s not even mentioned in the core rulebook), and neither do the average denizens of the Empire.

It’s also worth noting how important class is in WFRP. D&D will pay lip service to this as you begin as a farmer-turned-adventurer and gradually accrue wealth and reputation, but in practice most of the time nobody will treat you particularly badly because of your background. In WFRP, there is a big class divide, where nobles can literally get away with murder when it comes to commoners, and most people genuinely accept their right to rule of their fellow man. There is also a sense of imminent social upheaval brought about by new technologies (the printing press, gunpowder) and a burgeoning middle class. Since you’ll likely begin as a penniless commoner, you can expect to be short of money for most of your adventuring career.

So classic WFRP adventures are:

• Dealing with the plots of mysterious Chaos cultists – seeking to gain power for themselves (as in Shadows Over Bogenhafen), or undermine the Empire (as in Power Behind the Throne), or just generally up to no good (as in Night of Blood).
• Encountering the results of Chaos, such as the mutated von Wittgenstein family and the Skaven hunting warpstone in Death on the Reik, or the Chaos-haunted house in The Haunting Horror
• Encountering the cruelty or folly of mankind, such as the or the revenge-obsessed wizard in Grapes of Wrath or the revenge-obsessed wizard in Lichemaster (!)
• Running around encountering silly characters and situations, such as the farce of A Rough Night at the Three Feathers, the silly melodrama of The Affair of the Hidden Jewel, or the antics of the Purple Hand in Death on the Reik.
• Dealing with Skaven who are perpetually in search of warpstone; interestingly this means that Skaven are often not outright antagonists, but can be bargained with.

As I noted in What Makes a Good WFRP Adventure, some scenarios are completely absent of supernatural elements (e.g. A Rough Night at the Three Feathers); others where the magical elements could be removed without really affecting the plot (e.g. Power Behind the Throne would be little changed without any supernatural stuff); and many others where there is only a single supernatural element that is important to the plot (such as Shadows Over Bogenhafen). There scenarios could almost be run in a real-world historical setting – particularly if you were willing to accept the existence and activity of demons (something a majority of people likely believed in at the time). Still, there are other excellent adventures that have rather more supernatural elements, such as Lichemaster and Death on the Reik.

Not pictured: supernatural elements. From A Rough Night at the Three Feathers, copyright Games Workshop 2005

And of course WFRP adventures are often – although not always – investigative. Famously Brian Ansell²‘s brief to Graeme Davis for Shadows Over Bogenhafen was “fantasy Call of Cthulhu” and many of the great WFRP adventures follow in its footsteps. The fact that combat is realistically dangerous, and the consequences of injury are long-lasting, certainly encourages PCs to avoid combat and similarly encourages adventures to be less action-heavy than comparable RPGs of the time. Having said that it is vanishingly rare for a WFRP adventure to actually lack combat at all – I seem to recall Graeme Davis saying (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that “everyone wants to fight a bad guy at the end”.

Classic WFRP is often set in urban and wilderness settings. Some campaigns take place on dangerous roads through the wilderness, with PCs finding shelter in coaching inns and small villages (e.g. the Restless Dead campaign); others take place on and around the great rivers of the Empire (e.g. Death on the Reik). Isolated outposts are also common: as well as the classic coaching inn and remote village, you have exaggeratedly Gothic castles or monasteries, ripe for hiding secrets or being the setting for a siege situation.

I love this map. From The Restless Dead, copyright Games Workshop 1989

Urban adventures are common, taking place in mercantile towns and great cities filled with the new middle class and starving masses stirred up by agitators where the gap between rich and poor is especially evident. You may well end up trudging through filthy sewers, risking disease and ruining your clothes, or striking a dubious bargain with a criminal gang to further your aims.

WFRP is not a place where heroism is absent or dead. While there is plenty of scope for PCs to be mercenary or even corrupted by Chaos, a lot of classic adventures assume that the PCs will investigate something or seek to thwart the Big Bad out of a sense of goodness and a desire to do the right thing, not merely the desire to get paid or save their own skin. That’s true of Shadows of Bogenhafen, Death on the Reik and Power Behind the Throne. A canny GM can provide incentives for a more mercenary party to tackle these plot threads, but in the adventures as written it is assumed PCs will choose to be heroes – even if most of those around them are not.

I think this one is controversial. I’ve often seen (e.g. on Reddit) the opinion that WFRP PCs will probably be entirely mercenary in their motivations. Indeed the WFRP Fourth Edition corebook’s introduction kind of assumes that! And of course it is completely fine for PCs to be motivated primarily by personal gain – it is completely in keeping with the Warhammer world. But its interesting to note that that isn’t really the assumption in a lot of classic First Edition adventures.

The changing face of WFRP

For my money, WFRP’s focus changed somewhat in Second Edition – although I get the impression that this may have started in the Hogshead era of First Edition. Most crucially, Second Edition is notable for bringing WFRP more into line with the current edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, in particular with the assumed setting of immediately after the awfully-named “Storm of Chaos” campaign. (This was a global campaign in which players could send in results of their battles to decide whether the Empire survived or fell to the new Chaos invasion; in the event Chaos players did really badly, Games Workshop fudged some results, and in-universe the invasion ravaged the north of the Empire and was eventually defeated at Middenheim.)

The siege of Middenheim. Copyright Games Workshop 2005

The Second Edition setting is thus explicitly a post-war setting, which is not a bad concept for WFRP – there’s plenty of scope for dealing with social upheaval due to returning wounded and the recent move to war footing. Unfortunately it massively undercuts some of the classic themes of WFRP. No longer is Chaos a hidden threat – instead everyone knows it exists and who the Chaos gods are. The threat that secret Chaos cults will undermine the Empire, leaving it ripe for invasion, is rather blunted since that has explicitly just happened, and they failed!

There are also some additional themes to WFRP that appear in Second Edition³:

• The fact that PCs rarely get paid (e.g. the Paths of the Damned campaign adventures), or if they do its often a rubbish reward (e.g. Barony of the Damned)
• Magic is now Colour Magic which is more dangerous, although also more organised (into the Colleges of Magic). Magic items are even rarer, and there is a much greater emphasis on how wizards are feared and mistrusted
• As a result over-zealous Witch Hunters are now a staple of the setting
• Sigmar is emphasised as being even more important as the principal deity of the Empire
• Skaven are no longer solely focused on Warpstone, but also quite like taking slaves and indeed eventually want to take over the lands of the hated man-things.

Bringing Us Up to the Present Day

Fourth Edition appears to continue the themes given above from both editions with which I’m familiar. It is clearly an edition direction intended to tap into nostalgia for First Edition – evidenced by the enormous number of 1e adventures which have been converted to fourth edition (in constrast to absolutely none of Second Edition’s). Yet it also attempts to cohere with the canonical Warhammer world of the battles games, like Second Edition.

In my experience so far the new adventures do a good job of sticking close to what I have identified as the classic themes of WFRP. Adventures are set in urban and rural environments, with a total absence of dungeon crawls. There are plenty of investigations. There is commendable restraint in featuring many supernatural elements. Nobles are usually corrupt and so is the Watch; criminals abound (and may well be somewhat sympathetic). Chaos cults are plentiful but not the only source of antagonism.

As the blog goes on we shall see how much this continues, but signs are certainly encouraging so far.

1. This is true of most WFRP 1st Edition adventures, at least the ones regarded as classics. The rulebook on the other hand has a reasonably large magic item section, implying the authors expected them to more common than was actually the case in a lot of published adventures. ↩︎
2. Games Workshop’s Managing Director of the time ↩︎
3. I heartily commend the Gamemaster chapter in the Second Edition rulebook which covers some “classic themes” for WFRP. ↩︎