Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory rulebook (Part 1: Character creation)

This is my first foray into the Grim Darkness of the Far Future (TM) on this blog (having mainly reviewed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay books before). It’s a universe I’ve never roleplayed in, but I played a lot of the wargame (2nd edition) back in the 1990s and it’s very dear to my heart. 

Wrath & Glory has a slightly unusual history. It was originally published by Ulisses Spiele in 2018, who held the licence from Games Workshop for Warhammer 40,000 roleplaying games. Six previous 40k RPGs had previously been published (including two versions of Dark Heresy¹) and W&G appears to have been intended as a more high-octane approach. 

Ulisses Spiele seem to not have done a great job with Wrath & Glory (based on the vague mumblings I’ve read online) and Games Workshop ended up giving the licence to Cubicle 7, who produced a brand-new version of the rulebook in 2020. This is what I’m looking at here. 

Three things to make clear at the start:

• This is not an actual play review. I sadly do not get to play RPGs much these days, so these are my notes on reading the rulebook. As such they should be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly when it comes to analysis of game mechanics. 
• The version of the book I have is the pdf from a Humble Bundle a year or two ago. It’s possible that it’s been updated since (I know this happens with WFRP rulebooks if you own them via DriveThruRPG)
• I’m not proposing to engage with the question “what is Warhammer 40,000” – it’s a big complicated setting and I could easily do a whole post on answering that question. If you don’t know, go watch this introductory video by the excellent Arbitor Ian. (But I will be doing a post on 40k Lore next week.)

So what is Wrath & Glory? Mechanically it presents uses a a fairly action-oriented game, using a dice pool mechanic. Thematically it’s a bit a kitchen sink approach to Warhammer 40,000 which enables you to play a variety of factions and species. Previous 40k rpgs had focused on enabling you to play one sort of campaign (agents of the Inquisition; a Rogue Trader and his retinue; Space Marines; evil servants of Chaos; grunts in the Imperial Guard). Wrath & Glory presents rules that (theoretically at least) let you do any of the above. How does it do?

A pet peeve of mine is that when RPGs stick the Rules section – the bit that tells you how to play the game – way, way into the book, usually after everything after character creation. In Wrath & Glory’s case you’ve read 158 pages before they tell you how to play the damn game. It’s not unusual in this (to name just two examples, WFRP and D&D both do the same) but it drives me crazy that you’ve read all this stuff about character creation, attributes, skills and so on before you get to find out how you actually use any of that stuff.

Instead, we begin with…

Character creation, Space Marine style. Copyright Cubicle 7

Character creation 

The interesting thing about character creation is that you (as a group of players) have to create a Framework first. This is the concept behind your party – why are they working together, and what kind of adventures do you want to go on? This is a great idea for RPGs in general, but its pretty much a necessity when you’ve created a RPG with such a broad scope – this game allows you to be mighty Space Marines, lowly Imperial Guardsmen, the weird servants of a radical Inquisitor, or a bunch of Orks bent on mayhem. Allowing players to create any character they want and then trying to fit that into a coherent party is likely to be an exercise in frustration.

At the same time you choose your Tier. This is Wrath & Glory’s answer to the problem that Space Marines are supposed to be a match for multiple ordinary humans so having a Guardman and a Marine in the same party is unlikely to work well – unless you nerf the Marine beyond all recognition. Thus the game’s various Archetypes (basically character classes) are divided into Tiers, and you choose which Tier you want to play for your game. Most of the game’s factions have Archetypes in multiple tiers (so you can play three different tiers of Scum or Orks, for instance). There are 4 Tiers, with each containing a varying number of archetypes; the fourth only contains two (Primaris Space Marines and Inquisitors). However there are rules for advancing a character from one tier to the next, so all is not lost.

The placing of some archetypes within tiers had me raising my eyebrows: I can accept that an Ork Nob or a Tech Priest is the same power level as a Space Marine; I have difficulty believing that any kind of Scum is on an equivalent footing, but apparently the Desperado is. And is the Commissar really superior to a Adepta Sororitas Battle Sister and of an equivalent power level to a Space Marine?

Character creation is… a bit more complicated than I’d like. (It’s not as complex as WFRP 4th Edition though.) After choosing your Framework & Tier with your friends, you select your Archetype. This isn’t too overwhelming – since you’re choosing only out of the Archetypes in your chosen Tier, the maximum amount of choice is choosing one out of 10 Archetypes (Tier 2), and in practice you may have less choice if your Framework excludes Orks and/or Eldar. (Indeed, I’m struggling to understand how you could meaningfully use Orks with this book – I can’t really imagine a party of mixed Orks and Imperials, but with only three Ork archetypes, all from different tiers, neither is it easy to imagine an Ork-only party being particularly interesting.) 

Anyway, having chosen your archetype you get a 100 XP per Tier (i.e. 100/200/300/400 XP) to spend on ‘buying’ your attributes, skills and talents. The archetype itself has an XP cost, which includes your species cost (since no Archetype is available to more than one species) as well as some skills and attributes, a unique Archetype Ability, plus starting wargear. You are then free to buy talents (which have varying XP costs) and upgrade your skills and attributes. Additionally, each archetype comes with a bundle of recommended attributes (ie above the default ones for the archetype) and another bundle of recommended skills, with XP costs for each, plus a selection of recommended talents. If that sounds a bit complicated, well it is, but the intention is to enable you to create a fairly standard character with a minimum of decision making – which is a good thing, given that creating a completely bespoke character would involve scores of decisions about where to set attributes and skills and talents – an extremely daunting process for a neophyte to this game. 

Ork Kommando

Primaris Marine

This is slightly undermined by the fact that (at least in the Archetypes I’ve delved into in detail) you can’t actually afford to buy all of the recommendations – you can typically get all of the recommended skills and attributes, and then have enough for one or two of the recommended talents. This is fine – it means you’ve got an obvious talent or two to buy first when you get to advance – but it would have been nice if the rulebook explained this was the intention rather than leaving you to puzzle it out.

Aside from a few questionable decisions about tiers, the Archetypes provide a good range… at least when it comes to Humans. Multiple archetypes are provided for Imperial Guard, Adeptus Mechanicus, Sisters of Battle and Adeptus Ministorum. Adeptus Arbites are mysteriously absent (it seems like they would be ideal for this sort of game, and they were a core class in Dark Heresy so I’m not sure why they’re omitted). Non-human races – including Adeptus Astartes – are notably more limited. Space Marines are limited to Scouts, Tactical Marines or Primaris Intercessors; Eldar to Corsairs (i.e. pirates), Rangers and Warlocks and Orks to Boyz, Kommandos and Nobz. To be sure, they’ve fitted an impressive number of Archetypes into this rulebook, but I do feel they might have been better putting in a few more Imperium ones and leaving the Eldar and Orks entirely for a supplement. (The Aeldari one is already out.)

I’m not going to go through any Archetypes in detail, but as far as I can see individual packages seem reasonably sensible. Oddly enough the Space Marine archetypes lack the “suggested” sections (for attributes, skills and talents) – this looks like an error, but it might also be because the basic package is so close in value to the target XP that you don’t have a lot of headroom to buy any additional stuff anyway. One oddity I found is that Space Marines appear to have nothing to back up mechanically their traditional description “And they shall no no fear”: base Willpower is 3 (better than average, but hardly amazing) and they don’t come with any species abilities to make them any less likely to suffer fear or morale loss than anyone else. On closer digging I discovered they actually do get +1 Resolve (which does help resist fear) – but the fact that I had to go searching for this, and it was in a different part of the book to the multi-page description of Space Marines as a faction, doesn’t speak terribly well of the book’s usability.

(There’s also the minor point that one – and only one – of the archetypes get to start play with an honest-to-goodness Imperial Frigate – i.e. a spaceship with literally thousands of crew. You might guess this is one of the Tier 4 archetypes, but no, it’s the Rogue Trader who for some reason is only Tier 2. If you would like rules for an Imperial Frigate then your guess is as good as mine since the rulebook is silent on this issue.)

One thing of note is that the game also provides support for playing a Chaos characters. Unlike other factions, Chaos doesn’t get their own archetypes, instead you just have some guidance on how to adapt Imperium archetypes to be Chaos – nothing particularly complex, but seems like it should work fine. 

Eldar Warlock

Imperial Guardsmen

Attributes and Skills

Attributes will be familiar to Warhammer 40k players and indeed most players of mainstream rpgs. Strength, Toughness, Initiative, Intelligence, Willpower and Fellowship all mean what you probably imagine they do. Agility is what you’d expect, but also incorporates ability with ranged attacks. Attributes have a minimum of 1 and maximum varies by species; for Humans it’s 8. An average Human has 2 in every attribute.

Brilliantly every attribute has a little table saying what it means if you have a score of 1, 2, 3-4 and 5-6. (7+ is almost superhuman.) This is fantastic for setting expectations, and demonstrates that an attribute of even 3 or 4 is pretty impressive.

I like the relatively small number of Attributes – it reduces the cognitive load on newer players, as well as the probability of redundant or overlapping attributes. I like a lot less that Wrath & Glory features an absolute TON of derived ‘traits’. There is: Defence (how hard you are to hit); Resilience (how good you are at withstanding injuries – how is this different to Toughness? Oh, it’s just Toughness +1… how pointless!); Wounds (this really means Max Wounds – how much you can be injured); Determination (how good you are at ignoring damage through force of will); Shock (how much mental trauma you can take; effectively equivalent to Wounds, but for mental damage); Conviction (how good you are at resisting corruption); Corruption (how much you’ve been corrupted); Resolve (your morale… how is this different to Determination?); Passive Awareness (how good you are at spotting things);  Influence (how much people think highly of you) and Wealth (how much resources your own). Good grief. I can see the value of some of these but there are so many and several are just equal to “Attribute +1” or “Attribute -1” which really suggests they are perhaps a waste of time. 

Annoyingly, these derived statistics aren’t even described in the “Attributes and Skills” chapter – they’re described earlier on, at the point you buy Attributes (3 chapters before you are told what Attrbiutes actually do). Sigh.

There’s the usual selection of skills, most of which will be familiar to WFRP or D&D players: e.g. Athletics, Awareness, Intimidate, Medicae etc. Interestingly the skill list includes Ballistic Skill and Weapon Skill, rather than having them as Attributes (as they are in the wargame and in WFRP), which is very sensible. As with WFRP, a skill test is made by adding your skill rank to the related attribute (so if you have Intelligence 2 and 1 rank in Awareness, your total Awareness is 3).

Again, there’s a great table showing what a variety of Difficult Numbers (DN) means for every single skill (with a note that you don’t normally roll for DN 1 checks since they are so straightforward). So Intimidating a Snotling is a DN1 check; Intimidating an Inquisitor to stop Exterminatus with a simple scowl is DN9!

(We still haven’t got to the Rules chapter, so we don’t know what that actually means: the simple explanation is that for the latter example you would need 9 successes from your pool of d6s, where a result of 4 or 5 is one success, and a 6 is two successes. As you can imagine this makes calculating probability on the fly a real pig!)

Anyway, that gripe aside, this table is fantastic and I love it.

Some interesting observations: Ballistic Skill incorporates knowledge of ranged weapons, as well as ability to shoot. Intimidate is based off Willpower, rather than Fellowship as you might expect; this makes a great deal of sense to me. (Appropriately, Orks get to base Intimidate on Strength instead.)

Advancement

Levelling up in Wrath & Glory is basically very simple – you just spend XP on improving attributes and skills and buying talents, just like in character creation. As a way of marking your power level, every time you accrue 40 XP (whether or not you’ve spent it on advances) you increase your Rank – so if you start a new Space Marine Scout you’ll be at Tier 2 Rank 1 with 200 XP (what all T2 characters begin with); then by the time you’ve got to 280 XP you’ll be Tier 2 Rank 3. (Your Rank impact a few derived stats and talents.)

W&G party, blinged out. Copyright Cubicle 7

However when you reach 100 XP over your starting XP – this being the point at which you have as much XP as a starting character of the next Tier – you get to increase your Tier. This is when things get a bit complicated. A Tier 2 character with 300 XP (total) is not actually the same power level as a starting Tier 3 character, because T3 archetype abilities are (at least in theory) more powerful than T2 archetype abilities. (In practice your wargear is going to make a big difference to your power level.)

When you Ascend you use XP to purchase an ‘Ascension Package’, which are basically a package of mechanical bonuses with a vignette to explain how you got them. Examples are “you undergo a psychic awakening” (so you get the Pskyer keyword, meaning you can now buy psychic powers) or “you suffer horrific injuries and your patron rebuilds you with augmetics” or even just “you did something really impressive and gain huge influence plus a nemesis”. Examples of mechanical bonuses are things like getting a free talent, gaining Influence or Wealth, or getting a cool piece of wargear; you may also gain influence with a new faction, represented by gaining their keyword, either because you helped them, or because they’ve decided to sponsor you.

I have mixed feelings about this system. On the one hand having something momentous happen to usher in your ascension to a new power level is a nice touch. On the other hand, presumably all the members of your party are going to have the same XP so they’re all going to coincidentally individually experience a momentous event at the same time – obviously you could weave these together into a single narrative (“Garrack suffers a horrendous injury while Morwyn saves the day through an act of extreme heroism”) but this feels like it might be tricky to achieve. 

Instead of buying an Ascension Package you can opt for ‘Archetype Ascension’. In this case once you’ve reached Rank 3, you choose an Archetype of the next Tier and just spend XP to exceed its minimum Attributes and Skills. Once you’ve done that you automatically gain the new Archetype Ability, Influence and Wargear (which the GM is presumably going to need to come up with a justification for) Pretty simple! This is how the game represents for instance graduating from a SM Scout to a fully fledged Space Marine; I guess you could also use it for an Eldar changing Path. It has to be said however that from a lore perspective there are a lot of archetypes that just don’t flow into each other very well: e.g. you’d think that a Tier 1 Imperial Guardsman could graduate to some sort of veteran, but the IG archetype for Tier 2 is the Tempestus Scion, who are apparently all picked and conditioned from childhood; similarly the next Tier Scum archetype after Ganger is Scavvy, which isn’t simply a better version of a Ganger but is instead a mutant.  (Though I’m sure you can come up with justifications for why your particular Guardsman has been given special treatment to become a Tempetus Scion.)

I have to say that this feels like a bit of a cheat option mechanically. Ascension Packages have an XP cost for the benefits they provide, but there doesn’t seem to be any equivalent XP cost for all the benefits you gain from Archetype Advancement (e.g. a Tactical Space Marine upgrading from a Scout will get incredibly valuable Wargear, including Power Armour plus an additional strong Archetype Ability and +1 Influence).

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That’s it for this post – see here for part 2 of the review, in which we actually discover what the rules of the game are. And I’ll have a post on my thoughts on Warhammer 40,000 lore next week too.

Buy Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory from DriveThruRPG here or from Cubicle 7 here. The former is an affiliate link so I receive a small payment for purchases made using it. 

1. I’ve read Dark Heresy 1st edition and Rogue Trader and will eventually post something about them on this blog. ↩︎