On Tuesday, we revealed that Cubicle 7 was deep into development on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 5th edition, an update to its popular game of grim and perilous adventure in the Old World. When we interviewed Cubicle 7’s Head of Creative and Design Dominic McDowall he had more to tell us about the new edition than we could possibly fit into that article – so here are his expanded answers in full.
For those not in the know, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay – WFRP to its friends – has been around for longer than Warhammer 40k, with the first edition debuting in 1986. Cubicle 7 published the fourth edition core rules in 2018 and has expanded the line with dozens of sourcebooks and adventures since then. If you just want to get the critical details about the new edition, check out our reveal article – otherwise, read on:
Wargamer: So, why are you working on fifth edition now?
Dominic McDowall: It’s something that has been building for a while, and the 40th anniversary celebration coming along just seems like the right time to do it. We’ve done loads of books for fourth ed, and with all of those, all of our playtesting, the extra bits that we’ve been developing, all the feedback from the community and stuff like that, it had that critical mass to it. So we were looking for an opportunity to do it, and this seemed like the best one to put it all together.
WG: So is fifth edition an evolution or a revolution?
DMD: It’s an evolution. We are building on what worked really well in fourth edition. I think there’s been a growing kind of clamor for a new edition of the rule book for a while, with some of the changes that we brought in with Winds of Magic, for example, that were really, really good, built into the core of the system. With fourth edition, one of the things that I hear is that there’s a really satisfying amount of depth, and people like the level of complexity it goes into, but in some places, it was a lot.
As a whole, when you’ve got that level of detail across everything, it was a bit much for some people. There’s a way of handling a lot of specific [situations] which [each] work well on their own. I think that most people would say, yeah, there’s an internal logic to all of it. But it was just a lot to keep in your head, and a lot of different bits, especially when you get abilities stacking and reinforcing each other, things like that.
We’ve been working on it for the last few years, just trying to find where are those bits where we can make it a little bit simpler without losing anything. Where the additional complexity doesn’t really give the returns in terms of satisfaction of the experience or the detail you go into.
WG: Can you give us an example of something specific?
DMD: We had Fate, Fortune, and Resolve in WFRP fourth edition, and they did different things and were geared towards different parts of the rule set, but they were basically just Fate points and the extension from those. So we’ve looked at how people are using them, what are the really satisfying ways that they’re deployed – so in fifth edition, there are just Fate points and Fortune points, and one of them is the big ‘save your life’ points, and [the other] is the more regular ‘get a bit of an advantage’ points.
There’s [still] a satisfying level of crunch, and it’s going to be a bit crunchier than the average [RPG]. [Fifth edition] is not simplifying particularly, but it’s unifying things a little bit more, and taking out some of the things where you don’t always need that level of granularity and it’s okay to use the usual range of success and failure.
So you don’t always need to know to the nth degree of detail how bribery works across different social situations. It’s good enough to say, ‘Okay, we’ve got a solid system that tells you whether you are successful or not, or how much it would cost to bribe somebody’. So it’s streamlining again – but it’s not dumbing down.
WG: Is there a risk of system bloat creeping back in as you start to publish more supplements?
DMD: I would hope not. We’ll see – the best of intentions. The longer you work with [a set of] rules, the closer that you get to them as well. It’s over eight years since I sat down with the blank page in front of me to start on fourth ed. So we’ve worked with it for a long time now, I think there’s more of a feel for it, after all that time and all those products.
I mean, you never know. Like any game system, as soon as you’ve established a category of thing, then that’s the fight, to keep that nice and streamlined and not let it go too broad, as much as the struggle to stop people from adding subsystems on to everything.
WG: Will it be close enough to fourth edition that people can use their old supplements?
DMD: Absolutely yes. Backwards compatibility was one of the key things that we wanted to make sure of. So we’ve kept the numeric ranges all the same. The names for things are the same.
So what you’ll find [if you look at an NPC block from an older supplement] is that there’ll be less direct interaction and reinforcement between some of the talents, things like that, but your NPCs from ‘The Enemy Within’, the abilities they have, all have an impact. They’re all there in the game. So it won’t be that half of them stop working. The way that you use some of the stuff changes, but the [named Skills and Talents] that you’re using, by and large, stay the same.
Now even when you’re trying to keep it as close as possible, there’s always some things [that do change]. And if something needs to change for the better, then you’ve got to make that decision about where the line is. So I’m sure there’ll be a couple of things that will have changed enough that we’ll put out a document to accompany the launch, to just show exactly what those are, so people can join the dots.
But I think that, touch wood, they’re pretty much kept to a minimum, so it should be as straightforward as possible for people. Obviously the lore stays the same, which is most of the campaign and adventure content, it’s the NPC stats and things like how they interact that’s the big part. The difficulties for skill tests and things, they’re all staying the same.
It’s more that we had a look through everything and standardized it a bit more. So there’s less effort to work out how everything interacts, a little bit more peace of mind. Quality of life improvements is a high degree of what we’re falling into, and then some clarifications around how the core mechanics work as well.
WG: Could you give us an example of a core rules change?
DMD: Just making it absolutely clear with the tests exactly what order you do things in – and there’s been more of a firm divide between the things that impact roles. So the modifiers are a bit more categorized and applied in more of a standardized way. With D100 we want to avoid people doing as much maths as possible.
So there is one double digit modifier – which is the difficulty of the test – and then you work out your success level, which is how many 10s you’ve made the roll by. At that point you switch into single digit [modifiers]. Say you’ve got a skill of 30, the difficulty is +20, so 50 is the number you’re rolling against. You’re rolling under that, so if you get a 30 you’ve made it by two success levels. At that point you [get any modifiers to] success levels, and you’re adding or subtracting ones or twos. There was a bit more of a mixture [of modifiers] in fourth edition.
We kept an eye on record keeping as well. So things like advantage in combat, we have a new implementation of that, which doesn’t require tracking of points. We’ve been paying attention to feedback from the release, and lots of internal play tests over the years, getting hopefully to the sweet spot, keeping that level of granularity that we’ve had a lot good reactions to, while taking some of the pain points out of the areas where people have said that they’ve run into difficulties or just bounced off a bit.
WG: Every edition of WFRP has its mega campaign – so are you working on a new one?
DMD: We are working on one. I can’t say too much about that at the moment, but we have just finished play test on part one. The pressures on for the team now that I’m firing that starting pistol in public! But we are underway.
WG: Could you give us a hint about how long it’s going to be?
DMD: It will be multi-part, I think that’s probably the best thing to say at the moment. We’re still looking at the schedule exactly for when that’ll land.
WG: Speaking of time, when is fifth edition set?
DMD: It is in a similar time period to fourth edition.
WG: Can you tell us anything about how careers might change?
DMD: We’ve tweaked them so they’ve all got 10 skills per level per career now, so that you get a bit more variety between characters in the same career track. So they’ve been tweaked like that.
WG: Aside from the core book, what new products should people expect?
DMD: Similar to the Warhammer: the Old World RPG, we’ll put together a launch pack for WFRP fifth edition as well – with nice bits and pieces and accessories and things that help to make things easier at the table. So a couple of card decks and some dice, maps as well.
I’m trying to get more maps together. We used to do maps [more frequently] when we had our own warehouse, and then we moved into an outsourced warehouse, and there’s just isn’t that good of a solution anymore. We had the high technology of a table and a spare IKEA table leg, and that’s how we used to do the maps. And professional warehouses, for some reason, are unwilling to go with this high technology solution. And then we never had them in America, but I think we have a provider now who can do both. So we should be seeing some of the old maps coming back as well.
WG: Will you be updating any of the fourth edition supplements?
DMD: One of the other reasons for the backwards compatibility is that we’ve got so many plans, the last thing we want to do is have to go back and remake anything that we’ve already done. That’s all good and stays there and we can just keep going onwards to all the places that we haven’t covered yet.
WG: So will fourth edition titles stay in print and in stock?
DMD: Thanks to PDFs, they will all be there. I think we’re at the stage now where we’re not reprinting certain titles. Part of that is just the feasibility of keeping it all in print, and also making it appealing to retailers as well. When they see something like a 30-odd book range it can be a bit off-putting, you know, they’re not going to be able to stock all of those.
Off the top of my head, one of the archive books, maybe Ubersreich Adventures One, they’re out of print. We’re low on some of the Enemy Within companions, so they’ll start to go out of print for us. I’m sure there’ll be another print at some point with those, but [it’s most likely to be] if we do come to do a new version of it, that sort of timeline. But the plans [for new books] go on a long way.
WG: Thank you very much.
DMD: You’re very welcome
If you’re excited for the new edition of WFRP – or have your own bucket list of changes that you want to see in the updated rules – come and let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
If you’re interested in what else Cubicle 7 has in the works, check out this interview about the upcoming Horus Heresy RPG.