When I finished my read through of the player’s guide for Warhammer: The Old World RPG, I was both impressed and underwhelmed. It’s a very neat set of rules that plays into my tastes as a GM and is just a hair less cumbersome than the D100 system used in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay – perfectly good, but why couldn’t it have been a setting guide for the existing game? The GM Guide has just landed in my inbox – will it have the secret sauce hinted at in early interviews that had me so excited?
With thanks to Cubicle 7, publisher of Warhammer: The Old World RPG, for providing me with early review copies of both the player’s guide and the GM guide. My first impression of the Player’s Guide was that it effectively communicated the atmosphere of the Old World period (several hundred years earlier than the main WFRP setting). It’s a seeming golden age when the blinkered Empire of Man is wilfully ignorant of the apocalyptic threats (ie, over 50% of the other Old World factions) that are hatching schemes from the shadows.
But having completed my readthrough, I found something was missing. In my initial interview about the game with Cubicle 7’s CEO Dominic McDowall-Thomas and senior producer Pádraig Murphy, they pitched a game that was essentially a thriller. Players would encounter a Grim Portent, a glimpse of a truly dire threat lurking in the shadows, which would take notice of them. As in any good thriller, once the PCs have come to the attention of this adversary, the only way they can stay alive is to fight back against it, attempt to uncover its true motives, and in so doing become even more of a target.
This concept is the lynchpin idea that, to me, justifies TOW RPG as a standalone game. WFRP is one of the best tabletop RPGs for fans of gritty, grimdark fantasy, but its origins in the 1980s show. It’s from an era when rules were engines that simulated worlds, with the game’s theme and focus coming from the setting and adventures. You can play a thriller campaign in WFRP – in fact, the high lethality and emphasis on investigation make that a pretty good play mode – but it’s not like the game was shaped around it.
If The Old World RPG can deliver a unique gameplay experience, that’s a great reason for it to be more than just a supplement to WFRP. Having finished my read through of the player’s guide, the setting and mood it establishes for the game definitely support the thriller concept. But the rules mostly feel like a modernised variant of WFRP, with a slightly quicker combat system, and dice pools instead of D100.
The only part which feels tailored towards the thriller theme are the PC’s Assets and Contacts. These embed characters into the mundane world via useful material goods and social connections, give them additional sources of information and assistance when tackling the Grim Portent, and give them something to lose when the Portent flexes its claws. It’s nice, but it’s not much.
If all you want is a slightly lighter set of rules for games set in the Old World, I think the core of The Old World RPG is very solid – you can pre-order the physical copies of both core books on the C7 website, and the digital edition of the Player’s Guide is already available. But there’s not much in it that will convince WFRP players that the game couldn’t have just been an expansion.
So it’s up to the GM guide to provide the systems, stats, and setting information for GM’s to bring the Grim Portent to life and truly terrorize the player characters. Perhaps I should have expected this – after all, it wouldn’t be a good thriller if the heroes knew what was coming for them. As soon as I know more, I will let you know.
Are you a WFRP fan who’s considering The Old World RPG? Have you experimented with the game already using just the Player’s Guide? Or do you play other thriller RPGs, like Night’s Black Agents or Esoterrorists? Come and share your table tales in the official Wargamer Discord community.
The Old World RPG wasn’t the only upcoming RPG I interviewed the team at C7 about – check out this interview about the upcoming Warhammer The Horus Heresy RPG!