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Games Workshop’s return to its original setting The Old World in the tabletop wargame Warhammer: The Old World seems to be working out. They’ve dropped a hint about adding Cathay as a future army—a plan they’d previously backed out on—and last year Cubicle 7 announced a tabletop RPG to accompany the wargame.
Players of Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play 4th edition were a bit surprised by this, given that it’s an existing and well-supported tabletop RPG set in Warhammer’s Old World. But while that’s been hovering around the Old World in the year 2512 by the Imperial Calendar, the Old World wargame is set hundreds of years earlier in the setting’s timeline. Still, that’s something you could cover with a supplement to the existing game that describes how things were different in the preceding period, right?
Wrong, according to Cubicle 7’s CEO Dominic McDowall. In an interview with streamer Great Book of Grudges on YouTube, McDowall explained that, while they considered publishing expansions for WFRP that covered both time periods, they soon figured out it wouldn’t work. “I think very quickly we realized that, certainly in the Empire and Bretonnia, any human city has burnt down, what, 17 times?” he said. “There’s no people in common. The geography’s changed completely, so you’d have to do two books in one anyway.”
Senior producer Pádraig Murphy added that a new RPG presented an opportunity to make something more accessible than WFRP’s infamously crunchy 4th edition. “The Old World’s a fantastic wargame and it’s bringing in new fans who aren’t necessarily gonna know who Karl Franz is,” he said. “We want our books to be really welcoming to those people.”
Murphy described the rules as based on a dice pool of d10s, and made them sound low on complexity, but high on danger. “This is a grim and glorious era as we’re calling it,” he said. “You’re still down in the mud and blood of the Old World, and accessible doesn’t mean less lethal, for example. It’s still very lethal—probably more lethal to be honest.”
Rather than having a bunch of points they can lose before they’re actually hurt, player-characters in The Old World RPG will either be staggered or injured when they’re hit, with those injuries getting quite specific. “It’s not like ‘I’ve lost eight hit points,’ it’s like ‘I’ve lost d10 teeth and my head is ringing.'”
It’s not just rules bloat that gets in the way when players consider a new system, however. It’s all those years of accumulated setting details as well. McDowall explained the Old World RPG will have a way of dealing with that too. “Your character comes with packets of lore,” he said, “so even if you’re not an expert on how an Imperial town may work you’ve got information right in front of you that gives you an idea of how you can start approaching an adventure. Contacts, for example. Every character has a couple of contacts so at the start of an adventure the event kicks off, everybody has a course of action that they know that they can take.”
Murphy said the rules will be split between two books, one for players and one for Game Masters. “The player’s guide gives you everything a player needs obviously,” he said, “the GM’s guide gives you more. It’s got a really extensive bestiary, it’s got the rules for corruption by Chaos—they’re in the GM’s guide now so you don’t know as a player necessarily how much you can risk.”
Cubicle 7 was keen to point out that the release of its Old World RPG, whenever that should be, won’t mean the end of WFRP, and the two will co-exist. “They’re different games,” McDowall said. “Obviously they share an awesome setting, but there’s so much of the setting to explore.”
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Kurt Indovina
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