Why Are Adults Still Launching Tabletop War?

The BBC has an article today about the 25th anniversary of the release of Warhammer 40,000, which is doing the rounds. Typically for the BBC there has to be an angle which will give the cognoscenti something to fret about (in this case, the fact that 40k supposedly "exploits" younger fans), but still, it's surprisingly sympathetic and avoids the kind of tongue-in-cheek comments you usually get when RPGs or table top wargames are discussed in mainstream media. The comments on the article are, as always, completely batshit mental, but raise a smile nonetheless.

There are two "!" instances worth mentioning. First, this:

Gillen contrasts Warhammer 40K to role-playing fantasy gaming like the online World of Warcraft (the modern equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons). [Emphasis added]

Get that? Almost as if D&D doesn't exist anymore except in the form of WoW. Not sure what to make of that. And second, more positively, there's this:

"It's like why theatre remains popular in the age of cinema," says 32-year-old Andrew Ruddick from Cambridge, explaining its enduring appeal. He describes himself as a "relapsed" Warhammer gamer, slipping back into it in his 20s with friends. "There's an intimacy. With tabletop gaming you are there."

Which is worth emphasising, I think. The USP of table top gaming needs to be shouted from the roof tops at every available opportunity.

Citadel Combat Cards; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gutlagg the Ogre Shaman

When I was a kid my friends and I went through a period of playing the original series of Citadel Combat Cards. These were, essentially, a species of Top Trump made, as the name suggest, by Citadel Miniatures. They sprang unbidden into my mind while reading Jeff's latest entry, which had me recollecting my 11-year-old Warhammer-playing self; I hadn't so much as thought about them in years.

The concept behind the cards was simple. You deal out the cards between the players and each player takes it in turns to call out an ability from the card at the top of his hand (say, "Strength 10"). The other players have to compare the card at the top of their hand with this. The card with the highest score in that abililty "wins" and the others "die", being cast aside. The game ends when there is only one player left with any cards.

My best friend at the time had two brothers, and the four of us spent an inordinate amount of time playing Citadel Combat Cards. I'm not sure where we got the decks from, but we had 5 - Monsters, Chaos, Warriors, Space War, and Goblinoids - which we mixed together in one super-deck; it felt like games could go on for hours (especially if you played it like Top Trumps, where the winning card "captures" the losing cards each turn, allowing them to be re-used).

It turns out that somebody has posted slideshows of all the decks on youtube: Chaos, Goblinoids, Monsters, Dwarfs, Warriors, and Space War. Looking at them, it seems there was an entire subset of rules that we never used - underneath each picture you see sigils containing things like a bow and arrow, an explosion, fangs, and so on. Presumably these had some sort of meaning which we piledrived away.

The thing I most notice about the cards now is the names. There's a real charm in things like "Gutlagg the Ogre Shaman", "Zoat the Forest Guardian", "Klaus Half-man, Mutant Thug", "Drakarth the Ravening: Mutant Spawn of Chaos", "Narx the Whiner, Goblin Musician", and "Fungus the Snotling Brave". When did Games Workship and Citadel Miniatures products get so bland?

Warhammer FRP 2nd Edition: What D&D 3.x Should Have Been

I'm enjoying running my Warhammer FRP PBEM game. Proceedings have been amusingly chaotic and the party members have an interesting tendency to attack everything on sight, which should prove entertaining in the long term.

I'm also enjoying the system, which is rare for me - generally speaking my philosophy on system is "Who gives a shit so long as you have motivated players and good characters, and we're not playing Blue Rose?" But WFRP really scratches that itch I have for realistic, gritty, low-fantasy nastiness, plus mutants, chaos gods and unreliable firearms.

The best thing about WFRP is the combat, which is both tactically fun but also pretty authentic in feel - the characters seem fragile in the same way that real people are fragile, and armour and shields are often the difference between life and death. It's a far cry from the weird D&D world of hit points, armour class and abstract mechanics - which is part of the charm, of course, but just not a proper fit for so many styles of gaming.

What interests me most about WFRP is that the combat is at least broadly similar to D&D 3.x's - everything is based on full and half actions, swift actions, free actions, etc. - but the difference is that WFRP's system just works, whereas I never felt D&D 3.x's did. Attacks of Opportunity were always annoying and fiddly; grappling and unarmed combat generally was a mess. Worse, the obsession with the tactical minutiae of combat never sat right with the level of abstraction at which the traditional mechanics existed - combat itself was exceptionally detailed tactically, but at the point at which hits and damage (the meat and bones) came into play, it suddenly morphed into something very simplistic. By contrast, WFRP combat is always at the same level of abstraction and the same level of detail, whether you're working out what actions exactly your character can do this round, or working out where he's been hurt and how badly. More importantly, its combat isn't likely to be ruined by overly powerful magic-users doing everything, or by killer class-combination "builds" dreamed up by annoying adolescent boys with nothing better to do with their time and posted on the internet.

WFRP's system is so robust and fun, in fact, that I think it would work perfectly for historical gaming, especially around the period which the Warhammer world is roughly analagous to. I can just imagine a game set in the Italian Wars, or during the Conquest of Mexico, or during the zenith of the Ottoman Empire. The fall of Byzantium, perhaps.

WHFRP and the Beauty of Random Character Generation

I'm a big fan of random character generation. For one thing, I just love randomness. Modern gaming often seems to be a huge exercise in reducing its effects, and I find this trend boring. I want to be surprised by what the dice throw up, the more surprises the better. (This is probably why point-based systems like GURPS, or diceless games like Nobilis, have never been by thing.) And why should the character I'll be playing be any different?

D&D character generation in its 'purest' forms is nicely random, but only up to a point. Once you have your stats, the rest is up to you. Weirdly, D&D characters also arrive more or less fully formed into the universe; you start off with a blank piece of paper, roll 3d6 six times, and hey presto! a 50-year old elven druid appears from the ether. This is a strength of the system, because it's quick and easy, but it's also less fun than, say, Cyberpunk 2020 and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

In Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, random character generation extends far beyond generating stats. Not only can you roll on a 'starting career' table containing dozens of entries (from Pit Fighter to Zealot to Rat Catcher), you also randomly determine pretty much everything else, including eye colour, star sign, distinguishing features (like 'pox marks'), birthplace, family background and and finally even your name (plus names and careers for your family too, if you're so inclined). I love this process and can spend a considerable amount of time merrily churning out characters. It almost always throws up interesting plot hooks for the game, too: who was this pit fighter born in a hovel in Talabecland, why does he have a missing eyebrow, and what are his 5 sisters, one of whom is an outlaw, doing? Boom: loads of ideas for the GM to use in the game.




It wouldn't be hard to incorporate something like this into a D&D campaign, and in fact it's something I might try. In particular, I think such random tables are fantastic if you're going to be running a game in a non-standard (i.e. not high fantasy) setting: we all know how hard it is to get players to invest in a game set in ancient Akkadia or whatever and how likely they are to come up with stuff that just doesn't fit. How much easier is the process made if you can randomly generate a character using tables that are tailor-made to produce results that fit in with the setting? At a stroke some of the key difficulties running campaigns in Tekumel, Athas or your bizarre homebrew setting are removed.

Of course, the best random character generator of all was Cyberpunk 2020's, with its silly life path and life history tables which never failed to turn up weird and wonderful results. ("I'm playing a Fijian netrunner who likes wearing fingerless gloves but otherwise goes around completely nude, whose favourite possession is a childhood toy, and who has five sworn enemies, seven ex-lovers and grew up in a pirate gang? Cool.")

Gunpowder, Technology, War Machines

For those of us who don't necessarily want to play high fantasy and/or sword & sorcery games all the time, D&D's general lack of black powder weapons can be frustrating and jarring. Many of the weapons which AD&D adventurers can use (the guisarme, the lucerne hammer, the bardiche) came into being at around the same time that black powder arms were becoming more common on the battlefields of Europe; it seems odd that esoteric polearms should be given such preference over the humble hand cannon. Admittedly a hand cannon isn't the perfect weapon when you're doing what D&D adventurers usually get up to, but it seems a heck of a lot more useful in those circumstances than field plate, an awl-pike, or a fauchard. I suppose the D&D creators (and most players) just don't or didn't think that guns 'fit' with the tone they were aiming for. (I know that 2nd edition lists arquebuses in its equipment pages, but that's all there is.)

The Warhammer creators had no such compunctions, and Warhammer fantasy battle is full of weird and wonderful black powder devices, from ordinary arquebuses to cannons, rocket launchers, and flame-throwers. I like this. Although Warhammer is a fantasy setting you get the feeling that technology develops in at least some sort of haphazard way - unlike in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms, where it seemed to reach a certain level and just stopped. For thousands of years.

Of course, this feeds into the old classicist/romanticist, or banalifying systematiser/mysterious dreamer debate. It's perfectly fine for there not to be cannons in The Lord of the Rings or the Corum stories, because those aren't meant to be in any way an accurate reflection of reality. But if you like a heavier dose of realism in your fantasy pie, their absence smacks of grandfathering rather than anything else.




One of the reasons I love D&D is that I think it can be all things to all people. Some people will tell you that games should be narrowly focused towards certain 'goals', but I've never subscribed to that view. What makes a game good is a good DM and good players doing what they want to do with whatever system they've chosen (though some systems are undoubtedly worse than others). The D&D designers always seemed to have this philosophy, at least up to and including 3rd edition. So to me it seems a little odd for the core rules to implicitly dictate that black powder weapons don't really fit with the D&D vision of what fantasy should be. I sometimes want to play a bloke with a massive matchlock gun which takes ages to load but which can knock an ogre's head off at twenty paces. It would be nice if D&D allowed me to do that without having to come up with my own rules.

The corollary of this is: what kind of guns, cannons and other war machines would kobolds, mind flayers, derro or the other creatures of D&D come up with? The various races of Warhammer have eccentric devices which suit their 'national' character: Chaos Dwarfs have huge cannons which cause the very earth to quake; the empire has steam-driven tank-like contraptions with mini-cannons; the armies of Chaos have fire-belching machines inhabited by the souls of the damned, who are always likely to be driven insane and start attacking their comrades. Once you start thinking about the introduction of firearms into D&D a whole new world opens up. Githzerai arqubusiers, thri-kreen pistoliers, ogres carting around battered hand cannons - the possibilities are fascinating.

The Threat Within

There is a strong thread running through Warhammer: that of corruption from within. This gives it a thematic strength that is rare in fantasy settings. Where most such settings tend to be exercises in imagination, Warhammer feels like it is genuinely about something - the conflict between Man and Self.

The first and most important element of this is, of course, Chaos - a force which corrupts from within and thereby destroys. Each of the major Chaos Gods tempts mankind in different ways, drawing people away from their essential humanity and transforming them into something baser, by playing on their fears, hopes and instincts. Khorne does it through awakening rage and bloodlust, Nurgle through despair, Tzeentch through the lust for knowledge and Slaanesh through plain old lust. People are drawn to their worship from an inherent weakness, a chink in their armour, and are taken - like those who cry out to Nurgle to protect them from plague, or who give themselves to Tzeentch in return for hidden knowledge. Chaos is a constant threat which seethes below human society; everybody must be on their guard lest they become tempted. This sense of danger at the roots of mankind is personified by the Skaven, a clandestine race of rat-men who live right under the foundations of human society, unknown and unsuspected but constantly gnawing, spreading disease and pestilence and gradually gathering their strength for the moment when they strike.

I likened the Empire to the USSR under Stalin in my post the other day, and I like that analogy - the difference, of course, being that the threats which faced the USSR were mostly made up and trumped up, whereas those facing the Empire are all too real. By coincidence at the moment I'm reading Orlando Figes' The Whisperers, a massive collection of oral testimony from people who lived through the Stalin years. The sense that foreign spies were everywhere and that anti-Bolshevik 'cosmopolitans' and 'class enemies' were lurking in the shadows around every corner pervaded the Soviet regime in its early years (though the real danger for most people was in fact the NKVD): the struggles which families of those accused of being 'class enemies' went through could well be compared to those of the familes of traitors given over to Chaos. Warhammer is like a 'what-if' scenario which imagines what a world would be like in which the lies of totalitarian dictatorships were actually true. Except transported to an incredibly baroque and blackly humourous fantasy setting.




This sort of thing is something I'd like to play with with Yoon-suin. Not the straight plundering of Chaos or Skaven or class-enemies, but the creation of some sense of an all-pervading and ever-present danger threatening to consume everything from within. Something to make players feel as though they have to keep a constant guard on their own behaviour lest they take a wrong step somewhere and find themselves slipping into something which might endanger their immortal soul. But which at the same time wouldn't mean an ending, just as the man who gives himself to the pleasures of Slaanesh loses his humanity but gains something Other.

Warhammer Goblins

One thing that the Warhammer designers did really well was to come up with a unique spin on goblins. The iconic fantasy creatures in 'standard' D&D are really rather staid and boring, probably from overuse - and goblins are no exception. In most campaigns they're just low-level mook creatures for the PCs to kill, with barely a second thought. "Oh, look, it's a goblin. Hand over the 15 XP..."

Warhammer goblins have something about them, though. They have style, for one thing. From the night goblins, with their black capes, pointed hats and moon motifs, to the Tupi-Indian pastiche forest goblins, there is a unified look to the Warhammer breeds. I especially like the night goblins: cartoonish it might be, but their demented rumpelstiltskin shtick is far more effective than D&D's rather drab little mini-orcs.




More importantly, though, Warhammer goblins have personality. The night goblins are maniacal drug-addled loons who dose themselves up on fungus before a fight and go running towards the enemy lines swinging ball-and-chains as big as themselves; they herd giant fungus-creatures called Squigs which they sometimes ride to battle; their favourite weapons are weighted nets and tridents which they use to capture their foes. The forest goblins inject themselves with hallucinagenic poisons and ride around on giant tarantulas. Others strap themselves into giant ballistas and hurl themselves at their enemies, kamikaze-like: they are happy to die if only they can have an entertaining death. Warhammer goblins are crazed, absurd, and very, very weird.

My favourite goblin war-method is undoubtedly the Squig Hopper. Imagine a kid on a space hopper. Now imagine that instead of a kid it's a vile, green-skinned, yellow-eyed murderous goblin. Then imagine that instead of a space hopper, it's an orange ball of flesh with a mouth which takes up half its body, giant horns, and two massive feet. Then imagine it bounding across the battlefield towards you with huge, ten-yard leaps while the goblin clings on, waving a cleaver over his head. That's a Squig Hopper. In Warhammer Fantasy Battle the things move entirely randomly, leaving destruction wherever they land (often in the ranks of their own side), and dying in droves. But the concept is just so phantasmagorically cool.




I wish people would give goblins in their D&D campaigns unique flavours like that. But so often they end up being, well, bland.

On Warhammer, British vs. American Fantasy, and Pessimism

As a teenager (let's say until the age of about 16 or so) the biggest drain on my time and pocket money was not girls, cigarettes or alchohol, but Citadel Miniatures (at the time a separate company from Games Workshop but which made all of its figures). I loved Warhammer. My friends and I played a lot of Warhammer 40,000 and Blood Bowl too, and we even created our own gang-warfare battle game a few years before Necromunda came out. But Warhammer was always what we came back to and what we did basically every weekday night after school and often all day at weekends. I like it just as much, if not more so, than D&D, and it's probably only because I can't cart hundreds of lead figures across Eurasia every couple of months that this blog isn't a Warhammer- rather than an RPG-focused one.

There are lots of things to love about Warhammer - the gonzo weirdness, the random generators, the endearing amorality, the sheer gothicness of the whole thing. But I think what I like most about it is the pessimism. Pessimism seeps through all of Games Workshop's lines like a sickness; from Warhammer 40,000's tagline that "In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, There is Only War", to Necromunda's bleak vision of gangs and mutants squabbling over radioaction-scarred urban jungle, these games are not in any way nice.

Warhammer's own particular twist on that theme is the spread of Chaos, whose tendrils are gradually extending themselves over the world and who will never, can never, be defeated - no matter how hard it is fought against. Humanity will slowly be brought under the dominion of the Chaos Gods, and the best that can be hoped for is that the process will be prolonged. There is something compelling about the idea of The Empire, ramshackle and disease-ridden but having to be constantly vigilant against betrayal by its own people - almost like the USSR under Stalin - terrified of spies and fifth-columns, forever jumping at its own shadow, and doomed to inevitable failure.




I believe I am right in saying that Warhammer owes much about this incredibly bleak meta-narrative to the works of Tolkien. Many people mistakenly (in my opinion) believe that The Lord of the Rings has a happy ending, forgetting that, taken in context, it is really just an account of the last hurrah of a once mighty and beautiful civilisation that has been slowly collapsing over the course of thousands of years. Something of this atmosphere fed into Warhammer at its inception and has strongly influenced it ever since. But I also think that there is something in the British, and particularly in the English, view of the world, that influenced both Tolkien and Games Workshop (and also Moorcock and the Fighting Fantasy creators - the other points of the British fantasy square).

In comparison to people from other countries, British people are deeply pessimistic. I can say that, having grown up in the country but spent a lot of time in others. I notice it every time I go back home. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is one of their/our defining national characteristics. Of course there are many exceptions to this rule, but I don't think the sheer numb weight of cynicism and world-weariness present in British culture can really be ignored. (This can be a great quality, of course - it's what makes the British sense of humour so richly ironic, which is incidentally something else that can be noticed in Warhammer - but more on that in another entry.) And it sets the British in direct contrast to Americans, for whom a defining national characteristic is optimism.

In fact, I believe that in many ways Warhammer and D&D can be taken as representative of the cultures which created them. On the one hand you have a cynical, nasty, bleak and darkly humurous setting whose dominant idea is decay. And on the other you have a game basically founded on the principles of rugged individualism and self-betterment - in which a set of characters fight to success all on their own, without much in the way of a helping hand, or else die trying. In a strange sort of way, you don't get anything more representative of British values than Warhammer, nor anything more representative of American values than D&D.

What that shouldn't mean is that D&D campaigns can't take some of the pessimism of Warhammer and make it their own. It's perfectly possible to be a rugged individualist in a world slowly collapsing. I'm not talking about 'doing' Warhammer with D&D (why have that cotton when you can have the silk of WHFRP?) but introducing that key idea of an inevitable turn for the worse in the wheel of history... I like it and want to build a campaign around it.

This rather rambling entry doesn't have much else to it apart from that. I hope it makes at least some vague sort of sense.

Warhammer and Dreams

I've got a big project on at the moment, so time is tight for blogging and other internet activities (note: this applies to the Yesteryear crew too) but I hope to do a series of posts over the next few days all about the world of Warhammer and how it can be used to influence D&D.

In the meantime: I had a dream last night that a new game was being released in which task resolution was carried out not through dice rolling, but through trying to pull down the pants of the other players. It was the talk of the internet, and even featured on the BBC news website. I wish I could remember the name of it. My wife told me I woke her up by laughing at the concept in my sleep.