My Favourite Supplement Ever

...is Renegade Crowns: A Guide to the Border Princes, by Black Industries, for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition.

The thing about Renegade Crowns is, it's not what you think. Normally books detailing a certain area of a campaign-setting follow a staid, trite, and rather bland formula: lists of settlements, adventuring locations, important NPCs, with a few sample adventures at the back. Snore. And all the WFRP setting supplements tended to go down that route, basically constituting detailed but rather by-the-numbers gazeteers of various regions of the Warhammer world.

Renegade Crowns is something different, though, because with this book the designers chose to create what can only be described as a random sandbox generator: a big set of tables for drawing up a map; populating it with settlements, rulers, wandering monsters, adventuring locations and lairs; creating a several-thousand-year history for the area; and planting the roots of conflict with various subplots to give the whole thing flesh. It really is a tour de force - that rare supplement that doesn't just give you something to play out of the box, but which gives you the tools to do something original of your own. The difference between Renegade Crowns and, say, the Forgotten Realms, is rather like that old adage about giving a man a fish so he has fish for a day versus giving him a man a net so he can have fish whenever he wants.

And it's not just a nice idea. As a random sandbox generator it works exceptionally well, striking the balance between giving you enough detail to mould your creativity while being abstract enough not to act as too much of a constraint. For instance, if you randomly generate an ancient ruin, there are tables to generate the Ruins Type (e.g. dwarf, chaos cult, or recent human), the Ancient Menace inhabiting it (e.g. a daemon, an undead being, or a degenerate tribe), the Original Purpose (for instance a temple, a tomb, or an outpost), the Age (from dozens of years to thousands of years old), the Reason (for example, abandonment because of famine, war or resource loss), and a means to link it with other ruins (if you get two Arabyan ruins around the same area and of around the same age, for instance, it might mean that during that era an Arabyan sultan ruled the region).

And that's just one example. There are random tables to generate regional leaders and their conflicts, relationships and secrets, for creating settlements and "oddities", for special geographical features, for economic resources... Anything that you need to create a sandbox and make it tick.

The greatest achievement of Renegade Crowns, I think, is that it manages to ooze flavour at the same time as avoiding providing any real setting detail. It precisely captures the mood of the Border Princes, as a chaotic, sparsely settled Wild West full of rogues, adventure and wealth, with nary a map or an NPC in sight. What the designers have done, in other words, is to give the reader a way to create a Border Princes of their own, rather than foist a Border Princes on them.

Imagine if all campaign settings books were like that: giving you a way to create your own Forgotten Realms, your own Athas, your own Mystara, rather than only providing the officially-sanctioned version the designers themselves created. Imagine if all writers took the attitude that their own special-snowflake campaign ought not to be canonical but merely inspirational. Imagine if designers tried to give you useful stuff rather than pretty stuff. Imagine if they weren't all wannabe novelists. Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try.

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.

Fighting Between Two Stools

For some reason my posts weren't displaying yesterday or today; bloody computers. Anyway, this is the last of my Warhammer/D&D related posts. Back to regular esoteric stuff from tomorrow.

I think there are basically two schools of thought on combat in role playing games. There is the realist school (whose foremost proponents are GURPS, Cyberpunk 2020 and Rolemaster) where all elements of combat are played out in a detailed manner - from parries and dodges to appreciably nasty wounds. And then there is the abstract school (exemplified by the likes of Dogs in the Vineyard, Tunnels and Trolls, and the old World of Darkness games), where generally pools of dice are rolled and the results are interpreted in a vaguer and broader way.




Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is very much in the realist school. A combat round takes 10 seconds, and players not only roll 'to hit' but can also parry blows, lauch 'swift attacks', feint, and perform various other maneuvers. Generally speaking injuries are as severe as you would expect in real life, and it isn't unusual to see characters being killed with one hit. No matter how experienced a character is, they remain vulnerable to physical attacks: an unarmoured character of the highest level could still be killed by a few goblins firing arrows.

D&D was traditionally much more abstract. A combat round was a minute long, and the 'to hit' roll was really a shorthand term for determining whether, over the course of one minute, one character would be able to land a telling blow on another. Characters lose hit points, but these should be seen not as 'wound leves' but as a combination of physical health, morale, energy and other factors keeping a character in the fight. As characters gain in experience they become almost impervious to physical attacks; there is no chance that a level 20 character will be killed by a few goblins firing arrows, because an arrow hit will only take off a tiny percentage from their huge pile of hit points.

I like both methods of combat. Warhammer allows for a more tactical and realistic game. One thing I love about the Warhammer combat system is that it accurately reflects the level of protection that armour offered: a knight in plate mail is almost impossible to injure unless he is disabled somehow or falls over. Combat frightens the players because their character could easily die or suffer permanent injury, and this makes them cautious and clever. On the other hand, traditional D&D combat is fast and furious and allows for improvisation on the part of the DM and the players, because the rules are so loose.

Trying to mix the two schools is often a mistake, and I think that is where a lot of my dislike for D&D 3rd edition stems from. It sacrificed the almost freeform nature of D&D combat in previous editions for a greater level of tactical detail (attacks of opportunity, combat grids), and yet it retained the abstractions of hit points, armour class and the like - resulting in a bizarre mixture of both irrealism and restrictiveness. Not only did the 3rd edition combat system fail to match Warhammer for realism and danger, it also failed to match traditional D&D for ease of use and improvisational fun. It fell just in the middle of two stools, and (for me) was not at all as enjoyable as it should have been.

I haven't played D&D 4th edition, so I can't speak for it directly, but the designers seem to have made an effort to make a better hybrid of tactical detail and abstraction. Did they succeed or not? I can't say, but I think I generally prefer the either/or of realism and detail vs. freeform and abstraction.