Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

This article is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it

In the grim, dark, grimdark fantasy version of Late Medieval Germany, you will roll up peasants and be slain by fantastical creatures and Daemon lords vastly more powerful than your character can ever hope to become, no matter how much experience he gains. Unless you have the Tome of Corruption supplement, in which case, you can be a badass motherfucking Chaos viking.

Either that, or he'll just die of cholera.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is, as its name implies, a roleplaying game set in the world of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. It has had a checkered past, going through a number of different publishers and frequently sitting for years in development limbo. A 4th edition is currently being developed by Cubicle 7, set to release in june 2018.

Although the setting is occasionally Tolkienesque, it generally takes far more inspiration from the real world, being essentially an alternate universe version of Europe circa the 1500s. This means that firearms are fairly common but also fairly inaccurate. Similarly, magic exists, but it has a chance of raping you with eldritch energy. Humans, as well as their dwarf and elf allies, are opposed by beastmen, orcs, daemons, trolls, and all manner of other horrible things that may inflict loss of life and limb, usually with far darker interpretations than their Dungeons & Dragons counterparts.

Nearly every portion of character creation can be rolled leading to amusing tales of a peasant, a noble, a doctor, and a sailor getting together to claim a lost dwarven stronghold. The best class is ratcatcher, as it has the most important piece of equipment in the game, a small but vicious dog.

The system in general, especially in combat, is extremely (and often hilariously) lethal, and has many rules for crippling injuries and critical hits. This can cause, for example, a lowly badger bite to result in the loss of limbs, and turns attempting to mount a horse into a dangerous endeavour only undertaken by the most foolhardy of warriors.

It is also probably the only high fantasy universe, in which magic is not (terribly) OP. Not so much because the rules don't have spells that can deal 4*1d10+4 damage every hit having a chance to be critical, dealing another 1d10 damage, which keeping in mind that a PC min/maxed and lucky too can at most have 22 hitpoints and 13 damage reduction is quite a bit. No. It's because of the fact casting even a lowly fireball has the chance to open a rift to the realm of chaos that sucks you in so your ass can be eternally fucked by Slaanesh. And for some reason the Lore of Light has more listed healing spells than the Lore of Life.

Perhaps the biggest claim to fame for the system is the extreme amounts of character classes available to players. While the base game is generally rather simple (start as noob wizard, then shit wizard, then ok wizard etc) additional books have added a shocking about of player choice. Want to be a rat catcher or a slave? How about a Grail Knight or a Vampire? Want to play a warp stone sniffing Skaven or champion of Nurgle? All of these are options. Highly recommended is playing with the Career Companion (even if the book itself is rarer than pieces of the holy cross) since it adds literally hundreds of classes from all the released books, but be aware that some aspects they add (like new types of magic) are not in the book and might require some extra legwork or modulation to figure out.