Link: HERE
d10 Rule SystemCEO Dominic McDowall-Thomas and senior producer Pádraig Murphy explained their vision for the game in an exclusive interview with Wargamer. The launch of Warhammer: The Old World RPG is “getting pretty damn close now”, Murphy says, though the team can’t quite commit to a date. The line will open with a player’s handbook and a GM’s guide very close together – welcome news after the drawn out DnD release schedule – followed later by a starter set and GM’s screen.
Over the course of our conversation, the pair set out their vision for the game. There’s going to be a blend of familiar Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay motifs with a novel ruleset, and a particularly grounded sense of place, which they hope will make it easier than ever for newcomers and old hands alike to start roleplaying in this gritty, grimdark world.
Murphy calls the Old World itself “the star of the show”. For him, the setting is “what calls out, even when all the dice have been forgotten: you want to go back to the Old World and you want to experience that sort of grim and gloriously bloody setting”. If you’re unfamiliar, think of it as a fantasy version of renaissance Europe with a hidden world of Lovecraftian cults gnawing away at the veneer of civilization.
The Old World time period is the current version of the Warhammer setting that license-owner Games Workshop is supporting with new rules and models. As a much newer version of the world, it has far less content than the older Warhammer fantasy setting: less of the map has been filled in, and the lore is far less established.
This all means that players will come to the Old World fresh, whether they’re brand new to the setting or grizzled WFRP veterans. The quest to get players grounded in the setting as fast as possible underlies many design decisions that Cubicle 7 has made which differentiate The Old World RPG from WFRP. The most obvious is a totally new rules system.
CombatThe Old World RPG abandons WFRP’s venerable D100 dice system. “I love the D100 system, but all game systems have their peculiarities”, McDowall says, “and I think a degree of complexity comes with D100”. Early in development he and Murphy spent a long time looking for a dice system that was “quick to get your head around”, so people could “understand what was going on and be able to use it as easily as possible”.
The pair settled on a D10 dice pool system. A character’s statline will actually be very similar to WFRP, with familiar values like Strength, Toughness, Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, and so on. It’s close enough that Murphy promises a conversion system that will let you move characters between the two games – typically, you just need to put a zero onto the end of an Old World RPG character to move it into WFRP. Stats will even be compatible with the Old World miniature wargame.
Skill checks will be simple to resolve. “The characteristic is the number of dice that you’re rolling in your pool”, McDowall says, “and the [character’s] skill is your target number”. Murphy adds “we’ve got a much smaller skill list” than WFRP, “less than 20 skills” – though they will be familiar to WFRP players.
“It just gets you rolling dice and counting successes”, Murphy says. Players can quickly determine for themselves “I did the thing, or I did it really well, or I didn’t do it at all”. It’s a big break from WFRP, but as he says, “WFRP exists, and continues to exist – we didn’t need to make it again”.
It’s a simple enough core rules system, one that’s designed to shut up and get out of the way, and rolling big handfuls of dice is certainly on theme for a Warhammer game. But being simpler than WFRP doesn’t mean that The Old World is dumbed down. For a start, combat is going to hurt.
Grim PortentsCombat is “one of the things that we’ve kicked around for a long time”, McDowall says. It was a really key element for the team to reflect the themes of the game in the mechanics, set the tone and establish the world the characters live in. The resulting system puts more weight on storytelling than number crunching, where combat is brutal and the risks aren’t always clear.
“We looked at all the stuff that we liked in WFRP’s combat and tried to build on it”, Murphy says, “so you’re still dealing with opposed rolls” where both the attacker and their opponent will roll dice, “with ties going to the attacker in most cases”.
Whether you’re rolling to strike or parry, “when you get hit the first time, you’re staggered, you’re on the back foot”. Your characters are “competent, but pretty much ordinary people”, and they don’t have a stash of hitpoints or wounds to protect them. Should you be staggered and then staggered again, “in most cases that leads to an injury”.
That means rolling on an injury table, similar to the luxurious critical hit charts in WFRP: teeth go flying, skulls are cracked, and limbs come off with sprays of claret. If you’re already carrying injuries and get injured again, “you roll more dice on the injury table”, Murphy says, which of course means “you get worse injuries”.
McDowall expands on this: “for a gritty game, [health] shouldn’t be a quota of hits you can take and then your character’s dead – if you get hit, you feel it, but there’s no artificial limits to how many bruises you can take”. “There’s always a chance you’re going to be okay and it’s just a bloodied face”, Murphy adds, “but as you throw in more D10 to this injury table, you’re very quickly getting towards these grim and grizzly amputations, decapitations, and death”.
“As a player, you’ve got the choice of eyeballing that and deciding where your risk appetite is, how far you’re going to push it with your character”, McDowall says. But you won’t have the false certainty of hitpoints to guide you – just a growing list of all the terrible things that have happened to your character.
The era that The Old World RPG is set in “is as close to a gilded era as the Warhammer world gets” McDowall says. The powers of chaos are at their lowest ebb, and though the Empire of Man has no single ruler, it has yet to suffer the catastrophic damage of Asavar Kul’s reality warping invasion, which lurks not far off in the future.
Murphy expands: this is an “era where all the little powder kegs are being stocked and everything is being piled up high and no one seems aware that there’s a spark that could set all this off”.
“We were thinking about what that would feel like, where adventure would come from”, McDowall continues. All the horrors of the Old World are there, but they’re “having to be a lot more careful, to move more slowly, working through others and sending out their tendrils”.
What if “as an ordinary citizen of the old world, you stumbled across something, something that couldn’t afford you shining a light on its dark activities”? Something that, once you know it exists, will make your life a living hell. That’s the Grim Portent, the BBEG of your Old World RPG campaign.
“You’ve seen something, it’s seen you, and it is never going to rest while you still draw breath”, McDowall says. Unless the characters “lie down and die, they’ve got to oppose this, and they’ve got to be very active in doing so to have a chance of surviving”.
