I used insanity points, too. Played as written, the chances of going insane are fairly low (you need what, 6 points, if I recall correctly). The main source of insanity in the campaign is critical hits, and such hits have a 20% or greater chance of killing you. There are a few other ways (first sight of a demon, and the like), but they're rare enough that it's not a factor unless the GM really works to hose the players.

My big advice is to read the modules at least twice through, if not more, before running them. In a D&D module, it's a pretty big deal (and very rare) if even 3 rooms are somehow interconnected, but WFRP adventures link up in all sorts of ways, and the GM has to have a good overall feel for the whole structure to run the adventure properly.

Personally I would play with a more detailed critical hit table.  The one in the book is too basic for my tastes.

Make generous use of the Difficulty Modifiers.  

Don't be fooled by claims that it's hard to make a decent combat character right out of the gate or that combat is overly deadly.  In my experience combat between two equally skilled and equally geared opponents often comes down clever use of the combat maneuvers.  If your players use too many swift attacks once they get 2+ attacks then throw some defense heavy opponents at them.

Spellcasters are as vulnerable to an arrow/bullet/bolt as just about anybody.  While they can certainly pull off incredible stunts they are often over specialized, and thus have huge holes in their defenses.

Use magic items sparingly.  Some items or properties can do nasty things like ignore non-magical armor or add to damage done after armor is applied.  In my experience it's fights with magic items that become death traps.

Tailor the career system to your group's taste.  Some will claim you need to use the system completely as written, and while this can be fun it doesn't lend itself to every type of campaign.  

Consider using weapon traits to differentiate between basic weapons.  Go with what makes sense or how the weapon is designed.  Axes with Impact, Blunt weapons with Stunning, etc.  I believe there might be rules for this in the Old World Armory.

Take advantage of the flexible system that sits nicely in the background.  I find WFRP works best when you let description and roleplaying take precedence over die rolls.  While this is possible with any system I think Warhammer lends itself very well to this style of play.

There are, or at least were, some very excellent "more detailed" Crit tables out there for WFRP 2e, and I strongly recommend you get those. There were some in particular that I thought quite good that were made by a guy who was an actual doctor irl, so they had a great deal of very good and realistic anatomical detail.

Aside from that, definitely do not buy into the idea that WFRP can't be a game about combat.  Have your PCs fight regularly, but make sure its thematically appropriate and interesting.

WFRP is like Fantasy Shadowrun, sort of. There's lots of plot to it, but in the end its about being a kind of scuzzy guy on the fringes of society who Kicks Motherfucking Ass (or dies trying).

RPGpundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;407721There are, or at least were, some very excellent "more detailed" Crit tables out there for WFRP 2e, and I strongly recommend you get those. There were some in particular that I thought quite good that were made by a guy who was an actual doctor irl, so they had a great deal of very good and realistic anatomical detail.

HA has them, and we've used them, or if not the same ones, another set of crit tables also done by a doctor. They go to +15 or something similar. It's harder to kill someone using them, though easier to cripple them. We gave them up out of frustration at how long combat was going while using them, IIRC.

Quote from: RPGPundit;407721There are, or at least were, some very excellent "more detailed" Crit tables out there for WFRP 2e, and I strongly recommend you get those. There were some in particular that I thought quite good that were made by a guy who was an actual doctor irl, so they had a great deal of very good and realistic anatomical detail.

Do you have any links?

The website Winds of Chaos has two detailed crit tables.  The one written by the trauma surgeon also has a 76 page document about healing, surgery, infection, and magical healing that goes along with it.  Some crits can only be healed by certain magic.  Unfortunately I haven't been able to get the website to load recently.

They also have updated TEW stats for WFRP v2

Also, Pundit's advice about Fantasy Shadowrun is dead on.

Edit: Got the link to work.
http://www.windsofchaos.com/?page_id=19
The second version is the most detailed one I've seen, and includes the healing document.

I thought Earthdawn was fantasy Shadowrun...

@Simlasa: Love the Avatar from a great, great movie.

Disclaimer: it's almost 6am and I can't sleep. Please forgive any grammar mistakes or crap like that. Heh.

I've been running WFRP since 1991. I absolutely fell in love with the gritty Renaissance feel of the setting, tainted by the underlying threat of Lovecraftian horror. I tend to mix both settings, since 1e and 2e are radically different in some areas (I prefer 1e Bretonnia).

I do agree that it is VERY possible to make a kick-ass combat character out of the gates, and it is VERY possible to have a combat-heavy campaign that doesn't involve a whole lot of character deaths. I once ran a Dwarf campaign that took place in  a Dwarf hold in the decades before and leading up to the Greenskins finally overrunning the place. It was epic and involved a whole lot of combat (as well as tons of exploration and role-playing). Even in their first careers they had some brutal crawls through Skaven-infested warrens and Ghoul-haunted catacombs. Yes it can be bloody. Yes it can be lethal. But yes it isn't as lethal as some people make it out to be.

And some good advice was given before: remember that there are WAY more threats than Chaos. I'd even recommend using Chaos sparingly. It keeps the creepy mystique about them. The Undead, the Greenskins, the Skaven, the Dark Elves, and the Norse all present some very serious threats to the Empire. Oftentimes, though, the biggest threat to the Empire is the Empire itself. The Great Provinces war amongst themselves when an outside threat isn't present, and generational feuds along the borders can sometimes leads to skirmishes... or even invasions (read the history of the Empire; it happens). Or it wars amongst the religions. The bad blood between Sigmar and Ulric's cult is a powder keg in some areas, waiting for one little thing to trigger it. When it isn't the Grand Provinces or the religions, it's the races. While Dwarves are given great status in the Empire and Halflings have their own Elector-Count, Elves are greatly persecuted. And ignorance is RIFE in the Empire, so a lot of places have never seen a Halfling or Dwarf and might mistake them for a mutant!

Play up the ignorance. It's everywhere.

If you feel that the Empire is too overwhelming for you right now, being new to the setting, why not run your game in the Border Princes. Heck the book Renegade Crowns helps you make your Border princedom, and I happen to like that book. The whole region is the GMs personal touch on an already established world, since he gets to create whatever he wants there. It's a microcosm of the rest of the world of Warhammer.

And read the novels. I had players that didn't "get" the setting at first. So I had them read some of the books. And then they were like new players. Some books are crap. Some books are decent. Quite a few are really good.

A trilogy worth reading, since it takes you from the ignorant life of a peasant to a traveler in the Empire, dealing with everything and everyone, are the Death's Messenger * Death's City * Death's Legacy books. They're by Sandy Mitchel. C.L. Werner's Witch Hunter books finally have an omnibus out, so all three books are in one. They're really good (I love Witch Hunters). Guardian's of the Forest is absolutely essential for any Elf player or GM looking to see how Elves are (the three races of non-Dark Elf - Sea, Wood, and High - are one race; Wood Elves are just those who defied the King's edict and stayed behind). Riders of the Dead is an awesome look at Kislev and the Chaos Marauders. And the Black Hearts series by Nathan long are just plain, ol' fun.

I hated the Dark Elf and Trollslayer books. YMMV.

Also - run the rules AS IS until a few sessions go by. Then decide what you like and what needs changing. What works for some might not for you and vice versa.

Oooh and another thing: really have the PCs roleplay the transition between Careers. But as the GM it is also your responsibility to present the player with opportunities to do just that. If a PC wants to pay the 200 XP to go from Peasant to Roadwarden, have the Roadwardens post a sign that they're recruiting due to a shortage of men after the recent Chaos invasion.

A side note: I really fucking hated that Chaos invaded. I removed that garbage. I felt it cheapened the subtle madness of Chaos. Instead of made it a Norse invasion from the north but with RUMORS that Daemons aided them (or Skaven, or Undead, or Greenskins, or the Emperor, or Bretonians, or Elfs, or whatever the rumormonger hates the most, hah!).

Most of all, have fun. It's a great game for a great setting.

-=Grim=-

I am Blackhand, and I approve this thread.  You may all now eat your puddings.

Everyone gives good advice here, and the setting seems to have reached out to all of you.  

I'd go so far as to say the extra crit tables are just that - extra.  I tend to not burden myself with extra material and stick to the published game, but your mileage may vary, I've found that the players don't really care if the crit tables weren't drawn up by a doctor.  I also have been playing WFRP since 1991, oh what a great year that one.  

The advice about using Chaos sparingly is true, unless your main antagonist is chaos!  I should talk however ... my last campaign featured greenskins as the primary antagonist, but a vampire was a 'flavor villain' added to season the mix and a chaos daemon was the mastermind.  It's all about variance in flavor.

Yeah, I think making Chaos be cause behind all the bad stuff gets old... so use it as a sparse flavoring. If it were as omnipresent as some people make it out to be it would have overwhelmed the world long ago.
Even in Call of Cthulhu I'd often have non-mythos goings on... the cults are few and secret... the PCs are paranoid... not all things that look mythos related turn out to be... plenty of people are just plain evil without any weird cosmic influences.

That said, I always thought it would be fun to play/run a campaign in WFRP where the PCs start as bottom run members in a chaos cult... aspiring to climb the ladder to success.

At the end of the Storm of Chaos, the influence of the Ruinous Powers IS omnipresent.  That's 2522 I.C. + (i.e. WFRP 2e)

During The Enemy Within campaign (which takes place much earlier than the present moment) chaos within the Empire is still in hiding.  It's been many years since the last great Chaos Incursion (give or take 500 or so years) and it has faded from memory.  This background is given in WFRP1.

So...I guess it depends on when you're running the game, but generally - yes, chaos is behind everything, including all the Chaos armies, daemons, dark elves, skaven and most other things.  Except necromancers and ogres, but there are chaos ogres and dragon ogres (which are creatures of chaos) and most the other monsters and chaos beasts, such as cockatrices and minotaurs.  All of them are chaos beasts.

Also, anything to do with magic, Chaos is behind.  All magic IS chaos.  So...when Chaos gets old, play another game.

Quote from: Simlasa;407952That said, I always thought it would be fun to play/run a campaign in WFRP where the PCs start as bottom run members in a chaos cult... aspiring to climb the ladder to success.

I've done just that.

I ran it as a side-campaign to my main one, running it whenever enough players couldn't make it to bother running the main campaign, but there were still enough to warrant game night going on. It was awesome! Some of the most memorable WFRP scenes my players talked about were actually from that campaign. The PCs started out at mutants though. They were normal commoners with crap stats, at first, and a band of "brave adventurers" happened to be battling a group of footpads in the street outside of their homes (the band of NPC adventurers were going through the Odenhaller Contract from the 1e corebook, I decided). Well, the NPC adventurer-wizard fumbled his spell and got a Tzeentch's Curse effect that warped everything with Chaos within 50'. This happened to be the PCs, who were huddling in their hovels and hoping the fight didn't trash their property. The PCs suddenly went from lower-class commoners to mutants on the run. They were minor mutations, at first, but they knew they still had to run, hide and hope to eke out an existence somehow.

They started out at pawns in a power play between Tzeentch and Slaanesh cults, both of whom needed peons in their machinations and thus both wanted the PCs. It was a truly awesome, fun, creepy, and completely different WFRP game. I'd do it again in a second.

Quote from: Blackhand;407962At the end of the Storm of Chaos, the influence of the Ruinous Powers IS omnipresent.  That's 2522 I.C. + (i.e. WFRP 2e)

Which is why I made the invasion Norse with Kurgan allies instead of open Chaos. Chaos is the "enemy within", the rotten core at the heart of the Empire. Making it so overt was silly on the part of Black Library. And they only did it because the tabletop game did it first. And the miniatures game always does insane, hyper-unrealistic crap just to warrant every single army they put out having a reason to fight. To let such a thing influence the role-playing game was bad. The RPG had it's own history and flavor. It should have continues off of the Enemy Within and Doomstones, not... ugh... Archaon's invasion (i.e. the WFRP Battle Royale).

And I wouldn't say that Chaos' power is now Omnipresent. It's is OVERT, yes, but not omnipresent. There are places in the Empire that have only heard RUMOR of the war and what invaded (with conflicting stories), knowing only their the local lord went north with a lot of his men-at-arms. In many places Greenskins and Undead are more present than Chaos. And in places outside of the Empire it is even less affected by the war.

Just sayin'.

-=Grim=-

P.S.: yea I can B.S. about this game/fluff all day and night. I dig it that much.

Quote from: GrimJesta;408056I've done just that.

I ran it as a side-campaign to my main one, running it whenever enough players couldn't make it to bother running the main campaign, but there were still enough to warrant game night going on. It was awesome! Some of the most memorable WFRP scenes my players talked about were actually from that campaign. The PCs started out at mutants though. They were normal commoners with crap stats, at first, and a band of "brave adventurers" happened to be battling a group of footpads in the street outside of their homes (the band of NPC adventurers were going through the Odenhaller Contract from the 1e corebook, I decided). Well, the NPC adventurer-wizard fumbled his spell and got a Tzeentch's Curse effect that warped everything with Chaos within 50'. This happened to be the PCs, who were huddling in their hovels and hoping the fight didn't trash their property. The PCs suddenly went from lower-class commoners to mutants on the run. They were minor mutations, at first, but they knew they still had to run, hide and hope to eke out an existence somehow.

They started out at pawns in a power play between Tzeentch and Slaanesh cults, both of whom needed peons in their machinations and thus both wanted the PCs. It was a truly awesome, fun, creepy, and completely different WFRP game. I'd do it again in a second.



Which is why I made the invasion Norse with Kurgan allies instead of open Chaos. Chaos is the "enemy within", the rotten core at the heart of the Empire. Making it so overt was silly on the part of Black Library. And they only did it because the tabletop game did it first. And the miniatures game always does insane, hyper-unrealistic crap just to warrant every single army they put out having a reason to fight. To let such a thing influence the role-playing game was bad. The RPG had it's own history and flavor. It should have continues off of the Enemy Within and Doomstones, not... ugh... Archaon's invasion (i.e. the WFRP Battle Royale).

And I wouldn't say that Chaos' power is now Omnipresent. It's is OVERT, yes, but not omnipresent. There are places in the Empire that have only heard RUMOR of the war and what invaded (with conflicting stories), knowing only their the local lord went north with a lot of his men-at-arms. In many places Greenskins and Undead are more present than Chaos. And in places outside of the Empire it is even less affected by the war.

Just sayin'.

-=Grim=-

P.S.: yea I can B.S. about this game/fluff all day and night. I dig it that much.

The Storm of Chaos nearly destroyed the Empire.  With Grimgor's horde and the other Chaos lords attacking from the east over the World's Edge, it pretty much smashed all the lands of the Empire in some form or fashion.  Even if it wasn't Chaos that did the smashing, smashing was done and it's pretty well blamed on Archaon.

I liked Archaon as a villain.  I didn't really care for the Sigmar reborn stuff, i.e. Norse Jesus with a Hammer.

Quote from: Spinachcat;407762Do you have any links?

I'm afraid I don't. I used to, back when I was running WFRP 2e a few years ago, but I've lost them since then.  They're pretty well known, though, so hopefully some hardcore fan on here will post them.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Simlasa;407798I thought Earthdawn was fantasy Shadowrun...

Only in-setting.
WFRP 2e is like the spirit of Shadowrun in a Fantasy version.

RPGPundit