WFRP 4e House Rules: Magic

Channeling with Blood

A magic user can amplify their channeling by drawing blood and sacrificing Wounds. They get +1 SL to the channeling test for every:

• 2 Wounds of their own sacrificed 
• 4 Wounds of another 

Succeed at a Toughness test at the end of the channeling or suffer a Bleeding condition. The difficulty is:

• Average at 2 Wounds
• Challenging at 4 Wounds
• Difficult at 6 Wounds
• Hard at 8 Wounds
• Very Hard at 10 Wounds

  Using blood in this way will cause other colors to seep into the magic, with it tending towards Dhar, and is thus seriously frowned upon by Certified Wizards.

The effect can be further enhanced by invoking Chaos; Roll under your corruption and if successful the blood SL bonus is doubled. Gain 1d10 Corruption regardless of success.

Damage & Magic

As per the rule changes regarding combat where Strength & Toughness are no longer used for calculating damage excepting that a Strength greater than 50 confers a +1, so to WPB is not added to spell damage (where relevant) except to the extent that having a Willpower score greater than 50 confers +1 to spell damage.

Cartomancy

Characters with precognition related talents and fortune telling skills may use a Tarot deck (or some similar prop) to try read the future.

This can be done once per day, the Cartomancer must prepare before hand (by meditating or similar) and the reading must take place in a situation propitious to their background.

Process:

• The player asks a yes/no/maybe question of the cards
• The GM deals the player and themselves 3 cards (from a normal deck)  
• The GM then randomly determines what the answer will be if the reading is wrong
• The player reveals their cards
• If the total of the players cards (each card being worth 2-14) beats the GM's cards the GM tells them the truth, otherwise they use the randomly determined answer.
• The player does not get to see the GM's cards either way.

 

Miracle: King of the Wild

• The animal summoned understands and obeys summoner until Sunset or Sunrise, whichever comes first
• The miracle can only be performed once/day
• The animal will arrive in 1d6 minutes
• Commands must be simple, generally no more than one 'and' or 'if'
• The animal will flee (ending miracle) if wounded while doing anything other than defending summoner
• On miracle success roll on the relevant environment table, adding 10 for every SL

Default Forest Environment

Roll     Animal
1-9         Squirrel
10-19     Rabbit
20-34     Snake
35-50     Boar
50-64     Hawk
65-79     Stag
80-94     Wolf
95-119   Bear
120+      Great Stag

WFRP 4e House Rules 2

 

Fear & Terror

Fear and Terror inducing entities cause their opponents to make all rolls with disadvantage, that is take the worst combination from any percentile dice roll; a 39 becomes a 93, a 13 a 31 etc.

An entity suffering from fear can attempt to overcome it at the end of each round, provided:

• They are not within striking distance of the source of the Fear
• The source of the Fear is not getting closer

Overcoming fear requires an Extended Cool test equal to the Fear or Terror rating of the source, for Fear the difficulty is Average, for Terror it is Challenging.

Corruption

Convert the old value to a percentage by multiplying it by 10.

Every time a character's Corruption score increases to 50 make a % roll; if the roll is less than or equal to their Corruption score the character must succeed at a Challenging Endurance test or gain a mutation.

Upon mutating the character's Corruption is reduced by their Willpower.

Awesome Points & Plot Armour

 

I came across 2 really interesting mechanics this week, I'm not sure either would really suit the whole grim-dark Warhammer thing, but I want to file them away for potential future use anyway...

Plot Armour

From the alchemistnocturne blog, the rule is that a player can turn a failed roll into a maximal success by answering a relevant (to the situation) question about their character's background, for example a missed roll to hit during a fight could be fixed with 'What was that important lesson you received from your master?' The idea is that PCs should start out with minimal background detail and have this serve to both flesh them out and provide some extra protection when their characters are low level and weak. I really like this idea, and wonder if it could be applied more in the abstract, i.e. not requiring strict relevance to the situation but more just in a building future trouble manner, a bit like how taking 'disadvantages' function in some character generation systems; 'What gang in the city holds a grudge against you?' Ideally you would want a set of questions related to career or some key background aspect, or maybe even just some very leading questions 'Where did you bury the tax collector?' I also think, probably given all the 're-roll' systems we currently employ (Luck and Corruption) that this might be better used to save a character from actual death rather than a failed roll and limit it to one or two uses.

Awesome Points

From the Old School Hack, which I sought out courtesy of Chris McDowall's interview with Reynaldo Madrinan. At the beginning of a session the GM lays out a bowl filled with 2 and a half times as many chits as there are players in the game. These are the Awesome Points. Anyone can reach into the bowl and award them to another player for doing something cool, or even just saying something funny. They can be spent on bonuses to die rolls, reducing damage or even, by spending several at once, creating a useful NPC that the character knows. Each player tracks how many awesome points they have spent, and when everyone has spent 12, everyone levels up. 

I really like the sound of this, incentivizing fun and linking character progression to it. Maybe we could use this as part of our current xp system (which is barely any system at all), so the players effectively reward each other from a set pool as we play, though I find myself immediately wanting to tack more conditions on to it (each player can only hand out one or only one can be granted for any given thing etc). With respect to WFRP I am thinking about this purely for XP, not as some kind of gameplay resource for modifiers or narrative control.

WFRP 4e House Rules: Combat

The Combat Round

A round lasts about 10 seconds. During that time all combatants who are capable may Move and perform both a Full Action (i.e. attack) and a Fast Action (draw a weapon).
If one side is Surprised, only their opponents get to do anything in the first round. Circumstances dictate surprise, die rolls may be called for to avoid, or Talents employed (i.e. Sixth Sense).

In a normal combat round combatants with loaded ranged weapons may use their Full Action to fire their missiles first, starting with those with the highest Initiative attribute (use Agility in the case of ties). Note a thrown weapon counts as loaded if in hand.
Once all loaded missiles are launched the round proceeds according to Combat Initiative.

Combat Initiative

Combat Initiative is group based.
Generally speaking the side who initiated the combat get to go first, with each character performing their actions in turn (in order of Initiative attribute if required) before play passes to the opposing side.
If it is unclear who should have the initiative, draw a card or roll a die at the start of the combat, highest wins.

Taking the Initiative

One side may take the initiative if one of their number spends a Full Action attempting to do so and succeeds at a Leadership test. Modified as follows:

• More/Less fighters than opponents +/-10
• More/Less total Advantage than opponents +/-10*

*Only apply if one side clearly have more Advantage than the other, if it’s necessary to count don’t bother
The opponent can try to oppose this with the Leadership of one of their own provided they commit a Full Action to it.

Delayed Initiative

If their side has the initiative a character can choose to delay their action until some condition is met, at the risk of potentially losing their action for that round. For example someone may wish to fire on an enemy who crosses their line of sight, or move to intercept an enemy charging at a weak ally. To do so requires winning an opposed Initiative test. Success stops or interrupts the opponent’s action, which they can resume afterwards if capable. Failure results in losing one’s action for the round.
Bonuses or penalties may be applied depending on how precise the condition is.

Moving & Actions

I will write all the details out properly later, for now just noting changes or rules we’ve rarely used.

• You can Move your Move rate in 2 yard squares (walking) and perform a Full Action.
• You can move up to 2 times your move rate in 2 yard squares (running) at the cost of your Full Action, this still leaves you a Fast Action.
• You can move up to 4 times your Move Rate by sprinting, this is all you can do in the round and requires an Average Athletics test (+20) with failure deducting the negative SL in yards from the move.
• You can Charge into combat gaining 1 Advantage provided your enemy is more than your move rate distance away but less than twice your move rate
• See 'Disengaging from Combat' here for Disengaging & Fleeing.
• You can elect to perform a Fighting Retreat, moving half your movement rate backwards with your only action being to oppose attacks (this is a combined Move & Full Action).
• You cannot move after attacking unless you are no longer Engaged (i.e. your attack knocked your opponent Prone)

Full Actions

Full Actions include any which require a die roll and some which don’t

• Melee Attack
• Ranged Attack
• Cast a spell/pray
• Reload Action (crossbow, blackpowder etc)
• Leadership Initiative test
• Fight Defensively
• Fighting Retreat
• Aim
• Pick up a dropped weapon
• Remove an item from a backpack

Fast Actions

• Draw a Weapon
• Drop an item
• Take an item from a worn pouch or pocket
• Reload a Sling or Bow if you only Move or Fire

Opposed Combat Tests

In Melee you can oppose one attack with your primary weapon, one with a secondary weapon (i.e. shield) and oppose one with Dodge, but for every test after the first subtract -10 cumulatively (i.e. the 3rd roll is at a -20 penalty). Whoever scores the highest Success Level wins (even if its a negative). Success Level is the degree to which a roll is less than the fighter's relevant combat skill counting only the 10s die, so a roll of 32 on a Melee (Basic) skill of 51 would yield 2 SL. 

Using a shield to oppose a (point-blank) ranged attack counts as one of these opposed actions.
An unopposed melee attack is effectively an automatic hit where a failed roll merely reduces the damage done by the negative Success Level.

Damage

In order to reduce the amount of arithmetic in the game we’re dropping Toughness as a damage soak and Strength as a damage bonus, unless a character has greater than 50 Strength in which case they do +1 damage. From now on weapons only do their base damage plus the Success Level of the attack. As per the original rules a successful attack will always inflict one wound (unless supernatural traits etc stipulate otherwise).

Crits & Fumbles

In order to reduce the amount of criticals and fumbles I want to switch to a more traditional, simpler method:

• Criticals happen on 01, 02 & 03
• Fumbles happen on 98, 99, 00

Note this applies to all rolls, including opposed defensive and non-combat tests.

Shields and Helms can be sacrificed to prevent a critical, but this must be called before the critical is rolled. The armour is ruined, but so is the entire hit, not just the critical component of it.

Shields

Only provide Armour Points to the portion of the character that they cover, this is based on the Defense Rating of the shield:

1. Shield Arm
2. Shield Arm and Body
3. Shield Arm, Body and Head

Advantage

Advantage is now limited to a maximum of the tens unit of the skill being used, so a Melee (Basic) skill of 34 limits Advantage to 3. If a combatant changes weapon their maximum Advantage may change as a result.

Vaesen

 

Vaesen is a 'nordic horror' roleplaying game, illustrated and inspired by the works of Johan Egerkrans. It's a really beautiful book, worth having simply for its aesthetics as an artifact. I got it as an add-on to the Kickstarter for their new Mythic Britain & Ireland source book. I suspect I probably first heard of it on the Grognard Files podcast. It's published by the Free League, the Swedish rpg publisher, and uses a modified version of their Mutant Year Zero engine. This is the first game I've read using MYZ, but not the first one I've actually bought.

It's set in 19th century Scandinavia where the creatures of nordic folk tales are real and the player characters are investigators all gifted with a second sight which enables them to see these creatures, or Vaesen.

It uses a dice pool system as it's core mechanic, exclusively utilizing d6. Like VtM you roll a number of dice equal to the sum of your relevant skill and attribute values. A 6 counts as a success, and for most actions only one is required. For opposed rolls the character with the greatest number of successes wins. Each of it's 12 skills defines what happens should you have more than one success, generally you have some kind of choice, in the case of combat you can do more damage, make the opponent drop their weapon etc.

It seems like a very clean, simple system. Combat is spiced up with the use of playing cards for initiative. These are drawn for all combatants at the beginning of a fight (lowest goes first), but can be swapped by expending additional successes on them. I really like the sound of this, I'd been thinking we should try this in our WFRP game (having heard that  Deadlands does something similar) and only hadn't for fear of nerfing the Initiative attribute, but Vaesen's swapping card mechanic provides an elegant answer.

It feels like a system very much geared to creating a certain mood and kind of story. The rules are more abstract than simulationist. Damage to a character is expressed as 4 mental and physical conditions (exhausted, battered, wounded and broken for physical), each of which reduces your dice pool by one, with a descriptive critical being applied when you reach Broken. Dice rolls can be pushed (i.e. re-rolled) at the cost of sustaining a condition.

Character creation is points based, which everything except memento (a personal object you can use to relieve a condition) being chosen rather than rolled. Your age descriptor determines the number of points you get to spread between your attributes and skills, with your Archetype setting the options for Talents (special modifiers and abilities) and various background details, relationship types and starting equipment. There are 10 Archetypes ranging from Officer and Servant to Occultist and Academic.

The game is presented very much as having a set structure, from the advice on how to create a mystery to the fact that each character can gain an Advantage (2 bonus dice for one roll) on the journey to the site of an adventure, to how you can upgrade your base afterwards. It does away with much book keeping by having a resources stat that you roll on for acquiring equipment rather than tracking money.

 I like the sound of this in theory, and can see how these abstract, almost board game elements could facilitate an evocative mystery story, especially including the fact that each character has a Trauma, a Dark Secret and a specific relationship with each of the other player characters. In theory. The fact is our group seem to gravitate naturally to a more simulationist style of play, where often the most fun seems to come when we're playing out a game moment by moment rather than cutting from one scene to the next. I'm definitely pilfering that initiative system though.

It can be purchased from the Free League webstore.

Warlock! (20/11/21)

 

Not entirely sure what put me on to Warlock! in the first place (though I would have got there eventually via the Mud & Blood podcast), apparently it single handedly created the #BOSR hashtag (British OSR), and is a completely understandable reaction by the author to the over-complex mess that is WFRP 4e. 

Warlock! takes the careers and ethos of WFRP and marries them to the simple stats of Fighting Fantasy (via Troika!), so you have simply Stamina, Luck and a bunch of Skills. The key departure from its inspiration is that its d20 based, roll + skill and score over 20 to succeed, with combat being simple opposed tests. Characters are rounded out with some OSR like career specific random details (What you’ve seen, Who you know etc). It makes me wonder if WFRP was a big influence on Electric Bastionland (re random careers and flavour).

If I had discovered this before I bought WFRP 4e I think I would have used this for playing The Enemy Within.

An elegant little detail I like; each career has its eponymous skill, so if you are a Beggar you get the skill Beggar and this is an average of all your career skills (careers are simply defined by their skills, starting possessions and the random details). Your Stamina increases by 1 when your career skill does (which amounts to every 5 improvements in your career skills). I like this clear indication of ‘level’, WFRP 4e does something similar, but nowhere near as clear or satisfying with no actual career skill. There's no explicit guidance on how to use this skill, but even if it was simply just to make money at your career that would be reason enough.

Combat is similar to WFRP but also feels like a cleaner version; damage done to Stamina is considered  just bruising and fatigue, but once Stamina is depleted every hit is a roll on the critical table with negative Stamina as a modifier. Stamina is regained quickly, criticals affect the character and take time to recover from or just outright kill.

All characters can use magic, they simply require the knowledge of spells via scrolls or books (Initiates & Wizards start with one random spell each). An Incantation Skill roll must be succeeded to cast and each spell consumes an amount of stamina whether successful or not. There is also a miscast table.

I just had a quick go at the combat right now, my Beggar equipped with a club vs an unarmoured, short sword wielding goblin. I did the goblin some damage but got butchered; the 2nd critical killed me after 5 or 6 rounds. It felt pretty fast. The attacker in the opposed roll gets a +5, which I was thinking in the case of evenly matched opponents would lend the combatant with  the initiative a big advantage, it didn’t help me too much though. I missed once with my 1d6-1 damage club when the goblin hit with his 1d6 + 3 shortsword. Our skills were matched and my Stamina (17) was almost double that of the Goblin (10), but the disparity in weapon damage was too much. 1d6-1 seems pretty stingy for a club! Also I’m surprised it doesn’t have critical hits on a straight 20, though the fight would have been even shorter then as that was one lucky Goblin.

I’d be tempted to use this for our WFRP campaign if I thought I could get it past the players, though keep WFRP Success Levels and make all weapons do their average damage plus the success level. Hmm.

I bought Warlock! from DriveThru

Lamentations of the Flame Princess (08-08-21)

 

I was very much looking forwards to reading this, having heard many sing it’s praises and listened to a great interview with the author. The presentation of the book is slick and oozes atmosphere. The subtitle is ‘Weird Fantasy Role-Playing’, it can’t be a coincidence that this would have the same acronym as Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, right? I was very hyped for it, to the point of thinking that when I finally get around to playing something this would be a fine contender. The Rules & Magic core book is fairly short, 159 pages, just over a third of which are spell descriptions, I managed to get through it all today (I skipped the spells).

I was, perhaps a bit unfairly, a little disappointed. 

This is an OSR retro clone of B/X D&D set in the late middle ages/early Renaissance, although the setting exists really only in the equipment lists and the fact that there is an appendix on firearms of the period. It feels like a tidied up version of the Basic D&D rules with a hodge-podge bunch of house rules on top, to cover everything from ship combat to property management.

 My single biggest criticism is that I’m not at all sure about the organization of the book, it all feels a bit random (I would have less of an issue if there was an index), and I think the explanation of many of the rules could be clearer, it could do with bolding key terms. There is however no fluff and no explanations of context, the thing is what you can read from the rules and see in the art. I may be being slightly unfair, it’s possible that my knowledge of Basic D&D was getting in the way, like I have an expectation of what should be explained when etc and that could have been fighting with the text.
If I had not listened to that interview with Raggi I wonder if I would have found the inclusion of Dwarf, Elf & Halfling classes weird? I know he only put them there because of expectation, but they feel at odds with the tone, or would they have made me detect a different tone?

The other key thing which sets it apart from its origins is in its spells, well, one spell.

It has the usual D&D, Vancian inspired magic system with all the usual spells; Magic Missile, Cure Light Wounds etc. with one paragraph devoted to each. Then we plunge deep into Lovecraft with Summon, a 1st level spell which runs to 10 pages! A 1st level spell, which as I'd heard from several sources, can destroy a campaign if it goes wrong!

The details of what comes through from the other sides is a hideous concoction of random tables, a bespoke horror with potentially awful powers rather than just a random creature from a subset of the Monster Manual. One possible disastrous outcome is a bit meta; the player who failed swaps roles with the GM until conditions are met for reverting play to normal!

I should note that there are also a whole slew of rule tweaks which evoke a more low fantasy setting; only Fighters hit chances increase with level and there are no damage bonuses due to Strength or Dexterity.

Reading it has not really dampened my desire to try it, although I do feel like it could maybe use an extra class or 2 in place of the non-human ones, and maybe a few extra skills. Oh and possibly a Sanity mechanic.

It and its many amazing modules and source books can be got from the publishers website.