The new Warhammer: The Old World RPG launches on Thursday June 19, with digital versions of the Player's Guide available immediately, and pre-orders for loads more up on publisher Cubicle 7's webstore. I've been poring over the new Player's Guide, and while I haven't had enough time with it to write a full review, what I've encountered so far has me very excited.
The Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game (TOW) takes place in the same world as the venerable Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP), but around 400 years earlier. If you're wondering why this warrants a whole stand alone tabletop RPG and not just an expansion to WFRP, my interview with Cubicle 7's CEO Dominic McDowell and senior producer Pádraig Murphy earlier in the year has really exhaustive answers - but the short version of the explanation is focus and tone.
TOW is grim and perilous and packed with cults and conspiracies from all kinds of nefarious Old World factions, just like WFRP, but unlike its forebear, this one is explicitly set up as a thriller. It's set during the dying days of an age of (relative) peace for the Empire, a human-majority coalition of states that is currently split into power blocs with no single Emperor. The everyday evils of poverty and civil strife hold the attention of the highborn and the low, while the truly apocalyptic powers are plotting from the shadows.
This setup is captured in the very first art spread in the book. In the midst of a deep forest, a merchant crew punts a shallow draw boat up a river, about to pass under a bridge crossing. The bridge span can't be more than forty yards, but at either end is a fortified gate house, cannons mounted on each rooftop facing one another across the gap. Unobserved by the humans below, a goblin scout watches from the treeline. The meaning is clear - even as the humans of the Empire pursue their grudges, outside forces gather to consume them.
I've found that same clarity, strength of theme, and economy of information everywhere I've looked in the Player's Guide so far. For example there are thirty possible careers for your character: each takes up just one page. There's a neat table of rules, a great illustration, a character quote, a few paragraphs of description, and a little box-out with a tit-bit of lore that connects that career to the people or mysteries of the town of Talagaad.
Talagaad is very important to this book and this game. Unlike WFRP, which is broadly set within the Empire and relies on adventures and splatbooks to give more detail on specific locales, the TOW Player's Guide uses Talagaad as a default setting. All the flavor in the book is tied to this town and its environs, and each player starts the game with a couple of Contacts among the town's NPCs.
The Gamemaster's Guide should go into more depth on that setting, and provide tools for the GM to create their own. I haven't seen that book yet, but there are hints at how it works in the Player's Guide: the 25 Contacts are each assigned an archetype such as 'General' or 'Heretic', indicating the kind of NPCs the GM will need to create to fill their role in a different campaign set elsewhere.
Nicely, there are four possible ways for the PCs to know each Contact, which don't really need any adjustment if an original character is assigned to that role, giving a huge range of evocative character relationships that won't be too taxing for a GM to replicate.
The PCs will be brought together by a Grim Portent, a strange and deadly event that puts them into the crosshairs of powerful forces that will seek to destroy them. It's a classic handbset up for a thriller, and for an unlikely alliance between (for example) a Rat Catcher, a Dwarf Slayer, and an Elven Waywatcher. Like all good thrillers, the only way to escape is to delve deeper into the mystery, learning more, and riling up the powers that oppose them to ever greater violence.
So far, I've found that the Player's Guide sells this idea really well. It particularly communicates that there's a lot for the PCs to lose - you're playing as (relatively) ordinary people, with material and emotional connections to Talagaad, and plenty to lose other than your lives. But I don't know how that experience will actually play out across sessions - I expect to learn more in the Gamemaster's Guide.
As I say, I've not had long with the book, and I want to see the GM Guide before I pass judgment on the system as a whole. I haven't touched on the dice system either - my interview with C7 goes over how it works, but I haven't had a chance to test it and see how it feels. And I can't address the quality of the published PDF - C7 does use its digital launches as a way to get feedback on its books and improve them before they go to print, which means errors are less fatal than in print-first releases.
What I've seen so far has me excited to learn more. I'm a fan of low fantasy RPGs and thrillers, and they don't get put together very often. The high level of connection between players and key NPCs is actually perfect for an RPG campaign frame I'd been idly musing on last year, and this might be an excuse to brush off my GM's cape and put it to the test.
You can pre-order the TOW Player's Guide from the Cubicle 7 webstore from 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm BST on June 19. Cubicle 7 says that all pre-orders and bundles containing the Player's Guide will receive a PDF of the book right away, and the PDF of the Gamemaster's Guide will be added to all applicable orders as soon as it's ready, "by the end of July".
I'm going to continue working my way through The Old World RPG Player's Guide. If there's something you particularly want to learn about the game, you can let me know in the official Wargamer Discord community, and I'll do my best to get you an answer, either in there or in a follow-up article.
Cubicle 7 has the license for all past and present editions of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k RPGs. I ran its most recent 40k RPG, Imperium Maledictum, last year, and it was one of the most successful I've ever done - great game, though I went overboard on prep. You can learn more about what makes IM so charming from this playtest piece team Wargamer did with senior producer Pádraig Murphy.