An obvious choice really given the Games Workshop-centric introduction I had to roleplaying. Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, or WFRP as was the ugly acronym, was a role playing game extrapolated from the rules and background of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle wargame.
And boy could you tell.
The rules mechanisms were mired in it’s origins, full of cumbersome modifiers for combat, yet fairly simple for everything else. Combat early in the game was quite deadly, if anything actually hit you. Later in the game, combat was still quite deadly, it just tended to be over quite quickly as you and what you fought were better at hitting things.
What it did well was the background.
Set in a fantastic version of Renaissance Germany, the mood of the game was close to Call of Cthulhu with a dash of Stormbringer. The characters were the common man (or dwarf or elf etc…) invariably set against cultists worship chaos gods. The game boasted a huge range of character professions the players could move through, later professions more familiarly the heroes of fantasy fiction, but starting professions included such lower class positions as Rat Catcher.
The approach of battling chaos cults was reinforced by the Enemy Within campaign that GW released to support the game. Rather than the dungeon exploring and monster killing you’d find in a D&D adventure, the focus was more on detective work and political intrigue.
I ran this game a fair bit with my first gaming group and briefly returned to it with the second group of gamers I was part of. It was ignored by GW for a long time, indeed when White Dwarf stopped publishing WFRP material was around the time our interest in tabletop gaming was overtaken by an interest in Japanese videogames. WFRP was eventually revived in 1995, before dying again in 2002, and then revived again in 2004.
I still have a copy of the first edition, even though I can’t have played it for more than 10 years.
This is the best piece of text I’ve ever read that describes the world of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play game. Too bad these days are behind and Games Workshop has became a parody of what it used to be…