This is a tricky one. I have fallen in love with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, sort of, since reading the original Enemy Within back in 2019. I like the idea of WFRP1E a lot, but the system is heavier than I want to run these days (even if it isn’t quite so heavy as you might think). I have no desire to wade into 2E or 3E — I like the look of 1E and not liking the look of 2 and 3 is enough to put me off. I do like the look of Cubicle 7’s fourth edition, however (2018). A lot. I know it isn’t quite so gritty as the 1e vibe, but I still find it appealingly grimy for a pretty top tier game in the year of our lord 2022. I also generally like C7 — Cthulhu Britannica was good fun. My hope here was to get something like Call of Cthulhu 7E — the same essential system with a ton of polish and modern renovations.
It is that, sort of. There are lots of nice improvements. The career system gets a nice overhaul, which allows characters to keep their career for, well, their whole career, without awkward changes or dead ends. The trade off is that means all the careers advance in basically the same, balanced way, so you don’t get that sense of variety, but I’m OK with that. I love status levels — your wealth, which gives you access to everything within your means without book-keeping. I also dig XP bonuses for keeping random results in character generation. Skill tests, magic system, everything feels pretty good. Except combat. I love the idea of trying to capture the momentum of a battle through tokens, but it just keeps getting more and more complicated as you go. And it isn’t just Advantage you have to track — you’ve got Fate and Resilience and Fortune and Resolve as well, each its own currency. None of it is bad, but all of it together is too much and so intricately interconnected, I can’t see a way to simplify it. Like, no way, easy or hard.
That basically means I can’t bring this to my in-person table. Which is fine, it probably runs great digitally. But when I finally run Enemy Within, I might just do it with Warlock?
