Now here is an intriguing bit of OSR — Warlock! This is the Black Edition (2021), put out in a joint venture between Fire Ruby Designs and Black Oath Entertainment and reprints the core rules as well as the Kingdom setting supplement under one cover.
The tag line here is “A game inspired by the early days of British tabletop gaming.” They can’t say it for trademark reasons, but they took Fighting Fantasy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying in equal measure, put them in a pot together and came up with something that echoes both systems while also being its own thing. The game is skill and career based, with more complexity baked in than the Fighting Fantasy system, but far simpler than WFRP. At the core, you take the value of whatever you are testing and add it to the roll of a D20; anything result over 20 is a success. Combat is resolved using opposed roles. That’s basically it, though there are are all sorts of noodly bits to explore — mighty strikes, for instance, do double damage if your attack roll is three times your opponent’s. In sum, it reminds me a lot of the Black Hack — it feels like the systems that inspired it, but it is also very much its own, modern thing.
The Kingdom stuff is pretty good too, capturing a lot of Warhammer flavor without bogging down into slavish copying. Like the rules, this is its own thing (with wingless manticore, so all the points for that). You get a good amount of detail on the world and then a survey of the amusingly named city Grim Bickerstaf. I can totally see using these rules to explore the world presented here. But the real question for me is: can Warlock be used to run something like the classic WFRP campaign The Enemy With and still satisfy? That is apparently what they were made for! And I intend to investigate…
Oh, cool thing I love: there’s no race in the game. You can play human, elves, dwarves and halflings, but they’re considered “communities.” There are no mechanical advantages for any of them. Rather, there are social differences. This strikes me as a good way of approaching things.
