Playtest Review: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, 3rd edition

The Warhammer fantasy game world has always been a very popular one, and some of the old campaigns for it (Enemy Within, especially) have a near-legendary status. The second edition of the game, published (mostly) by the Black Library imprint, was very popular and the whole game line consists of a lot of books. It’s always been a fun setting, as far as I know, but it has always also had a very “retro” game mechanic that hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s been serviceable by most accounts, but nothing all that fantastic.

So, when Fantasy Flight Games got the Warhammer license and announced that they are working on a new edition, the Internet rumor mill started buzzing again. The buzz intensified when some details became clear: it would (gasp!) use a dice pool system, would (gasp!) include some mechanics in card form, etc etc. Many of the initial fears were along the lines: “it’s a board game, not a roleplaying game!”. These complaints intensified when it became clear that the release was a gigantic boxed set, to the tune of a $100 retail price.

So now Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition is here. What is it? How does it play? I’ll try to answer some of that, but I do have one disclaimer: I’ve never played either 1st or 2nd edition of the game. I’m halfway familiar with some of the material, but really… I’m a relative newbie to the Warhammer world. I’ll inspect the game on its own merits, not “compared to 2nd edition sourcebook N”.

I’ll start with “what is it?”. First off, it’s a real roleplaying game. It’s in no form or fashion a board game. It uses some mechanics from board games (and card games) to keep track of things, but the game itself is a pure tabletop rpg. The box contains all you need for a GM + 3 players; only one person in the play group actually needs to buy this, assuming a group of 4 people.

The box is big, and contains 4 books (total a bit under 300 pages) and piles upon piles of different counters, cards, sheets and… stuff. It’s all a bit overwhelming at first, but there is a method to the madness. Fun fact: the page count of the books alone is actually higher than the 2nd edition corebook – and you get a ton of stuff in addition to the books. One book contains the core rules, one is a GM sourcebook, one is detail for playing priests, and the last one is about playing mages. All in all, the books are nicely laid out, and most things are clear enough. However, some of the rules are spread out among multiple books, making some rule details a bit hard to figure out. It’s by no means the worst I’ve seem (compared to Burning Wheel this is a cakewalk), but still… the books could have been a bit better organized, in an ideal world. I do have to give kudos to the GM section; it’s excellent, and contains lots of “indie” stuff like “say yes”, emphasis on a three-act structure, and lots of nice general advice.

In general, this game has taken a lot of cues from “indie” games. I can see bits and pieces of Burning Wheel, Spirit of the Century and other games in here. The design is quite unconventional, and in most places extremely innovative. It’s not without its problems (I’ll get to those later), but in general: this is the most innovative roleplaying design to come from a major publisher for a long time. Not everyone will like it, but I do think that most people who are interested in rpgs should take a look at it. There are lots of cool ideas in here.

To give an exact description of the mechanics would take more space than I want to spend here, so I’ll give a “nutshell” summary.

You still have a traditional “character” sheet, but it’s enhanced with numerous cards. First off, you get a large-format card detailing your current profession. This contains main info about the career. You also get a smaller career card, with the career special ability. This is a bit kludgy imho, that stuff should have been on the main career card… I think they just ran out of space on the main card, here. Anyway, in addition to those you get a bunch of abilities which you attach to your career card into dedicated “slots”. Some of these may be swapped in and out during play. Last off, you get a bunch of Action cards, which represent your normal actions.

Traditionally, this is stuff that would have been represented by written lines on a character sheet. Here they are pre-printed cards. The advantage is that it vastly reduces the need for book lookup during play, since the cards contain much of the mechanics. This is good. It also allows for visual representations of when the action (or whatever) can be used again, via “recharge tokens” placed on the cards.

Then there is the dice pool, which is very cool. It consists of a bunch of custom dice, with symbols on them. The dice have different numbers of faces… some are d6, some d8, etc. You collect a “pool” of them, based on various factors: you base attribute for a skill gives you blue dice, skill training adds yellow “expert” dice, your “stance” (see below) modifies some of your blue dice to green/red, the difficulty of the action adds purple “challenge” dice, and lastly you may get white “fortune” dice and black “misfortune” dice. Once you have your pool you roll it, and the result gives you a “multidimensional” result: in addition to saying whether you succeed or fail, it also provides good or bad side effects which are not tied to success. So you might succeed, but get a bad side-effect. Or vice versa.

All that may sound complicated, but it’s actually quite quick to learn and works really nicely. Good job there, FFG.

There are lots of details I could mention, but I’ll only note two specific innovative extra things here.

First, the party sheet. This is the first rpg that I’ve run into which details the group of player characters as a separate entity (in addition to the PCs). So after the players create their characters, they need to decide what kind of party they are. Are they Intrepid Explorers? Or a Gang of Thugs? Or Brash Young Fools? In addition to providing some mechanical effects, the party sheet also serves to remind the players of that important thing: “why are we together in the first place?”. It’s a nice idea.

Secondly, stances. Each character gets a “stance meter”, which depends on his/her career and other things. This consists of a neutral middle point, and a number of “conservative” and “reckless” spaces on either side. In “encounter mode” (the mode you use to resolve most things), characters decide their current stance on that meter. That setting has an effect on how all their actions resolve; doing stuff “recklessly” nets potentially higher benefits, but also runs higher risks. It’s a very nice mechanic, and a clear evolution from many “indie” game ideas.

Ok. Up to now I’ve talked about how the game looks and reads. Based on just those, my impression was very favorable: the production values were excellent (as usual for FFG productions), the mechanics contained a ton of innovative bits, and the thing was still a traditional rpg at the core.

I did have a few issues:

• The price is high. Sure, you get a lot for your $100, and the box contains enough for a GM + 3 players – the equivalent set in D&D 4th edition would actually cost you more. Still, it’s a lot of money. I personally think it’s worth the price, though (and you can get it for a lot less than that $100 via Amazon, for example).

• As noted, the organization of the rulebooks could be a bit clearer. In addition, there are mistakes and omissions here and there, you need the FAQ document to figure some things out. It’s not horrible, just in the “could be better” department. Also, there is no index.. but FFG actually provides an online ”living index” instead, which is a nice idea and might prove better than a normal index in the long run.

• After reading the thing, I was a bit concerned about the amount of table space this thing would probably take, and the amount of fiddly bits (cards, counters, etc) you had to keep track of.

• There are only a limited number of races, careers, etc available here. I don’t find this to be much of a problem, the design here makes it easy to expand things as the game develops. It does feature less initial choice in those matters than earlier editions; to me that’s no big deal, but it of course affects the price-vs-value proposition for some people.

Luckily enough, my housemates were all home the next weekend after I got this, so I recruited them as victims for a quick playtest. One had never played any sort of roleplaying game before, one had run some 2nd edition Warhammer, and one some 1st edition… so a nice mix of people there. I decided to run the “Eye for an Eye” demo scenario included with the box.

Character creation went fairly smoothly, though at that point there was quite a bit of “pass me the book” going on… some printouts of relevant tables etc might have helped. The players settled on a priest of Shallaya, an Agent and a Mercenary – forming a gang of Brash Young Fools. After a brief into, off they went into the wilderness.

Things started off with a combat encounter, which ended up taking the bulk of the session. It almost ended with a Total Party Kill also; I should have had the Beastmen break morale earlier than they did, but since I wasn’t familiar with the system I didn’t realize the problems fast enough. The PC group had only one really functional combat character, and against a horde of beastmen.. well, while the Mercenary could hold his own for quite a while, it was a losing battle. In the end, one of the characters would have died if we went by the rules, but I decided to fudge it and “just” leave him critically wounded.

All in all, the combat mechanics seemed ok. Needs a bit of practice to get it to run smoothly, and that one fight went on a bit too long due to the PCs being a bit underpowered – but in general, the system seemed to work nicely. Players reported that having the combat powers right in from of them on cards helped a lot, both with book-keeping and with figuring out capabilities in general.

After that we got to the “investigation” section at a hunting lodge. Things proceeded pretty nicely, though things were a bit hampered by only one of the characters being in mobile shape… and here I ran into the first real rule problem: the rules give no help for deciding how fast a priest can heal someone outside of combat. I decided that the others could get back to decent health pretty fast to keep things moving, but… the rules failed here.

After some stalking around, I decided to call the game session a day – character creation and that one combat had taken a lot of time, and it was getting late. We may continue that scenario later, but for now that’s where we are: halfway in the demo scenario.

So, my opinion of the game after some (quick) playtesting?

• The basic mechanics worked pretty much as well as I had hoped. The dice pool thing rocks.

• I’m still undecided on when and if to use the “Rally Phase” mechanic.

• The “progress tracker” is a nice general mechanics, but the books give way too little actual examples of how to use it. As it, it has promise but needs more game support in order to be really useful.

• Despite my own hopes, the game doesn’t really have a “social combat” mechanic. It has something in that direction, but it’s pretty rough and simplified. Of course, due to the expandable card-based design, this might change in the future. I’m sure something cool could be built on top of the Progress Tracker.

• Yes, it takes a lot of table space, but nothing impossible. The abstract combat movement mechanics means you don’t need a grid or miniatures, so things balance out. Might be a problem with a larger play group and a small table, though – you need decent table space for this thing.

• In the future, I hope they provide NPC/monster stats as cards, also. Here I had to keep a book open for that stuff, which was a bit cumbersome.

• At the moment, the rules have a big gaping hole (or at the least, a massive source of confusion). I’ve talked about this a lot of rpg.net and FFG’s own forums, but for now there is no official answer, you must do some houseruling in order to play this game. The problem is this: the game has Encounter Mode, and Story Mode. Action cards make sense in Encounter Mode, but stop making sense outside it. Nowhere in the rules does it say exactly when to use which mode, and how to handle Actions outside Encounter mode. As priest healing “spells” are Actions too, it results in stuff like zero information on how fast divine healing (outside combat) is. Is it instant (one interpretation of the rules)? Does it take days (another interpretation)? Nobody knows, and there is no official answer yet. Though…

…ok. I won’t go into length on this, but in a nutshell here is my current interpretation: you play most of the game in Encounter Mode. You only use Story Mode for “scene switch” narrations, etc. The important thing is this: the amount of time a “turn” takes in Encounter Mode is highly flexible. During combat it might be some seconds or tens of seconds. Outside of that, it may be minutes, hours or even days. Depends on the context. With this framework, you can sort of make the game work outside “combat-time” mode also, though you must fudge things a bit (allow multiple actions during “turn” even though the rules don’t strictly allow that, etc). The problem is that this interpretation depends completely on GM fiat, and also results in some corner-case problems – but it results in less problems than other interpretations to date. To my mind, at least.

So… be prepared for some house-ruling. At the moment, this is a somewhat weird game… it goes from “exact rules with exact results” to “no rules whatsoever, total GM fiat” with no warning whatsoever. While the nice and visual layout of the game might make it good for newbie GMs, the fact that the rules contain some holes at the moment make it less than ideal for that. It’s nothing that a good GM (even a newbie) can’t deal with, but… you have been warned.

In sum: this is a very good new incarnation of Warhammer Fantasy, with lots of (honestly) innovative bits and lots of promise. It’s a bit unpolished at the moment in places, but I have hopes that FFG and/or the player community can slowly fill in the missing bits. Despite the small problems, I’ll highly recommend this one. It’s a breath of fresh air to an old world, in many respects. […]

Minireview: Creatures Anathema (Dark Heresy)

Creatures Anathema is a “monster manual” of sorts for the Dark Heresy game, but it’s far from being just a boring list of stat blocks. In a way it’s a continuation of the earlier Disciples of the Dark Gods book – where that book presented a large group of specific antagonist organizations and individuals, this one lists more general threats (general “monster” types and alien races). What makes it so good is the fact that each entry is shown with in-game “notes” from various parties on how the creature in question is generally viewed, and there are also plot hooks given on each one. All this makes actually using these things in a game much easier than it would be with just a “stats” book, and it also makes for a much more entertaining read.

The creature types are varied and interesting, ranging fron non-intelligent “monsters” to diabolically intelligent major threats. A lot of imagination has gone into most of these (though the “space orcs” still make me cringe a bit).

In sum, yet another quality supplement for Dark Heresy. As always, the production values are excellent, this is one good-looking book. I did spot some typoes and some missing page references, so some small bit of extra editing might have been good… but those are minor issues. […]

Minireview: Disciples of the Dark Gods (Dark Heresy)

The Dark Heresy line continues to impress me. In Disciples of the Dark Gods the GM is presented with a collection of antagonist groups to use in his/her games. The title is a bit misleading… only some of these are worshippers of “dark gods” as such. Many are “just” human, with motivations either very twisted or quite understandable. In fact some of them have motivations that are quite benign by our standards (search for ancient knowledge, for example). That sort of thing just happens to be heresy, punishable by execution, in the DH world. No, it’s (still) not a happy, fluffy place. I guess that’s part of the twisted charm.

The antagonist groups are divided into sections, roughly by type. We have the human groups, the aliens, the demonics, and “internal dangers”, and others. To my mind, all the groups presented were interesting and very usable as antagonists and/or foils in a game. All are given motivations and typical methods of operation, making their inclusion in a game all that much easier. Anyone needing a cool set of “bad guys” for their DH game should be well served by this book… I think the main problem would be choosing which one(s) to use.

The book finishes off with an adventure, titled House of Dust and Ashes. It’s a bit gimmicky, but since it features such absolutely cool locations (airship, volcano, etc) and good NPCs, I’ll forgive it for containing some gimmicks – especially since the whole things reads like a very fun (if quite lethal) romp. The piece concerns an auction of some potentially dangerous/heretical items which belonged to (now deceased) Rogue Trader Erasmus Haarlock; the PCs are sent in as errand boys (of sorts) of an “allied” Inquisitor and need to watch their backs & gather information on who bids on what. Well, it’s not quite that simple. It never is…

Once again, excellent production values, good writing, good art… not much to complain about, even if I wanted to. Did catch a few typos and some missing page number references, but those were minor. […]

Minireview: Purge the Unclean (Dark Heresy)

I must admit, I’m getting more and more impressed with the Dark Heresy game line. While the game world is still a strange mix of overblown silliness, dystopia-turned-to-11 and gritty intrigue, the writing and production values of the game line have been excellent, so far. Purge the Unclean is no exception, being a collection of three linked adventure scenarios (all written by T.S. Luikhart). Damn good ones.

The first scenario, Rejoice For You Are True, is linked to the adventure in the core book via a clue potentially found by the PCs there – though that’s just a convenience, there is no other real link to that scenario here. It’s a very strong scenario, and perhaps the best one in the book. Mostly an investigative piece, it has the PCs investigating a seemingly benevolent and harmless cult on a hive world. While being quite freeform, there is an assumed escalation path and the whole thing is quite versatile, switching gears quite a few times. Though it’s no surprise that the cult in question isn’t quite as benevolent as people assume, there are lots of twists and turns here. Good stuff.

The second piece is Shades of Twilight, and forms the action-adventure part of this trilogy. An ancient space hulk has appeared on a collision course with a planet and the PCs are among the few within scramble range of intercepting the thing before it must be destroyed. Why intercept? Because the call code of a presumed-dead Inquisitor is being broadcast from the hulk. Cue space marines, aliens, and lots else besides. While this one is action-heavy, there is some (quite bizarre!) social interaction here as well.

Last off there is Baron Hopes, which ventures more into the angst and horror department. The PCs must look into ancient rebellion and heresy on a mining world, among throngs of serfs (=slaves) barely living in hellish work-camp surroundings. An order of mutants is plotting rebellion… maybe. Who are the good guys and who the bad? At this point, at the latest, it should dawn on the players that they are not necessarily on the side of “good” here (if not direct “evil”, either). Moral choices to be made, mutants to kill (or talk with), and lots of mud and squalor. There is one small twist at the end which really underscores the nihilistic nature of the game world and the types of people the PCs (probably) are. Won’t spoil it here, but it’s a nice – if grim – touch.

All three have memorable and “cinematic” settings, interesting NPCs, and at least a few surprises. All also feature multiple ways to resolve the “mission” – which is good, since all are quite challenging and risky.

The writing and plotting is very good on all three, and all have (obviously by intent) very different “feels” and themes to them. Extra bonus points for linking the first scenario with the (quite decent) one in the core book, so GMs have the option of running four quite different adventures as a linked set. There is a shadowy background antagonist group which is present in all three adventures, and which seems like it might get some continuation further on the game line – at least, things are left open on that front. The Warhammer (fantasy) line has reputation for excellent pregen adventures and that seems to hold true on the 40k side also. The only stinker so far is the first free demo adventure, which should be ignored by all sane sentien beings. The second free demo is much, much better, as are all these “commercial” ones so far.

To top things off, the production values are again top-notch. Nice art, solid layout, and competent editing. I wish other rpg companies would do as good a job as these guys have done. While the writing is of course the critical ingredient in all books like this, good production values do enhance the experience significantly. […]

Minireview: The Inquisitor's Handbook (Dark Heresy)

The Inquisitor’s Handbook claims to be “The Ultimate Player’s Guide” (for the Dark Heresy game). Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s pretty nice and seems useful. Like most books titled as “player’s guides”, it’s more a collection of character creation and advancement options, equipment, and suchlike crunch to decorate your PC with. Oh, there is a section at the end which actually tries to describe day-to-day life in the Dark Heresy world and gives some overview of what’s what and who’s who… but the bulk of the book is “crunch” for tweaking player characters and their gear.

The book introduces one completely new career option, the Adepta Sororitas “Sisters of Battle”, open only to female characters (obviously). In addtion, the existing careers are expanded a bit with various optional advancement paths, giving some extra variablity to the as such quite fixed career progressions. Some specialist subgroups are also introduced which your PC might be a member of, these seem to work a bit like “prestige classes” in D&D 3e do – they have various sorts of prerequisites, and confer some extra benefits. Nothing to complain of in all of this; the quite static character progression was one of the complaints leveled at the core rulebook.

A big section of the book is devoted to gear. It’s nicely organized, being first divided by origin world type (hive world, feral world, etc), and then subdivided by gear type within each section. This makes it a lot nicer for figuring out character gear based on their locale and/or origins than one humongous equipment list would be. The downside is, of course, that in order to scan through, say, all the armor options, you have to do some back-and-forth skipping through the book. Not a problem in my mind, but something to be aware of.

As noted, the book ends with a section that’s more of an actual “player’s guide”, giving some PC-centric overview of how things work in the game world, and some tips on how Acolytes would usually approach problems. There is some especially nice stuff here about using contacts and alter-egos to help with investigations.

While it’s somewhat of a grab bag of character options and game world tips, it’s a good one. Were I to run a game of Dark Heresy, I’d use this book to flesh out character creation – no question of that. There is nothing here that really complicates the game, and having extra options is usually a good thing. […]

Winter hibernation

Still alive, though the recurring flu of this winter is (was) back for a short while. Feeling much better now, but we spent the weekend in Jyväskylä at a wedding and Sunday morning had me feeling like something the cat dragged in… and I didn’t drink that much. Decided to stay home and vegetate yesterday, was feeling pretty crappy – and it was worth it, now back at work and more or less ok. Managed to watch some small bit of my tv show backlog when I wasn’t horizontal in bed, so at least something good….

Otherwise it’s life as normal; nothing spectacular has happened but I manage to keep busy and entertained. I bought the board game Arkham Horror and most of the expansion packs, and we’ve been trying that out. Fun game, and even though it is complicated we’ve mostly managed to figure it out. FFG really does publish some brilliant board games; the newer Battlestar Galactica board game is also very, very good and a huge amount of fun.

Been playing a bit of EVE now and then, but it comes and goes. The new expansion does sound very interesting, I have to admit; I’m busy brushing up on my exploration/scanning skills so I can go try out the new “wormhole” stuff once it goes live. At the moment nobody knows how the new Tech3 stuff will work out. I suspect the devs are clueless there, too, and the “let’s tweak it as we go along” model is in play. I’m ok with that, as long as they do balance things eventually.

Oh, and I do have to mention my new (work) phone, the Nokia 6210 Navigator. Now, it’s not often that I praise anything done by Nokia, I’ve usually found their hardware to be ok but the software abysmal. Well, this thing is actually pretty sweet. Nice, compact form-factor, a navigation suite that actually works quite well, and software (on both phone and PC side) that doesn’t utterly suck. Even the PC Suite thingy was usable now, instead of the mind-eating horror it used to be. Go figure. It’s not a total home run.. the GPS reception is patchy at times, and in true Nokia fashion the menu choices and “which button does which logical thing” seem to be randomly assigned at times. But I don’t want to bitch too much – this is a very nice phone. I’m especially loving the combined A-GPS navigation plus compass… having a GPS map on a phone which rotates according to your own orientation is cool. As is the walking (or driving) routing guidance it can do. I’ve already used it as a car navigator a bit, and it works. Pretty well, in fact. […]

Minireview: Dark Heresy

Well, this is one book with a colorful history. I don’t (or didn’t) know all that much at all about the “Warhammer 40,000” universe, except that it seems to involve lots of somewhat silly-looking miniatures and totally overblown “gothic” imagery and “dark, dark future” trope. I’m a bit more familiar with the fantasy “Warhammer”, but don’t know all that much about that one, either (except that the rpg has gotten quite a bit of praise ever since the first edition). In any case, lots of (other) people apparently had been waiting a long while for a WH 40k rpg, and Dark Heresy was just that.

The tiny limited run of the book sold out in minutes, and the normal printing started to fly off the shelves, too. Based on rumors of limited printing run size and no certainty of reprint, I decided to get a copy for myself, too – it was getting a lot of attention, and I was interested in reading it at some point. The game was generally well-received, even though some on the forums were bitching about the low power level. Low power level sounded fine to me, so I wasn’t concerned.

Then the bombshell dropped: Games Workshop was discontinuing the game. It would get two other books (ones already written), and that would be it. Most people, including me, were going “what the fuck?!?” at this point: an rpg sells out in short order, receives critical acclaim… and is immediately discontinued. It just didn’t compute. Well, of course there is some method to the madness; turns out it’s cheaper for Black Library (the subdivision responsible for Dark Heresy) to churn out endless Warhammer novels than to do rpgs… so even though the rpg sold well, the profits from novels were higher. Spreadsheets win, game loses.

Well, turns out GW did retain some sanity: they sold the Dark Heresy license to Fantasy Flight Games (known for brilliant board games and some very cool rpgs), and FFG pledged to continue the line. Now, half a year or so later, things look pretty good. FFG has published a fourth book for the game line, and there are more in the works. The quality, I hear, is very high. So after much angsting and gnashing of teeth, WH 40k fans finally have a pen&paper rpg that seems to have a future. A daaaaaark future. Sorry, just had to drop that in there….

So much about the game history… what’s the thing like? Well, as I said I come into the game pretty much from the outside, not knowing all that much about it. I can’t compare the section of the game universe shown here with the “big picture” (if indeed there is such), I can only examine this on its own merits. Which it does have, no question of that.

The players play “acolytes” in service of an Inquisitor, tasked with rooting out heresy, corruption and anything dangerous to the Empire. This is an interesting approach, since it formalizes the “NPC gives you missions” structure many games have in a less formal fashion. I think it’s a fun choice…. and there is nothing really forcing the GM to go with that model, it’s just the assumed base scenario. So, the game has you playing lowish-level servants/journeymen of a more important Inquisitor NPC, and this is probably the basis of some of the complaints; it is a quite limited thing to focus on, and it does make the game more like “Cthulhu in Space” than “Super Space Marines Kill Everything!”. Which is fine by me. The game universe seems huge, so deciding to focus on one facet was a good design decision, imho. There is talk of possible later books opeining up higher-level careers, letting you play space marines, and all that stuff. No hard info on that yet.

So yeah… it’s kind of “Cthulhu in Space, with Nazi Stormtroopers”. Where the Nazi Stormtroopers are you, the players, and the Cthulhu is more of the in-your-face gibbering horror variety than the Lovecraftian subtle menace variant. There are chaos cults to unearth, real or imagined heresy to track down, witches to burn, and suchlike. As you may have gathered, the PCs are not necessarily the “good guys” here, they are more Imperial Stormtrooper than Rebel Alliance. They may (or may not) think they are doing the right thing, but the ways and means to their goals may not always be very pleasant. Or justified, at least to our modern, “western” sensibilities. I’m not sure if there are any good guys in the WH 40k universe, it’s dystopian to the point of being silly. Everything is more-gothic-than-thou, with more spikes, skull motifs and black menacing uniforms than you can shake a hand flamer at. I’m not sure what to make of the whole universe… it’s apparently intentionally over-the-top, being quite corny in places, but contains some “serious” bits too. Of course, the same thing can be said of Exalted, too, so…

I mean, come on. A place called “Gunmetal City” where they make… yes, guns, and where all inhabitants carry a gun. There are chainsaw swords. And chainsaw axes. Hell, I’m pretty sure they have chainsaw forks somewhere in there, too. These guys love their chainsaws. The ruler of the whole thing is a semi-immortal creature who feeds on thousands of sacrifices daily. There are space orcs. And space elves. The spaceships also have spiky bits and gothic towers. Etc etc.

Silly, yes. But kinda fun, too, in a demented way, and not all of it is quite as silly. Some of the political groups, cabals and what have you are pretty interesting, as are some of the locales.

This seems like a game that you can play in many ways. You could get a pretty serious investigation-themed game out of it, or you could go for over-the-top action and mutant hunting. Or both. I like that, versatility is good.

Ruleswise, this is very old-school… but for some weird reason, it fits. Unlike the fantasy version of Warhammer, here you cannot switch careers, you can just choose some advancement paths and take some optional stuff. It makes sense, due to the rigid future society this thing is set in: people there tend not to change careers, so the game doesn’t allow it either. There are levels, and hit points (of sorts), and the combat system seems workable but also very old-school. Round per round, init rolls, all that. In short, I should probably hate this… but I don’t. Here the rules, while not awesome, seem to fit the spirit of the game somehow. In addition, there are at least some nice bits; some of the combat crunch does give you options, and armor isn’t a simple hit/don’t hit thing. I also liked the rules for playing “psykers” (psionically gifted people). You can do it, but it’s extremely dangerous. Using your powers may possibly get both you and your “team” killed, driven insane, possessed, or other nastiness. No “I cast fireball!” wizard stuff here. Me likes.

Overall, I liked this quite a bit. While the game universe has me somewhat bemused by some overly silly stuff, the game as a whole seemed very well done. Sure, it’s an old-school game system, but it’s a well-done one – and for once, a rigid game system feels fitting since it’s trying to model a very, very rigid society. The production values here are excellent, the book really is a thing of beauty. The writing and organization were very clear, and in general this whole thing exudes quality. I was pleasantly suprised by this game, I wasn’t expecting to find anything quite this interesting. […]