Warhammer - Final Nod

So...after two years, I brought my Warhammer game to an end last night.

I felt that some words needed to be said about Warhammer.

The original Warhammer game hit sometime in 1986. I don't remember exactly when I started to play it. Must have been in the late eighties, early nineties. I really liked the world. D&D was entrenched but I've never quite been sold on the setting, which D&D kinda has a lack of. D&D, even at the time, felt like they were going for something unspecific in their setting. It was a melting pot for monsters and magic. This rarely detered any GM I knew.

Warhammer was different. It had a finite setting, but one which could easily act as a sandbox. It had years of history that you could read and buy into. It had plenty of monsters but many monsters were 'feature' monsters: The orc (greenskin), the daemon, the beastman. It had a very high quotent of zealots. It was also very low magic, both mages and items. It was definitely different than D&D.

I remember enjoying Warhammer a great deal, both playing and running it. I remember my campaign got rather out of control but the players enjoyed it. I just remember my friend Jason's unstoppable Dwarf who slaugthered every Chaos Warrior he met in some grisly fashion. He quite enjoyed writting down every gruesome way that he butchered one.

In the game that I played in, I remember my first actual...well...role playing. Where the story started becoming more important than the stats on my character sheet. Golly. How did that happen...

Good players helped. I remember that, Steve tried out a female rogue. I was a bodyguard and started protecting her. We could see a romance forming between the two and that was neat and different. And kinda odd because...well...we are both straight males...so...it was just weird. But we both got into the roles.

Dave played some pale Outrider character, who, as it turns out, had quite a bit of plot associated to him. He became a follower of Morr (the god of death) because he had been the only survivor of a massive war. We later questioned whether he had survived that battle or if Chaos had given him some fortune.

As the campaign progressed, we found out that Dave's follower of Morr began to see strange things. We uncovered a plot to overthrow a high ranking member of the Empire. We met with some lizard creature who was giving us information, when the GM handed Dave a note. Dave murdered the NPC before our eyes, believing it to be a heretic. We had watched Dave's character get slowly worse at this point and we crossed swords for the first time. We didn't fight...just crossed swords. Dave's character was so tough that he could beat any one else in the party one on one...except me. I was had the 'strong' to beat through his 'tough'. So it was a very tense sense. And we were like teens here, so it became all the more intense.

I told him that he had to leave the party. And he did but he was filled with sorrow for doing it and I for telling him.

I later decided that I needed to busy my character's time because I didn't want to think about what had just happened so I would go on a quest to get a magic sword. The GM had not given us any magic items at that point but felt that if we were to seek one out, that would be an excellent way to introduce one. I got a quest about a sword broken in half. Sounded pretty epic.

Then Dave's character returned. He sat down and revealed that he had already learned of my quest and he presented me with the haft of the sword. Then he hit me with the bombshell. Probably the first incident where I could really understand what role playing was all about. He entered into this speech, explaining that my character was his only friend. And that he was haunted with darkness. That he may be a servant of Chaos. And that he could only trust me to kill him if he turned over to the darkness.

Solid. Gold.

Naturally, I could never let my friend perish in such an awful way. I told him that we would find him some cure. That I would never give up on him. He made me promise me that if we couldn't find a way to cure the darkness in his heart, that I would kill him.

I say again: Solid. Gold.

Without saying it, the GM, myself and Dave all knew that there was no cure. There would never be a cure. There might be a false cure, a quest for a cure or some other such nonsense. But my best friend was turning to darkness...and one day we would cross swords again...and one day we would find out who was stronger. Light or Darkness.

I am said to say that the campaign ended before this could ever get resolved. The GM was moving to Vancouver. I am always a proponent of good so allow me to bring it to a conclusion. We cross swords. We fight and we are well matched, but my heart isn't in it. He gains the upper hand. I beg him to remember some shred of who he used to be. He has a momentary lapse of conscience and pleads with me one last time. He raised his sword to finish me off and I finish him off instead. I fade off into the sunset, never to be seen or heard from again.

Regardless of the lack of true resolution, Warhammer will be the first game where I remember what true role playing could be like. That having uber stats are great, but it's just a sheet. Getting into the role could be more rewarding.

So I was eager to try the new Warhammer. Like trying to play the Classic Marvel Superheroes again...it just didn't quite have that magic. The combat system tried to steal too much from D&D, with full actions and half actions. The magic system was much better but that also meant much more abusive. I didn't quite like the percentiles, having experienced a newer generation of superior mechanics. Still quite liked the world so I dived into it.

I'm glad that it's over. I was very keen on it at the beginning, but I've come to realize that anything that last so long does lose it's steam after a while. The characters were powerhouses at the end. I was generous on XP and magic items at the end but I threw up a creature that said in the book: Characters cannot possibly manage to beat such a creature. These are plot devices at best. Well my Greater Daemon WAS a plot device and I gave them enough magic boost to beat it. I suppose without those, they might have failed. But I suspect, even without a magic boost, they could have beaten it. No big deal but it's the one thing that was never 'fixed'. Their monsters are wimps. I know, there is a template that you're supposed to add to monsters to make them tougher but I really would have rather had a book that gave you the Newbie, Expereienced and Tuff guy versions of each monster.

I saw a lot of potential in the Warhammer RPG but it never quite achieved what it could have. It has the same problem that I have with Cyberpunk 2020. In both cases, they built this world to be grim and dirty. Then their rules don't quite follow through with it. In Warhamemr you have Luck Charms which are great in concept...but they have nothing to do with luck. They have a 1 shot use where you can avoid taking damage. What?! Where's the luck? How do you recognize a luck charm? Etc, etc. Luck Charms should have been a 50% chance that they work, for example (and been much cheaper). (Cyberpunk 2020 has a clearer example of what I mean: It's a grim/dirty world...but Cybernetics cost $X.XX amount and get installed without any problems, ever, and there are no grade of doctors or anything. For a grim world it had a pretty clean system to handle getting Cybernetics).

Warhammer was a grim world but most of their mechanics were too clean. They did have their critical hits tables and that lead my party to lose eyes, ears, toes, fingers, etc. And that was grim and dirty. But their disease rules were a little weak. And their healing rules were too easy. When my group found out that Healing Poultices were 1 penny apiece...well...they laughed and then cleaned out every store they could find. Again, no chance that those Healing Poultices would ever be bad. Not for 1 whole penny!

Anyway, I really would have liked to have seen a world where it was a bit more dirty, where not everything worked the way it should have. Where the rules matches the fiction. It's grimmer than regular D&D and other fantasy settings, so that's something at least.

One last observation about Warhammer and D&D. With the new 4th Edition D&D that, again, I think will be a very fun game. But it will now be infused to the core with magic, as first level characters can now produce magic shields, teleport short distances and the like. That's fine for D&D but it will now create a bigger distinction between Warhammer. D&D looks like it'll be much harder to have a low magic campaing without excluding some classes. Warhammer may well become the fantasy game of choice for low magic fantasy gaming.

Oh...who and I kidding...most people won't even remember Warhammer when the new D&D comes out. I guess I will and the first time I was walked down a campaign in which the worse enemy of the adventuring group was my best friend and one of our own. The Enemy Within. That's was Warhammer was all about. I may never touch it again but I hope that it does well.