Warhammer Core Rule Book

[Samantha Figueredo]

Oneof my favorite parts of this book is how well it sets the tone for WFRP. Just after the Contents is a collection of six two-page spreads of awesome scenic images with a short story that continues through the half dozen images and sets the tone for the world as you start flipping through the book.

Before I go too much further in this part, I want to make sure I give the artists of the book credit. Sadly, individual works are not credited like newer WotC publications, but we do have a list of the artists that have work in the book: Dave Allsop, Michael Franchina, Andrew Hepworth, Jon Hodgson, Ralph Horsley, Pat Loboyko, Sam Manley, and Scott Purdy. The instant classic cover was done by Ralph Horsley as well. Thanks everyone!

This chapter is fantastic for a brief introduction to the Old World that has been expanded in every release since. For a core rulebook, I find the amount of lore stuffed into it great and enough to get any gaming group started.

Rules. There are a lot of rules in this book. Interestingly, some major sections of the rules have been updated in newer releases, such as critical hits in Up in Arms, and magic rules in Winds of Magic. These updates are optional and seek to take advantage of feedback that Cubicle 7 has gotten since the edition released about 3 years ago. Using the rules as-is in this book is nothing terrible, as these systems work just fine for the vast majority of players here.

Two key rules changes that were previously part of the Balance Dataslate have made their way into the core rules. Titanic Units can no longer fire Overwatch, and Titanic units do not have line of sight through ruins unless they are at least partially within them.

Onward with my review of Soulbound, the Warhammer Age of Sigmar RPG! In Part One, I discussed the game's setting. I was quite positive about the setting (almost to my surprise). This time, I'll discuss the core system and the game's approach to combat and some other stuff. In this post, I'll have many positive things to say about the game's system (with a few grumbles), but a somewhat more critical perspective about certain aspects of the published scenario-supplements will emerge in my next, and hopefully culminating, section of this multi-post review (along with points of praise there, too).

DISCLAIMER: As I noted before, Cubicle 7 supplied materials for a fair and honest review of the game. I received free .pdf review copies of the core Soulbound game, the Bestiary, and the Champions of Order and Champions of Death supplements. I also liked the game enough that I purchased the GM screen and several other game products. Please note that links on this blog to DTRPG.com contain affiliate links, which help support this blog's activities at no added cost to you. Thank you!

In Part One, I noted the role this game has seized in my stable of RPG options: it's now my leading go-to game for short-notice, high-action, moderate-crunch tactical combat roleplaying with (super-)heroic characters (whew, that's a mouthful!). It fulfills, in other words, the vocation I'd hoped 4th edition D&D would satisfy at my table - my not-too-demanding, off-night, let's just rumble with a bunch of baddies because a player is away or I'm too busy to prep a regular session game.

...runs on a pretty straight-forward dice pool mechanic. PCs have points across 3 core stats - Body, Mind, and Soul. You also have levels of training in various skills, like Athletics or Ballistic Skill or Intimidation. To assemble a dice pool, you add your points in the Stat and in the relevant skill; so (for example) trying to break down a barred door would require a Body + Might check. The GM provides both the target number required for success and the number of successes required. This is written like so: 5:1, for a check requiring at least one result of 5+ among the dice rolled.

That's pretty easy to administer. This allows for checks with variable degrees of success, too, based on the total number of successes rolled. In some cases, the game will call for more complex and harder rolls - say, a 4:3 roll, where you only need 4+ on each die for success, but you need to roll at least 3 successes. This is less common, but it gets a little wonky. GMs are given a chart showing different target number/number of success combinations ranked by difficulty, to aid in eyeballing the best difficulty level, but honestly this seems a little creaky and opaque. In play, however, I've tended to just ignore most of this complexity, almost always calling for only a single success but ratcheting up the target number to 5 or 6 if I think something should be a little more challenging.

Though I've described Soulbound as my alt-4e D&D, one feature immediately distinguishes the two games' approaches to combat. Unlike the slow (to me) square-counting normal in 4e, default Soulbound combats take place on a map of abstract zones, each normally about 30 feet across unless otherwise specified (this can be quite flexible). I normally associate combat zones with more story-gamey systems (I think I first encountered them in FATE or some similar game), but I find it works really well here. Combat distances include arm's reach, same zone, adjacent zone, 2 zones away, or 3+ zones away. This allows maneuver and position to matter, so it's more precise than pure 'theater of the mind' combat -- but it is MUCH faster than a more granular gridded/square-counting system (interestingly, the core book offers guidelines in case you really insist on running with exact measurements or gridded combat - see pp. 298-299). Zone boundaries also make environmental effects and hazards really easy to adjudicate, along with special Area of Effect attacks. In the combats I've run, my players have had to think hard about exactly where and when to move, but the overall feel remained quite dynamic. Thumbs up.

Here are some visual examples of zones in use. First, a more-elaborate-than-necessary setup; note that I was basically running Soulbound here as a tabletop skirmish game with my kids. In normal play, you can just dash down some sharpie or dry-erase lines on a blank space. Here, instead, I used Master's Atlas Worldcrafting Tiles and treated each tile as a zone, ignoring the square grid within each tile, then slapped down a bit of Warcry terrain and a bunch of minis:

Notice the little gaggle of ratmen partially obscured by the wall at top left? If the game's weaker monster minions gang up within a single zone, they form a Swarm, which grows a bit more powerful but stays easy for the GM to control. All that bunching up also makes them convenient to devastate with heroic powers, of course ... in this fight, if I recall, the hero archer took out the entire skaven gang in a single round (!). In Soulbound, the little grunts are really there to get in the way, wear you down, or just make you feel awesome before you get stomped on by the bigger, nastier foes.

Once a fight breaks out, characters act in order of their Initiative, which is static. You don't roll for it; you just note down the fixed Initiative # of everyone involved and then start cycling through them in order (though there are tactical actions that can change your place in that order). I've liked this fixed-Initiative system more than I thought I would. It's certainly simple. As a generalization, the weaker, Swarm-forming foes tend to act absolutely last, so players often have to decide whether to focus on cleaning out the mobs or prioritizing the deadlier but lone big-bads.

Once your turn comes around, you can Move and take an Action. Well, in fact, you can usually do a whole lot more than that, but that is the basic action economy. It is stretched by two factors: the generous definition of Free Actions and the use of a spendable action currency, Mettle. You can use a Free Action to relocate anywhere in your current Zone, or to open a door, draw a weapon, or drink a healing potion. Since you can chug that healing elixir in between hacking apart a monster and running out the door, recovering from your beatings is surprisingly easy in this game. A bit oddly, the game proffers a liquid resource called "Aqua Ghyranis" as both your healing energy drink AND your market currency (in the game's setting, lumps of gold are a dime a dozen on one of the settled elemental planes, so precious metal has little value; but water that restores life, now there's a real commodity...). To heal via potion, then, you gulp down what in other games would be your gold pieces.

Mettle means you can ... do MORE. Most characters have access to 1 Mettle per turn; some can start with 2. At either rate, if you spend it, you recharge 1 point of Mettle back every turn. You use Mettle to gain certain mechanical bonuses to rolls, to activate certain miracle effects, or - more commonly - to take another Action. Since you'll start your turn with at least 1 Mettle, you are usually guaranteed at least two Actions along with your Move and Free Action, unless you spend that Mettle on some other awesome thing. This simple action economy gives players small but meaningful choices every single turn, and keeps them feeling competent as active agents on the battlefield. Oh yeah, but ... the bigger, bad foes can spend Mettle too...which gets scary.

This is an interesting move, design-wise. In recent years, the Warhammer skirmish game Warcry introduced something a bit like it - simplifying some of the traditional multi-roll procedures in Warhammer combat via a quick relative comparison between the combat levels of enemies. I wonder whether this was just convergent evolution, or whether Warcry influenced Soulbound's design? At any rate, I worried that constantly cross-checking these levels for every combat attack would be too fussy, but in actual play I've found that it quickly falls into the rhythm, and my players get attuned to the short range of possibilities - so that after a while, I can just say "he's got Good Defense" and they mostly nod and check for the needed target number.

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