Yesterday, the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was released. Since I had preordered it, it arrived that very morning.

As far as the new rules are concerned, I’m fairly pleased. The careers system has been left more or less intact. The skills system has been expanded and modified. The old standard tests have been linked more closely to the skills, and the skills that aren’t linked to a characteristic roll are now treated seperately as ‘talents’. More importantly, the old ‘Naked Dwarf’ syndrome has been eliminated by tweaking the combat rules slightly, so that toughness is less important and armour more so. Also fixed (or rather, completely replaced) is the magic system, which seems now to be much better (although I haven’t read it in much detail yet). I haven’t seen any changes that I particularly dislike.

The amount of background detail in the book is greatly reduced from the old edition, however. The new book is about 110 pages shorter than the old one, and there is nothing like as much detail of the Warhammer World as there was in the previous edition. Then again, this is perhaps a mercy, as this keeps to a minimum the amount of included material that has been changed by GW over the last three editions of WFB.

Overall, I’m pleased with it as a rules update, but as the new incarnation of one of the finest RPGs ever written, it somehow doesn’t seem quite good enough. Somehow the book doesn’t have that flavour and character that the old one did. Then again, it doesn’t matter a great deal. I still have all the old sourcebooks, so I can use the new rules with the old setting and the old atmosphere, and be perfectly happy keeping the bits I like from both editions and disregarding the rest.

Now I just have to come up with some ideas for a campaign so I can actually play this thing.