It seems that Games Workshop has found success with Warhammer: The Old World, as they have returned to an Ebbea environment.

The developers had previously hinted at adding Cathay to the armies in the future (a plan that had previously been scrapped!), and last year Cubicle 7 announced that they would be making a tabletop role-playing game to accompany the wargame. Players of Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (WFRP) 4th Edition were a bit surprised by this, as it is an existing and well-supported tabletop RPG set in the Warhammer Old World. But while this is set around the year 2512 in the Old World according to the Imperial calendar, the Old World wargame is set hundreds of years earlier in the timeline. Cubicle 7 CEO Dominic McDowall said in the video embedded below that while they considered releasing expansions for WFRP that would cover both time periods, they quickly realized that wouldn’t work. “I think we realized very quickly that, certainly in the Empire and Bretonnia, every human city has burned down, what, 17 times? There are no common people. The geography has completely changed, so you’d have to do two books in one anyway. The Player’s Guide obviously gives you everything a player needs. The GM’s guide gives you more. It’s got a really comprehensive bestiary, it’s got the Chaos Corruption rules – they’re in the GM’s guide now, so as a player you don’t necessarily know how much you can risk,” McDowall said.

Executive producer Padraig Murphy added that a new RPG is an opportunity to make something more accessible than the 4th edition of WFRP: “The Old World is a fantastic wargame and it brings in new fans who don’t necessarily know who Karl Franz is. We want our books to be really welcoming to those people. This is a dark and glorious era, as we call it. You’re still down in the mud and blood of the Old World, and accessible doesn’t mean, for example, less deadly. It’s still very deadly – probably more deadly, to be honest. It’s not like, ‘I’ve lost eight hit points,’ it’s like, ‘I’ve lost d10 teeth and my head is ringing.’”

However, it wasn’t just the bloated rules that got in the way when players were considering a new system, but also the environmental details that had accumulated over the years. McDowall explained that the Old World RPG will address this as well: “Your character comes with packets of lore, so even if you’re not an expert on how an Imperial city might work, you have information right in front of you that gives you an idea of how to approach an adventure. Contacts, for example. Every character has a set of contacts, so at the beginning of an adventure, when the event kicks off, everyone has a course of action they know they can take.”

The release of Old World is not the end of WRPG, but the two will co-exist.

Source: PCGamer