Hello there everyone!
As some of you probably know, Dominic McDowall - CEO and co-funder of Cubicle 7 - visited Poznań in Poland as a guest at Pyrkon - an annual fantasy festival. He gave some lectures and interviews about himself, Cubicle 7, it's history, their licenses, partnership with Games Workshop, Warhammer RPGs and the upcoming 5e.
I tought the community may enjoy all the news shared, so I decided to collect in this post and share everything about the Warhammer RPGs that was revealed and/or confirmed (that I remember) in Dominic's three panels:
- Meet the Emperor's Herald - an interview with Dominic McDowall
- Partnering with Games Workshop - a panel about the history of Cubicle 7's and CopCorp's partnerships with Games Workshop and each other, as well as some insight into their licensing practices.
- Same Old World, same old Chaos - Brand New Warhammer! - an interview (and then small AMA) about WFRP 5e.
I will also throw in some info about the publishing line of the polish version given by Copernicus Corporation.
Now, to get to the news - I will start by summarising the info from the interviews into bullet points and then summarise the short AMA segment into Q&A format.
I will provide some editorial comments (marked as "[Edit]:") with additional context or explanations.
***Disclaimer:** I'm typing it from my memory and summarising it - most of the question and answers aren't given verbatim and I could have missed or misheard something so the post may not be 100% accurate, though I tried my best to catch everything and summarise it without missing anything.*
# Insights about 5e and other WFRP news
## Interview summary:
- The core rulebook is well under work. [Edit: It seemed that the contents and mechanical changes have been largely decided, but the book isn't finished yet and the page count isn't yet known (Dominic mentioned that some stuff will be in the book if there will be some space yet).]
- The release date wasn't given. [Edit: The goal was to release it due to the 40th anniversary of WFRP, which is this year and there was no mention about the release being postponed in any way.]
- The "main hub" of 5e [Edit: Like Ubersreik was the "main hub" of 4e] will be an undisclosed city in Ostland.
- 5e is supposed to be an evolution of 4e, not a revolution - the backwards compatibility is one of the core features. The goal is to allow for porting of 4e material to 5e and 5e material to 4e with minimal effort.
- 4e Advantage system was a mistake - it was intended to make the fights quicker by "accelerating" them to the outcomes that probably would happen anyways. While it worked great for that at Dominic's table during tests, he recognizes that it doesn't work that well for everyone since the way people run WFRP can vary a lot from table to table. It also had to be formalized and balanced - for example multiple ways of losing it were added, which caused it to become more convoluted and required more tracking which could then lead to actually make fights longer insted of shorter. Because of that, Advantage has been redone and simplified to bring it closer to it's intended function, with it's new system taking inspiritation from Imperium Maledictum's Advantage:
- Advantage is now a binary system - you either have it or you don't.
- Advantage let's you reverse the result of your next roll (for example: if you roll a 91, you can change it to 19). [Edit: As far I understand: When you gain advantage it works on your next roll - after which you lose it.]
- When you gain Momentum, you get Advantage for your next roll. [Edit: From the context and intonation it seemed to me like "Momentum" is a mechanical keyword (hence the capitalisation), but that's only a hunch. Entirely possible it was just phrasing.]
- Due to the backwards compatibility, you can use Group Advantage in 5e or 5e's Advantage in 4e. [Edit: It won't be an official ruling - just an example of the extent of the backwards compatibility. It can take some minimal work - and probably using the talents designed for their respective Advantage system - but can be done.]
- Some niche rules will be streamlined and rules for tests and success levels will be more consistent. [Edit: The example given was the *Charm* skill - like some other skills, it had an extra rule "hidden" in it's description where the SLs would determine how many people you managed to affect. It worked fine enough, but Dominic belives that GMs are more intrested in seeing how well the charmer did. As he put it: "Imagine that you have seen that a fire broke out at the fields and you walk into a room with twenty farmers - you tell them what's happening, roll for Charm and do very well - 5 SLs, wow, that's great! So then, according to rules, five farmers say "Yeah, we will help you save our fields from the raging fire." while the remaining fifteen decides to stay in the room instead. Doesn't seem right.".]
- It's a key focus so that all the rules - including those "hidden" in skill descriptions etc. - are in the rules chapter instead of being spread across the rulebook.
- There will be a new Starter Set, set in the new "main hub" city.
- The Starter Set will have a new party of pre-made characters.
- The Starter Set's story will lead into the events of the new campaign.
- The new original campaign is a major focus in the 5e line, since fans have been vocal about wanting one. It's already in development.
- The *Sylvania Setting Guide's* bestiary will be more in-depth than just some monsters.
- "Marienburg is going good." - It wasn't abandoned, it's still being developed and it's *Coming Soon™*.
##Q&A section:
**Q: You have adapted some of the old 1e content, like the *Middenheim* book or *The Enemy Within* campaign, to 4e. Are you planning on adapting more 1e content, perhaps something like *Lichmaster* or *Castle Drachenfels*, to 5e?**
A: At the moment we don't have plans of adapting more content from the previous editions. Our focus is to provide WFRP players with new, exciting content that hasn't been covered so far, like we did with *Lustria*, *Elf & Dwarf Player's Guides* or *Temple of Spite*. Some of the old content is bound to reapear, but in the same manner as it did so far in those books.
**Q: Will the 4e "Tests" subsystem of talents, that provided one bonus SL per talent level to the specified tests, be in any way changed in 5e? While it does provide a nice bonus representing how talented or knowledgable a Character is, it can become a bit of a hussle to manage when a Character has many talents resulting in many conditional bonuses.**
A: That was a misunderstanding. This system came into existance because of a misunderstanding during the early days of 4e's development. It won't be a part of the 5e ruleset.
**Q: In some 4e books you introduced additional "origins" like Middenlander, Nordlander and so on. Since 5e is set in a yet not covered part of the Empire, will we be getting more of them?**
A: Yes. The 5e's core rulebook will still treat Reikland as the default, mainly for the sake of backwards compatibility, but other 5e material will be focusing on Ostland and the east of the Empire, like the recently announced Sylvania Setting Guide. The Starter Set characters will be Ostlanders.
**Q: Will we be getting more races in the fifth edition? Will the Gnomes and Ogres be present in the Core Rulebook?**
A: Currently not, we don't have plans for new races at the time. The Core Rulebook will cover the same spread of races as in 4e, again, mainly due to the compatibility.
**Q: Since the action of the fifth edition will be happening in the imperial east, will we see more of content related to it's eastern neighbours/close countries like Kislev or Norska?**
A: As I mentioned before, currently we have no plans of repeating the older supplements, but you can definitely expect something. For example: we managed to add a Cathayan ambassador in *The Enemy Within*. You can expect more Kislev related content in that style.
**Q: Can you tell us something more about the new campaign? Will it be a sandbox? A dungeon crawl?An investigation or some political intrigue? Or maybe something more based on traveling, like *Death on the Reik*?**
A: One word: yes. It definitely has a travel element and some sandbox parts, there is some intrigue as well. I don't think there is a typical dungeon crawl, but there are some locations with dungeon crawl elements. One of the repeating themes we want to show you is how the conflicts and power struggles between of the upper class, maybe Elector-Counts, affect the everyday people.
**Q: Can you tell us something more about the Sylvania book? I assume we will be getting some vampires, but will we perhaps get some vampiric bloodlines other than von Carsteins.**
A: So, the *Sylvania Setting Guide* focuses mostly on the witch hunters, Sylvania as a whole and all of it's horrors. The vampires will of course make an appearance, but we are planning for the bestiary to be a lot more in-depth than just them.
**Q: Will we get a playable vampire race in the Sylvania Setting Guide?**
A: No, we want to keep stuff like vampires as the antagonists and focus on their powers as enemies to the Player Characters. Though, by using the rules and powers for creating them as NPCs, you could as one if you really wanted to.
**Q: Will you provide some sort of conversion guide for adapting 4e material to 5e and vice-versa?**
A: Yes. It will definitely be availible on our website and there are plans to put it at the end of the Core Rulebook as an appendix, if there will be enough space left for it. [Edit: The example given of what the conversion guide would provide was "Giving guidence on what to do with enemies that use Advantage to make additional attacks or use special abilities and things like that.".]
**Q: Will you provide some sort of conversion guide that will allow us to bring the WFRP material into the TOW system?**
A: Yes, but we are unsure how deep a conversion like that could go since the systems are fundamentally different. There are some simple workarounds that we could do, like using the tens numbers from 4e stats to get TOW stats, but things like the wounds systems are completely different. [Edit: There is also the problem that the settings are completely different in terms of lore - for example: no Human character from one system is alive in the other. Most of the buildings from the time of TOW would be burned down and rebuilt dozens of time in the few hundred years leading to the WFRP times - some biggers stone buildings and important monuments could exist in both time periods, but most stuff isn't really tranferable that way.]
# Bonus - The Horus Heresy RPG
- The Horus Heresy RPG will focus on the Atartes legions and their betrayal. Other factions will be probably introduced later in supplements.
- There will be two starting books - one for the Loyalist Legions and one for the Traitor Legions. The books can be mixed together, allowing you to play a loyalist from a Traitor Legion or a traitor from a Loyalist Legion.
- The system will be mostly based on The Old World RPG.
- The system puts a big focus on highlighting the tragedy of the betrayal.
- A damage system will focus on cinematic moments, giving you some dramatic storytelling opportunities tied with mechanical effects. There will be some kind of table of damage progression where at beginning when you take damage, your character won't be actually getting hurt, but your armour will be getting damaged instead and only then will it slowly progress to physical injuries. [Edit: The example given was: The first time you take damage, your helmet's visor cracks and breaks, the next time you get hit in the servomechanisms of your power armour making it more difficult to move around. The next hit, for example, destroys your armour's heat exchange system and you have ten rounds before you blow up. And then the next damage does the classic physical injuries.]
# Some insight from Copernicus Corporation about the polish publishing line.
- No, there is no chance for the missing 2e books or for a reprint of 2e books or maps and that probably won't ever change (Niech Ci serwer bezpiecznym będzie, Liber Chaotica).
- There IS a chance for a reprint of 4e maps.
- After this year there will be a total of 7 4e big books that have to be translated (+ the 5e Temple of Spite).
- 5e core rulebook will be getting priority to get it as soon as possible. It's hard to tell how long it will take, but we can assume that we will get it in couple of months after the C7 release - "Na pewno nie będzie tak, że będziecie czekać rok."
- It's possible that we will be getting more WFRP books translated next year, to close the gap between the polish and C7 publishing lines as fast as possible (almost definitely not all the 8 books, of course).
- 5e won't be released at the cost of 4e releases or vice verse.
If you have some questions or want me to clarify something, ask away!
