Welcome to WFRP3 Sunday!
I spent my exhausted post election all nighter putting away the couple of new sets of WFRP3 gubbins I wanted last year, so thought I'd share it's beautiful yet somewhat ridiculous excesses with you all!
1/
I store mine in two Raaco cases which are great for this sort of thing because when you buy them online you can select exactly what size plastic storage boxes you want, and they are ideal sizes to match those used by Fantasy Flight and other board game producers.
Tho WFRP3 is NOT a boardgame 😋
2/
Starting in the top left, we have a tray of PC standees and a stack of larger cardboard tiles, 2x playing card size.
The stack starts with PC careers, with art, special abilities & the "talents" they can have "slotted". Yes, there's a Rat catcher and their Small But Vicious Dog also gets a tile
4/
Next is Advanced Careers. Each career has ten "advances", you get 1 per session, and completing a career opens up certain Advanced Careers.
Then, Party Cards. A genuinely great idea, this gives a specific identity to the party as an entity, with matching special abilities. Idea worth copying
5/
Finally, the last two things in the stack of tiles are a bunch of maps and handouts from some of the various WFRP3 scenarios (the scenarios are actually pretty good quality)
And some enemy group cards to match the party cards, making them more than just a mob of monsters to be murdered.
6/
Next there are four boxes of smaller cards, these ones half the size of a standard card. Clockwise from top left, there are:
- Wounds/Conditions
- Talent cards
- Career abilities
- The Box of Chaos
7/
I think there's grounds to argue that in many ways it is closer to a modern boardgame than it is to a traditional pen & paper RPG.
In the same way that you can theoretically play Relic as an RPG rather than an adventure board game, just in reverse?
No, not really. The rules and cards only make sense when played as an RPG. Without a scenario and a GM, everything else is meaningless.
The cards and tokens are nothing more than a way of conveying information
Talent cards = table of Feats Career cards = Class chapter Wound cards = crit table, etc
Yeah, it was an attempt to "fight" piracy" and charge more by spreading the rules out onto cards is all.
Instead of a book with new enemies, skills, spells and feats they were pushing out decks with that mechanical content on.
I absolutely disagree. This wasn't anything to do with piracy. This was about harnessing FFG's USP - their ability to produce high quality game components in bulk, cheaply - and applying it to RPGs. It was designed to create something unique and notable, which it did. Playable, sadly less so
Po-tay-toe/po-tah-toe.
My view is that at the time FFG were buying IP for bafflingly popular mediocre games (eg Arkham Horror, Cosmic Encounter) and publishing overproduced big box editions of them, charging 50% more than those could possibly be worth and then putting out an expansion treadmill.
