The Altdorf Correspondent

Today Cubicle 7 dropped another “preview” of WFRPv4. This time the post talked about combat.

The roots to the new system is the combat system of WFRPv1 and WFRPv2. The stated goal has been to speed up combat by eliminating situations where nothing really happens in a combat round because of the low chances to hit.

There are a few nice morsels of information in the post.

Three characteristics are mentioned: Strength, Toughness and Initiative. Yes, that famous “Big I” makes a comeback! Hopefully it will be used more sparingly than in WFRPv1, where it ended up being used for just about anything that wasn’t combat and became the most important of the characteristics. Strength and Toughness were in WFRPv2, but given the reintroduction of Initiative we might be looking at more influences from WFRPv1 than I expected.

As for combat the big new thing is Advantage. This can be earned during a battle and used to gain a +10% bonus on an attack test. Several points of advantage can be accumulated during a fight, and they dissipate when certain conditions are met. It seems be a more detailed take on “winning” in combat from WFRPv1. It’ll be interesting to see how much “keeping track of fiddly bits” there is for the game master, but as the design goal has been to speed things up, I hope that’s been taken care of.

So you might remember the guys from UK Expo claiming to speak for C7 and announcing that WFRPv4 would launch at UK Games Expo?

One of the things we can say, I know that Cubicle 7 are working on Warhammer 4 rpg and they’ve given us the rights to say today that that will be launched at the UK Games Expo.

The video is here, check at 19 minutes.

This has now been walked back according to grimandperilous.com.

I haven’t found the clarification from Cubicle 7 that is mentioned in the linked post, but I guess that Jon Hodgson has now somewhere officially given information that identifies the UK Games Expo statement as being incorrect.

Now the game has been identified as the pdf being “anticipated” in June and the print version “anticipated” in July. I can’t wrap my head around the “anticipated” thing … sounds a lot weaker than “will be released” and more like “we put our hopes in that this thing will be released in pdf in June, but are choosing “anticipated” so as not to really promise anything”.

The radio silence on this is baffling and confusing. I think that a somewhat more communicative stance from Cubicle 7 would generate a lot of positive chatter that would carry over to positive fan activity once the game is released. As it now stands when the last “preview” dropped, they said “more info coming soon” and we are now looking at over a week since then.

Yeah well, the game will be here some day. Stay tuned for more info from me about the game then.

There have been some hints as to the careers of WFRP fourth edition. When the pre-order was announced, it was accompanied by three images of different careers. Also on the covers released as the first teaser are four adventurers with iconic looks. That gives us sixteen careers so far.

From those images and that number I presume that the career structure of this edition will be much like first and second edition.

I haven’t seen the careers in the images identified anywhere, so my best guesses are found below using the careers from second edition as reference.

Bounty Hunter – Apprentice Wizard – Pistolier – Bailiff

Rat Catcher – Camp Follower – Explorer – Outlaw

Navigator – Envoy – Knight – Charlatan

Witch-hunter – Trollslayer – Noble – Zealot