So I'm more a returned GM than a new one, but I only played briefly at launch so it's all new again for me.

I had my interested sparked recently in playing once more and that coincided with the price drop/end of 3rd ed. So I kind of bought everything (almost).

And this is where I need help.

I have a table covered in STUFF and I almost wept in confusion last night at the immensity of the task in front of me.

I'm looking for help on how to start processing this and getting ready to play, probably kicking off with one of the premade adventures or even the Enemy Within. Looking at 4-5 players, starting from scratch.

I have:

Core set

Adventurer toolkit

Gathering Storm

The Winds of Magic

The Edge of Night

Signs of Faith

The Creature Guide

Creature Vault

The Witch's Song

Omens of War

Lure of Power

Hero's Call

The Enemy Within

and plenty of dice.

I'm looking for guidance as to how to sort things out, just so I have a spread of stuff I can present to the players so they can make their characters and start getting their heads around the system.

And suggestions welcomed! And any tips for things to download/house rules/errata or anything like that would be awesome. I'm slowly making my way through these forums but I figured smart people here may be better able to point me in the right direction.

This is basically how I have stuff organized. I know others have all kinds of fancy stuff for this, but I have been doing fine with some rubber bands for cards and some plastic bags for chips etc.

1: Split all the card decks into their separate kinds.

2: Action Cards: Make sure you do not mix NPC actions and PC actions. NPC actions are usually easily recognizable by being marked with suggested monsters.

3: Organize the PC action cards according to the grey icon in their top left corners. So you have three stacks, one for melee, one for ranged and one for support/social.

4: Organize NPC actions according to monster type. This way it will be easier to find appropriate actions in the future.

5: Organize the NPC monster cards according to type, so all the orcs are together, all the beastmen together etc.

6: Career Sheets: Split them by Basic, Intermediate, Advanced and Epic. Everything except Basic can be packed away for now.

7: Career Cards: Organize them alphabetically.

8: Talent Cards: Organize them by type; Reputation, Focus and Tactic.

9: Condition Cards: Organize alphabetically.

This should give you a decent start.

For errata etc, go to the WFRP pages on this site and look under "Support":

http://fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=93&esem=4

I would recommend dropping the character sheets in the box and use Gitzmans character sheets instead. He also has a bunch of really helpful rule summaries. Just google the name.

For character creation, I would reccommend doing something like this:

I am not a big fan of the "choose 3, pick one" rule for selecting careers. It can turn out well, but it i a bit too random for me. I would suggest selecting a set of careers that you think would fit the adventure you are planning to run and then have the players draw from this pile. Or simply have them select careers. You can also split them into "roles". So you make a stack of melee careers (mercenary, soldier etc) a stack of ranged careers (hunter, scout etc) and so on. Then have each player choose a role and pull randomly from that stack.

The hardest part when making your first character, and where almost everyone messes up the first time, is selecting actions and talents. For one, it takes AGES for everyone to look through all the **** cards and then they have no real feel for how the game works anyway, so they are quite likely to assume cards work in ways they do not.

So, ahead of time, make some stacks with different themes. For example, melee can be split into "shield-based", "2-handers", "dual-wield" and "fencing". So if a player decides to make a guy with a two-handed sword, you give him the stack of 2-hander melee actions to look through. He does not need to waste his time looking through all the melee cards which won't fit him anyway.

You can also tell the players to not pay too close attention to the rules on the cards and instead simply go for cards with names they think fit. This is particularly fitting with the talent cards as they usually have character-describing names like "Quick-witted" and "Silver-Tongued".

For their first adventure, the easiest place to start is probably "Eye for an Eye" from the Core set. Although if the party has a wizard apprentice, the adventure in the Winds Of Magic supplement is very decent.

Whatever adventure you decide to go for, look through it and make a mental list of what type of NPCs the party could conceivably run into. Take the cards for these NPCs out of the NPC card stack. Then select a set of NPC action cards for them. This little card stack will be all the rules you'll need to run any combat encounter during the game.

Good luck!

I put all the (PC) Action Cards in 9-pocket pages in binders. One binder has all the blessings, one has all the spells, and the last binder has all the other Actions. For the spell and blessing binders, I further sorted them by order or religion, and then rank.

For the binder with all the other actions, I sorted them by the relevant skill, and stuck little tabs on the pages so it's easy to skip to actions that work with the skills you're interested in. To be honest, your skill level is a lot less relevant than your attribute rating, but it seemed at the time more useful to split the cards up into 20 categories than 6. Regardless, you still end up with the largest group being Strength + Weapon Skill, so you may have to subdivide that further by fighting styles or weapon requirements.

It was a lot of work up front for the GM, sorting through the cards, but the binders really make it easy for the players to make informed decisions at the table in a timely fashion. You come out ahead on the time investment before they hit Rank 2. If you can draft a player or two to help with the initial sorting sometime in the week before character creation, that'll save you time and help familiarize them with the cards and the basic mechanics. Win-win, as the skaven say.

I then did the same thing for Talents. One binder, with pages tabbed for the three main talent types, plus one page of knightly oaths. I put the orders and faiths talents in the spell and blessing binders.

--

Regardless of whether you go with binders or just piles or decks of cards to hand out, you'll want to pay special attention to the cards from Hero's Call that have the Epic trait, and isolate/hide them for now. They can't be chosen until Rank 4, and new players will likely miss that fact during character creation. There's a handful of over-powered cards that really ought to have Epic on them but don't, so you may want to pull those or consider some sort of house rule. Things like Reckless Cleave, Firestorm, and whatever that archery action is that can pin someone to the ground for several ridiculous turns.

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The other big piece of advice I can give you concerns the "draw 3, pick 1" rule. DO IT. Especially if your players have any D&D experience. Otherwise, they'll choose (without fail) one wizard, one priest, one melee specialist (usually a dwarf) and one ranged specialist because they'll think that's what they need to survive a dungeon crawl. This game isn't about that sort of thing at all (it's usually more about mystery and character) and ranged vs melee is an almost meaningless distinction given the abstract movement rules. Letting them choose from an open-ended selection of all 50+ basic careers starts them off on completely the wrong idea, and wastes a huge portion of what makes the setting special. Giving that much to process, they'll tend to gravitate toward the most "heroic" careers because those are easy concepts to grok. If you want to catch the feel of the warhammer world, with all it's gritty "dregs of the empire" scenery, draw 3 and pick 1 is great. Not only does it create memorable characters (what makes this particular coachman interesting?), but it also starts players on the right footing of thinking about the setting more than the mechanics. There's a lot of weird rough spots to the rules of this game that only end up mattering if the players are trying to min-max. The game will run more smoothly and everyone will be happier in the long run if they're not making every decision based around maximizing their damage potential or exploiting oversights in the rules.

The 6 character concept cards from The Enemy Within are a nice compromise if your players want to have a little more control over what characters they make. They each pick one of those 6 character niches to start with, and then when they do the "Draw 3 Pick 1" the 3 they draw must have at least 1 trait in common with that character concept (discarding and redrawing any that don't match). So nobody's forced to play a bruiser if they'd be far more interested in an intellectual (or vice versa) but again you're not opening it up to min-maxed combat classes (or analysis paralysis) during character creation. Plus, those 6 character concept cards have great hooks into Book 1 of the Campaign, and player's answers to the questions on the back of the card can inspire a lot of roleplaying scenes. The Enemy Within is pretty good (it's a great match for a talky, scenery-chewing method actor group, and not so good for those accustomed to straight-forward dungeon-crawls), but without a doubt those 6 character concept cards are best part of it.

You can also see a walkthrough of the game here: http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/95698-new-gms-how-to-gm-walk-through-of-eye-for-an-eye-play-by-post-new-gms-join-us-spoilers/

I have some house rules in my sig.

Here's something to remember about WFRP3: Don't let the rules overwhelm you. They're no different than any other RPG, except there is this stuff on cards (that players could write down if they wanted).

I recommend getting the Player's Guide PDF for your players.

Here's another thing: http://rpggeek.com/thread/915289/tutorial-how-learn-it-how-teach-wfrp3

The other big piece of advice I can give you concerns the "draw 3, pick 1" rule. DO IT. Especially if your players have any D&D experience.

True, this depends a lot on the players. The times I have had my players make new characters I have filtered out quite a few "heroic" options. No other races, no wizards and no priests as I feel these often mess with the "feel" of the game and often stick out as seriously odd in the group.

For example, the first party we made in WFRP we had a thief, a thug and a wizard. The wizard was just odd in that context. Sure, you could make it work, but you need to make quite an effort in the roleplaying department to make it fit.

I'll try to gather links for everything up, but here is some basic advice for organization of ALL. THAT. STUFF. I'm going to assume a worst case scenario where in a gleefully mad bit of unboxing you unpunched everything and mixed all of the cards into one massive pile.

Storage

If you're cool with it, you can probably get away with storage just being a bunch of ziplock bags (those included in the boxes and some more of your own) to separate everything out. A better solution is getting a couple of BIG (2 or 3 inch) binders, and a bunch of sheets that can hold cards. You can find these at hobby stores, game stores, and maybe even big box stores like walmart. You may also want to look into getting some kind of plastic boxes with dividers to store components in. You can find these boxes at places selling fishing equipment like tackle boxes, places selling tool equipment like boxes to hold screws and so on, or places that sell beading equipment like boxes to hold different beads.

Creatures

Creature Actions:

Use the cards in this (that list creature actions) to sort out your creature actions into piles for the creature types. You should have every creature and action type listed. Note that some of the cards it lists for creatures are technically meant for PCs to use as well, but, eh, don't worry too much about it.

http://www.orderofgamers.com/downloads/WFRP3_Cards.pdf

Creature Cards

Use this to sort out what creature goes where. Stack these together with the piles of creature cards.

http://www.orderofgamers.com/downloads/WFRP3_v2.pdf

Creature Standups

Use this component list (it's posted a few posts down in the thread) to help sort out creature standups by product. It can also help you sort the action cards. It will have pictures of all of the standups included by product, so you should be able to sort them into creatures for each chaos guide, and so on. Note that some of the standups do not match the artwork for their associated creature cards, particularly, the undead creatures in the creatures vault.

A lot of the standups will be special NPCs meant for particular adventures. I put all of the standups for each adventure into a separate bag (you should have a bunch of spare baggies from all of these boxed sets).

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/102288-help-needed-to-separate-standups-by-product/

Now, you should be able to have all of your piles sorted so that you can quickly pull out a creature's standup, card, and action cards.

Player Stuff

Career Cards

Go ahead and sort these out alphabetically. Create two separate piles, one for the basic careers and one for the advanced careers. One of the mounted knight careers is listed as a basic one, but it should be advanced. You'll be able to tell because it will have access to something like three talent slots rather than the normal two.

Career ability cards

Same thing, sort these out alphabetically.

Talent Cards

Sort them out into three alphabetical piles, for the three types (Tactics, Focus, and something else I can't remember)

Magic Schools

Sort them out alphabetically into a pile

Action Cards

You want to have a basic sorting procedure of Melee, Ranged, Support, Spells, and Blessings. You can also use the listings in the component list from above to sort things out further within those (e.g. separating out social, support, defence, normal, duel of wits, dwarf, teamwork, and rally actions). Here's the link to the component list again.

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/102288-help-needed-to-separate-standups-by-product/

The other bits

You'll have a bunch of those little triangle shaped tokens. You can just put them all together in a big pile or sort them out by color. I have mine sorted by color. Stress and fatigue tokens will get their own little pile. Same goes for corruption tokens, character turn counters (the hourglasses), the puzzle pieces, the clear plastic character stands, the little tokens for engineers or runesmiths from blackfire pass, disease cards, condition cards, miscast cards, and so on.

If you're wondering whether something needs to be put in sleeves in a binder, I'd suggest that the only cards that really need to be sleeved in that way are the action cards and creature cards, so that players and GM can easily look through them. I have talents in a binder as well, but that's not as big a deal. The other cards can just be stored in ziplock bags or other containers.

Stuff to Print Out

This quick reference sheet is pretty handy for play

http://rpggeek.com/filepage/83510/wfrp-3rd-ed-gamemaster-quick-reference-sheets

Gitzman's gallery has a few good things. Go ahead and grab the character sheets he uses and print those out. The reference guide by Court Dimon is also very good.

http://www.gitzmansgallery.com/wfrp-resources.html

There is a WFRP FAQ that is made by the publisher to help clarify some things. It, along with new copies of cards that have been errata'ed are here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=93&esem=4

Presenting it all to players

Consider using the pregenerated careers for players from Liber Fanatica. Have your players do the draw 3 choose 1 method and then copy their chosen career from Liber Fanatica ( http://www.liberfanatica.net/liber.fanaticaVII.pdf ) which has 44 of the careers or from this link, which has the careers from later books ( http://rpggeek.com/filepage/98403/later-completed-pregenerated-wfrp3-characters-post ). Most people really like the Eye for an Eye adventure, and it has a lot of posts on this board for tips on running it. You could also run the Blackfire Pass adventure that FFG has posted on its support page, linked above.

That's all I can think of for now. Let us know if you have more questions.

Also, for actually running the game, I would go against the grain and say that you should really give all of the rules a shot before dismissing them or houseruling. Here is some general advice on things.

The funny dice

Your players are your friends. Ask them what they think should happen. As a general rule, have the players say what the good things that happen are, while the GM says bad things. Don't be married to that though. Be willing to offer cool ideas to players or listen if they have cool ideas.

You may also find that it's often easier to come up with good things that happen rather than bad things. Use this list as an idea of things you can have happen when banes or chaos stars come up.

• Gain special attention of a monster, trigger a danger in the area
• Reveal an unwelcome truth
• Show signs of an approaching threat
• Deal fatigue/stress, or cause a wound or a critical wound
• Use up player resources
• Turn player action back on them
• Separate them
• Create an opportunity that fits someone's abilities
• Show a downside of a player's character
• Offer an opportunity, with or without cost
• Put someone in a spot
• Add extra requirements for an action and ask the player if they want to continue

Fortune Points

These need to be handed out like candy. Any time your players move the story along, hand out a fortune point. If a player has a terribly unlucky roll, hand out a fortune point to balance karma. If a player makes everyone laugh, hand out a fortune point. When you can tell everyone is really getting into it, hand out a fortune point. When a player really engages the rules, hand out a fortune point.

The game moved away from this a bit, but fortune points should also be spent to let players control the story a bit. In general, if a player asks you for something that you're not sure about (e.g. is this gun loaded, was I wearing armor when we got attacked, is their a blacksmith in this town) tell them the answer is yes if they spend a fortune point or two. I also have a HOUSE RULE that players can spend a fortune point to reroll an entire roll if it washes out with 0 success, 0 banes or boons, etc.

The party sheet

A lot of people have trouble using the party sheet effectively. Let players know that they can use it with their talents to give everyone extra powers. One piece of advice is to not let the players pick a party sheet until they've completed an adventure together so they know how their group works together. As a GM, feel free to add tension to the party sheet for any time when the players get in each others way. When a group splits up, add some tension. When someone screws up badly, consider adding tension. When someone steals a kill, add some tension. When characters disagree, add tension. Sometimes you should just add tension when the group is collectively suffering, such as from seeing something really crazy or suffering through a swamp. In general, any time you feel like something is affecting the entire group, go ahead and increase party tension as well.

Corruption Points, Diseases, Etc.

Sometimes you may plan something out when this is going to come up. Other times, you can use these as a result of rolling a chaos star, or lots of boons, especially during encounters. As a general rule, give the player a roll to resist if you're using banes, and be willing to just automatically inflict something if they roll a chaos star. If this happens, don't actually have the player roll for the disease or corruption until the encounter is over, just cackle and tell them "oh, you'll see" when they ask what the chaos star does.

Stances

Players will often have a bit of trouble using the stances. They have specific rules in encounter mode, but if you're in story mode, tell the players that you as the GM will decide whether to award them a single stance die or not depending on what kind of action they're taking.

Extra Successes

Sometimes you'll end up in a case where a player rolls a bunch of extra successes and their action has nothing for them to spend them on. As a HOUSE RULE, consider letting them trade successes for boons at a rate of 2:1, i.e. spend two successes to gain one boon. Another HOUSE RULE is to let them spend extra successes on a Melee or Ranged attack (not magic) to deal 1 extra damage per success, to a maximum of their expertise level in melee or ranged.

Encounter Mode and Story Mode

The main difference between encounter mode and story mode is that story mode is typically not going to use most of the cards, while encounter mode is going to be using the action cards to resolve things. In general, when a player wants to try using one of his or her cards, strongly consider moving things to encounter mode (this includes in social situations). When you move to encounter mode, consider what the "win" conditions are for it, so that you know when to end.

The Puzzle Piece Tracker

This thing is absolutely your friend. Use it in an encounter mode as your win condition. Maybe players need to succeed at X number of rolls to win an encounter. Maybe they're racing against someone else to do that. Maybe the players have a limited amount of time to find something. Basically, use this any time you want to keep track of something going on in the game.

Opposed Rolls

A lot of people don't like the way the opposed rolling system works. It makes it very hard to win an opposed roll if your skill in it is low. However, what most people don't realize is that this is because almost all social rolls are opposed, and that this rule is basically making sure that players with high social skills are much better at it than those with low ones. So go ahead and use the regular rule from it. Also, keep in mind that you can also do contests, which are just having both players roll a skill and seeing who gets more successes. You can also look into the rules for doing big combined effort rolls from Hero's Call.

Running Story Mode

Most of this is going to be resolved by basic skill rolls. If you're in doubt on how to interpret the dice, either ask your players if they have any ideas, or hand out stress/fatigue. Again, don't let players use their action cards in story mode. Tell them to just put their hands face down. If someone wants to use an action, go ahead and switch to encounter mode. Feel free to use all of the other bits for the game, however. The game gives some vague information on how to recharge cards, because you can technically use them in story mode, but it's not really a good idea to do so. Unless it really makes sense for a card to be used and you can't figure out a good reason to switch to encounter mode (sometimes you just don't want it to take that long to resolve something), stick to just using skill rolls. If a player is trying to use magic in story mode, try to limit them to cantrips (i.e. suggest that they should make a roll to cast a cantrip to do an action rather than use their card). In general, though, if you can think of a good goal for it, try switching to encounter mode at times when you weren't planning to. You may be surprised by what occurs. Also, try to not have too many encounters happening, as it lets players recover stress and fatigue too easily.

IMPORTANT: Stress and Fatigue should not really every be removed during story mode, unless your players are going to sleep and getting a full night's sleep (why are you letting your players get away this easily?).

Running Encounters

This is your time for things to shine. Remind the players that encounters are the point of the game where things are really getting closest to having tactical gameplay. It's their job to look at their cards and use them at the best time. Remind them of their card to remove stress and fatigue. Make sure your players know the Perform a Stunt card is there to let them try whatever crazy thing they want to do. If they use that card, feel free to make things fairly difficult for them, but not impossible.

Aggression/Cunning/Expertise

You NEED to be spending this, and quickly. Those monsters will either be dead or that NPC will give up what the players want from him at the end of the encounter. Spend, spend, spend! This is your time to make things hurt for the players.

Rally Steps

A good rule of thumb for these is to have them occur at the end of a round that you have run out of A/C/E points. Also, you can have them occur at thematically appropriate points, like the turn that reinforcements show up, at the start of the round that is going to decide who wins and who loses, etc.

Easily Forgotten Rules

-Make sure you add the Toughness of a character to it's soak value (the listed soak value does not include toughness)

-Make sure you add strength to melee damage or dexterity to range (same as above)

-You are fatigued as soon as fatigue exceeds ANY physical stat, distressed when stress exceeds ANY mental stat, and strained when BOTH of the above are true

-You check for insanity both when a character is strained and takes stress/fatigue OR when willpower is distressed and you take a stress

Wow folks! Such awesome advice.

I'm going to print it out and study it.

Thank you all so much