I played a bit of 3.5ed D&D (and previous versions) and bought but never really got into 2ed WFRP.

Been thinking about trying to get back into this again... but I'm confused by the variety of products for sale.

There's the Core set, which says its got everything in you need to play. Then there's the Guides and Vaults... which seem to contain everything the Core set does and more. Is that a correct summary?

So which of these things would I need to get to actually play a session? Presumably either 3 Guides, 3 Vaults, or the Core set would be the minimum required... but would Guides and Vaults be needed?

Second question: how do the game mechanics compare with previous editions? Are the stat lines etc the same as 2nd edition? Just wondering if things I've got from 2nd edition are going to be reusable.

Finally, are there rules for playable characters other than those in the Core set (human, dwarf, and the 2 elves)? Trying to sell this to my wife may involve use of dark elves, so wanted to check what is possible...

Thanks in advance for any help!

Sure we will help you :

you may forget the Guides : expensives, not so useful, and crippled with mistakes. Focus on the main original WFRP3 line that makes its originality. Here's my buying guide you may follow in that order :

1) WFPR3 CORE BOX :everything useful, main action cards and talents, a lot of dices. 60$ amazon. Only 3 gods and winds of magic. An excellent adventure, a bestiary and you may download the 2 official demos to begin.

2) PRIESTS AND MAGIC SUPPLEMENTS - SIgn of Faith and Winds of Magic : 40$ each. diseases + remaining blessing, gods and careers + 1 nice adventure + nurgle bestiary for the first, mutation + remaining spells, winds and careers + 1 excellent adventure + tzeentsch bestiary for the second.

3) ADVENTURES : 40$ each. Gathering Storm (4 deeply linked adventure in a campaign), Edge of the night (skaven, ubersreik detail and masquerade), Witche's song (Witchcraft around marienburg)

4) ADVENTURER'S TOOLKIT for SOME UBER CAREERS : 20$. More career (and excellent ones : ratcacher and his dog, swordmaster, ironbreaker... !) Might be bought with the corebox if you have got some extra buckets.

5) And Finally the CREATURE'S VAULT : to get all the creature cards, making the game more fluid and logical. You don't need that from the start.

If you have some bucks left, Gamemaster's toolkit is a nice option with some more component and a nice but not really useful GM screen. The book himself is not very useful but nice.

sandwich said:

sandwich said:

1) Core set includes everything you need for playing (as it says). That means the dices, cards, pieces and rules for BASIC playing. It does NOT however include rules or elements for mutations, corruption and diseases and offers quite a little in the way of magic and blessings. The main question here is do you or your players like the "bits and pieces"? If you don't even like the idea you should get the guides. They include every rule that has been published (excluding hedge wizardry from Witch's Song) and have all the cards as lists. More or less like your "traditional" rpgs. Vaults on the other hand have all kinds of extra that isn't necessary or mandatory (at least to my opinion).

2) Stat lines as well as everything else has changed from previous editions. There isn't percentile system but ranges of 1-5 (when it comes to attributes) and all rolls are made with special dices with symbols with different meanings. Previous edition books are reusable as referring material but rule wise you have to do some heavy converting.

3) At least currently no. I would assume it to be a small job to convert creatures from Creature Vault/Guide as player character but their gaming balance from the view of a player cannot be very good.

sandwich said:

sandwich said:

Welcome. I'll do my best to answer, though I am no expert.

The Core set is definitely the best place to start. You do indeed get everything you need to play and run. The Guides are hardcover books that contain most, if not all rules from all previously released material (Core Set, Toolkits, Winds of Magic and Signs of Faith), and allow you to play without all the physical components (which is missing the point as far as I'm concerned ). The vaults contain all those physical components - the cards, counters, standups etc that you'd need if you wanted to use them.

The exception to this is the creature guide/vault, which adds mainly new stuff. For the record, I have the Core set, and Creature Guide/Vault, for this very reason.

Also, as I understand it, the vaults do not contain the cards etc from Winds of Magic and Signs of Faith, so you'd still have a reason to get those....

Grab the Core set and leave it at that initially, that's my advice.

As for the mechanics, they are totally different to previous editions - hell, to any other RPG I've ever played. There are a couple of similarities - careers, advances and a few other things, but honestly, that's where it ends. It is however, still a roleplaying game set in the Warhammer world, and that was enough for me to give it a go.

As for your last point, there are no additional playable races as yet. The smart money is on Halflings appearing at some point. I wouldn't get your hopes up on Dark Elves though... That said, there are a number of Dark Elf specific actions out there (can think of a few in Creature Vault), plus rules for their hatred ability, so I doubt it'd be too hard to come up with something yourself.

Thanks for the answers so far :-)

I think where I'm getting confused is the Vault boxes... the product descriptions seem to imply they contain everything from the Core set and more. So does tha mean if I was to buy all 3 Vaults, I'd have everything from the Core set? Or are there things in the Core set not replicated elsewhere?

I think the extra cards, tokens, etc. would be of interest, to make things easier to keep track of without needing reams of paper around. I think I'm going to inspire some flames by that comment though ;-)

Even if you get all the Vaults you would still need the rulebooks...

sandwich said:

If you bought the player's vault and the Gm's vault then you would have pretty much all the components from the core set (the creatures vault contains some standups but aside from that most of the creatures vault, as mentioned earlier, is new stuff, and the old stuff is presented in a new format).

HOWEVER...

as also mentioned by the doc cthulu you would still need the rulebooks which is where it gets messy.

If you get he player guide and gms guide you get more than what is in the core set- you get the actiosn careers, spell, favours etc from every set except Witches Song. Sound great, huh? Well, if you don't want components, it is. If you want the components (and your reply above indicates you do) then to get, for example the spell cards for colleges outside of the core set you will need to get the Winds of Magic set- the components from this set are not available anywhere else (though most of the rules are in the players guide). This will mean that all of the WoM rules you will now have twice in books- once in the PG, and again in the WoM book. The same is true for priests stuff and Signs of Faith.

Additionally, there is material in both WoM and SoF which is not included in any of the guides or vaults, particularly info on the Chaos Gods (Tzeentch is in WoM, Nurgle in SoF) and the adventure in each set.

To re-iterate advice given by two earlier posters- if you want the components (and I agree- they are a huge part of what makes 3rd ed a great game which redefines the genre) then grab the core set, ignore the vaults and guides (except the Creatures guide and Vault which although not essential does include lots of stuff not available elsewhere) and get the other stuff as you see fit. There is a lot of gaming can be had with *just* the contents of the core set, so try it out and see how you feel.

I should add that I eventually bought a players vault as I found it to be the best way of addign more players to the base game- you get all the action cards needed for new players and duplicates of things such as career cards, more counters etc but I do feel I wasted my money a little because for the quite high cost of the set, only a few cards will see very regular use. I know I could hae bought more copies of the Adventurer's tookit but the PV was not much more and had 3 sets of basic actions, whereas AV has just one.

Good luck ,and if there's anything else, just ask, and we'll do our best to answer your queries.

If you are going to use tokens and cards (and I would it makes things a lot easier), then go for the core box set, it has everything you need. I have the players guide and Vault, I hardly use the guide but its nice to have, the vault is handy for me as I have five (soon to be six) players. I also have the creature guide and vault and they are superb. You can pick the Core box up cheap if you look around, get that to start playing, if you like it you will have a good base to expand from.