I don't know how other but I miss the old fequency of publishing expansions.

From the start of this line we had almost every 2 maybe 3 months a good, new, solid product for WFRP3ed. And now? We are gitting some small PoD that are expensive and have a small number of cards. We ha d to wait almost a half year to get Hero's Call after Lure Of Power. So how long we will have to wait to get The Enemy Within? Funny thing is that The Enemy Within does not have a release date and noone knows when it will be avalible.. So what happened to this so great line? When are we going to get some news about release dates and future titles?

It looks that in first two years we got almost 4 or 5 expansions a year and now what? We are going to get 2 big expansions and a lot of expansive PoD stuff?

For me it's a very unpleased feeling that the game is dying or FFG is loosing interest in it. I hope I'm wrong. I know that they have the right to make a Star Wars RPG but does it mean the other RPGs will not gain any love? What dou You all think about this sytuation? And how dou You think, when we will get The Enemy Within?

Cheers

PS. The Enemy Within maybe will be avaliable after at least 3 month after Hero's Call I think. So when July, August or maybe even September?

you're right about the PoDs, they are very expensive.

i cant tell qhy hero's call took so long to release, but it is, again, a very solid expansion ti the game.

and i think that the game is already very well supplemented. you gotta admit that. there's a supplement for every chaos god, there are small adventures, there is a whole campaign. and i guess the enemy within might take a while, as it is a truly large campaign setting which must be writtemn first.

i'd rather wait a few weeks longer than having to read over hundreds of typos and get a errata section the size of a football field…

One of the criticisms of v2 was the feeling from some fans that too much was pushed out the door too soon. My impression is that there was a conscious decision to develope and release supplements at a more paced manner with v3. YMMV but I favour the slow expansion form the initial tight focus on the Reikland. It's not like background info on the Old World is short. If you are looking for content to run, maybe try out converting Mad Alfred's 4 part campaigne

As my fellow repliers said, it's a mystery why it took FFG so long to publish HC properly.

But: We have a big campaign coming and they're feeding players' needs with new PODs. It has been FFG's policy (or bad habit) from the start of the line not to inform the fan base as much as people want, so nothing new here.

I really don't know why people love to foretell the end of days of 3e so much when they have no solid grounds but just a hunch.

Just my own opinion, but my guess is The Enemy Within will be a Gencon release. Just seems like a good time for it.

Slowing down a publishing schedule does not mean the game is dying or that the company is losing interest. All it really means is that they rushed out the 'core' supplements more quickly in the first year or two. Frankly, I'm happy with a slower release schedule, it makes it easier for me to collect the whole line and still afford to eat.

I estimate ongoing POD every other month and 1-2 boxed sets per year from here on out.

jh

To me it just feels natural to slow down after the first years of a RPG product line. The first years there are important parts to flesh out (such as the chaos gods etc.), but after a few years the game has a very good and solid core rule base. After that it's natural to slow down and release fewer supplements. I have seen this happend with many RPGs and it didn't mean they were dead or that the company creating them lost interest in the game.

News about releases and future titles hasn't been released since sifting through shadows in 2010, so FFG will probably keep releasing news on one major product at a time and sprinkle PODs in between the releases.

Personally, I don't think the game is dying. It just feels like a normal product life cycle, I believe that WFRP3ed has reached a mature stage in it's life cycle, you have built a base of loyal customers, furthermore you have reached a lot of those interested in your product and most of the potential customers know about your product. You don't have to push products as hard as the consumers will purchase the products. This often leads to a lower release rate for RPG's in my experience. It doesn't mean it's going into decline any time soon.

Personally I like the PODs, they ensure that new material is released quite often, even now that the line has matured.

yeah, that would be enough for me too. so we can get ahold of the new rules before even newer come out…

This is what happens to every RPG. The core books are the most popular and sell very well, so the distributors order loads of them. After that sales slow down. Distributors reduce their orders, so the publishers have to space out their releases more.

This continues until the game is no longer viable - a point which is different for every company.

The bigger question at the moment is whether the expiry date of the GW licence is coming up.

It sucks I think. There's so much more of the Old World to explore, but we are limited to only one fleshed out province, and only one fleshed out city town, Ubersreik…and we have NOTHING for ANY elves. I understand why they are running on the model they are, it's a recession and only one person per group buys these supplements. But, I feel the setting suffers for it. Whatever, I'm probably a minority, but I wish as a GM that I had more options for canonized or official material. The problems with the HC release is unsettling about future releases…if there will be any.

On a side note, this is my groups favorite game in our 20 year history.

GalaxyUC said:

You're certainly not alone in wanting more material. I think every fan of every game wants more material. But publishers don't really have much choice when it comes to the pace at which they release supplements.

Well, for now we have material from the first and the second edition to draw on as well as the massive amount of fairly high-quality fan-made material. And then there is the occasional White Dwarf article, all Warpstone magazine issues every published and the introductory chapters of the Fantasy Battle army books.

I find that aside from just a few selected texts from the second edition, which assume that some places have been burned during the Storm of Chaos, I can use pretty much all of it just as it is.

Now, I am with you in desiring more source material for the old world, naturally. I want city source books like we have for Middenheim and Marienburg, I want maps, locations, canon lore fluff and all of it in hardcover with high production quality. Take my money already, darnit! I have a job and I'd like to spend (party of) my disposable income on Warhammer. ;-)

All I'd like to say here is that for now we have a mountain of source material backlog that we can fall back on, while they surely work on said new high-quality source material.

And it's good from a customer view point, more is not always better. If they keep pushing out 4 - 6+ must have products a year like WW did with WoD back in their 90's heyday the line gets bloated and it starts repeating itself, its happening a little with Dark Heresy (which is due for a 2nd ed imo, or at least a revised).

A PoD every other month sounds good to me. A campaign a year and one or two splat boxes, my guess is that the next one will be about Elves or Brettonia. Now that we have Heroes Call we have a framework that can handle rank 4+ characters which is where the vaunted High Mage lives.

It's no longer about spitting out a ton of products but about prolonging the products longevity, it can't seem dead, but it can't seem over done either. You don't give people everything they want right away, you hold a little back, it's common business sense.

Edit: I know that you can find it in the over 9000 splat books that GW publishes and that it's part of the marketing strategy from GW to get us pesky role-players to buy army books we don't want or need (don't' blame FFG). I would love to see a setting TOME with nothing but fluff in it, tons of setting art, 15+ GIANT foldout maps of provinces and cities (A3+ ofc) and NPC's 400 pages, hard cover, obscene print quality and a 150$+ price tag (I have a job that pays well so I'm not bothered).

i would also pay nicely for maps, since we dont really have any.

i also mean A3+ in size and top quality. a map of the empire, a map of the old world! i printed a map of the old world myself on A0 once, but sadly the quality wasn't the best, i need some material!!!

A book of maps, an old world atlas or something, nom.

Fantasy Flight Games could really put out a 'mapfolio range', as Wizards of the Coast do it for D&D on occasions. Proper A1/A0 poster maps are really something we are desperately missing in wfrp and they are commonplace over at other games. It should make economic sense to capitalize on this, I should think. Heck, if Hasbro - the Big Brother behind Wizards of the Coast - sees a point in it, it must be worth it.

Meanwhile, I'm substituting.

To start out with, White Dwarf issue 300 came with some extra gifts, one of them being a poster map of the Old World:
http://bayimg.com/iaoDFaaDf

I got mine on ebay for around 10 pounds a week ago, so it's not all that crazy-hard to get. Be sure you're bidding on the gifts of that issue as well, not just the magazine.

As for the provinces, I have taken the clean black and white maps from:
http://www.andreas.blicher.info/Maps.htm

I printed them on A4 on my laser printer, copied them to A3 at a copy shop and then I tea-stained them a bit for that cozy parchment effect. I've included the white A4 page in the image to illustrate the colour difference:
http://bayimg.com/HaoDIaaDf

This will do for the time being. I do, however, intend to have a store print the Empire bit from Gitzman's map to A0 one of these days, since it will be nearly impossible to top in terms of detail even by a high-quality commercial product. Frankly, it's as good as it can get.

I'd kill for a map.

I ordered issue 300, but got the american version which didn't have a map…

I'll have to keep looking.

jh

Before I forget, I am still using this map from 1987 in my group in 2012:
http://bayimg.com/LaOhiaAdf
It's become really brittle by now but boy did I get a lot of mileage out of it.

I wonder why we can't go back to this state. Fantasy Flight Games really sports a very high production value and even a wfrp campaign from 1987 included the map above as well as:

http://bayimg.com/LAoHpaADf
http://bayimg.com/LAOHdAAdf
http://bayimg.com/MaOhBAAdf

And that's material that came with a campaign, which strictly speaking wasn't even a source book. Arguably it acted like one, though.

I've been thinking - if Fantasy Flight Games can't properly gauge the actual demand for such maps and they worry that they would end up as proud owner of a bunch of maps that don't sell, then couldn't these maps be made available through a print-on-demand order? I can print-on-demand posters at several online places as a consumer so that method certainly isn't restricted to cards. That seems to come with little up-front investment on part of the company. And I mean, the Dreadfleet POD came way out of left field and they still put it out there, so they seem to be inclined to take a risk via that route of publishing.

Its interesting to see complaints about the slow schedule because when you look at the intial release one of the chief complaints was that there where way too many expansions and sets to buy and people where getting flustered trying to figuire out what to get first.

As a GM it becomes common practice for me to buy the core sets, a few expansion and than really slow things up. The main reason is simple, I don't GM because I like running games, I do it because I LOVE creating and running games. The creation aspect is where most of my time is spent and what I need to do that is some basic source material, some good examples on how to do it well and sufficient supplies and books to offer my players more options they know what to do with. WFRP in its current state has all that and than some.

Personally if they never released another expansion or module, right now there is already too much on the market for me to concievably buy, in fact I'm still trying to get caught up and I find myself split between certain books and expansion.

As for content, really I find it shocking anyone has any trouble finding content for the warhammer fantasy world. Its easily the most expanded and fleshed out game work in existant perhaps trump only by the World of Darkness. WFRP is not a "version" of the warhammer universe, it IS the warhammer universe. Novels, all 1st and 2nd edition content, hundreds of army books, no less than 8 fantasy battle editions. I mean if you started today and attempted to read and learn everything there is out today for the warhammer universe you would probobly spend the better part of 2 decades trying to collect and read it all.

Point is that there was already WAAAAY too much story content for this game even before it was released. I mean … does good content have to be an "official" fantasy flight games WFRP 3.0 expansion for it to be usable?

BigKahuna said:

Good point. The epic threats in Hero's Call for example have long legacies and useful "fluff information" or "other ideas to use" in other books (e.g., the beastman epic threat is also described in the Beastman army book as just one of several epic beastman foes including Morghul himself).

Filling some gaps in current edition world information can be done looking backwards. I found Guardians of the Forest (an e-book only now I think) a fast, fairly light, but entertaiing read that helped flesh out Wood Elves beyond the text.

All ideas must be held lightly or a GM prepared to simply say "in this version of Old World" - as in , will there be a Storm of Chaos, well every major player except Valten seems to have been mentioned so far in 3rd edition materials, draw your own conclusion or just make it up for "your world".

I do think that in a strange way, the huge legacy of Warhammer universe feeds the hunger for more precisely because "we know there is more, having seen other versions of it". But I don't just want some old stuff slammed into new edition for the sake of publishing revenue, I want it thought through, playtested etc.

BigKahuna said:

I introduced two new players to the system last night. In order to teach them the basics I used some pregnerated characters from Liber Fanantic (thanks, guys, that was an awesome section). I pulled out cards for four different characters, and three players had already made characters and pulled out cards. Without working at it there were six characters with no duplicate action cards or talents, and broadly speaking most of the characters were similar-- melee oriented fighting types. When you can have four characters with a melee focus and yet still have niche protection, that suggests to me that there's plenty of support.

Of course, I do want more.

All I'm saying is he, can we get a little more fleshed out fluff information about another province and city other than Ubersreik and the Reikland? That's all I'm interested in…how about Stirland and Sylvania, gimmie a reason to use Undead, because right now…there's nothing. I understand there's a lot of out of print and dated material out there for previous editions, but truth be told…I'm not interested in reading out dated material and about a setting where the War of Chaos has all ready happened and the currency rates are off. Just saying. Please just give me another province and another city…

GalaxyUC said:

GalaxyUC said:

I get what your saying and Im not disagreeing at all, I mean, the MORE the better, but its also worth saying that the more they put out the less they will sell. I don't know that much about economics but it seems to me that you have to assume that the average consumer only has so much money to spend on this kind of hobby so its presumable at least that its better to focus on ensuring the quality of the products is high, rather than the quantity.

But I do I understand what you mean, content for a specific rule system has the advantage of relating the narrative to the specific mechanic. For example in the Lure of Power, we learn about nobles and various intracacies of society, this is great information (but attainable in many other none WFRP 3.0 suppliments), however what gives that expansion its real juice is the new professions, action cards, talents and various new rules that link that narrative to the game mechanic. So now you don't just have the information, but you also have very good line of sight for how to use it with tips on how to do it well. So there is no question that its always better to have an official source. I think my point was that now that we have one province fleshed out, you should have a pretty good idea on how the designers approached it, what they created. Aka you have an example on how to create a province and flesh it out. This is the real power of expansion content like this, its not just great as content itself, but great as an example on how to create your own.