Dear Gurus,

I just purchased the Warhammer Fantasy Role Play core set (WHF01). Can any one tell me if there is new material in the "Guide" and "Vault" sets not included in the core set.

For example The Creature Guide sounds like it contains new creatures but does not say how many. Is the same as the Tome of Adventure with just one or two new enemies or is it a completely new set of beasties.

Also are the "Toolkit" sets worth the extra purchase? They at least seem to contain new material and not just reprints of core set material.

After the hefty core set purchase, campaigns, and print on demand sets I want to make sure not to repurchase anything that is included in the core set. (I do realize the guides are hardback that is not important to me.)

Thank you in advance for any and all help on my behalf. Peace.

I'm wondering too if I have to buy " The Creature Guide " and then " The Creature Vault " or if the " The Creature Vault " includes everything.

The guides and vaults are first and foremost produced to give the option of playing without all the card components. Generally I would say they can be avoided.

The Creature Vault is pretty handy though, because it gives you cards for a lot of monsters. Most (all?) of these are printed in various rulebooks, but having them all in a deck of cards is so much handier, as you can just pull out the cards you will need ahead of playing and you will not need to start leafing around in rulebooks for the right stats. In addition, the Creature Guide contains rules for using some of the new stuff in the creature vault. However, I would not say it is needed as you will probably only read the rules once to understand how the cards and sheets work and then never open the book again. Personally I bought some of the guides in PDF form so I could just look up things quickly when I was away from the physical books.

Tldr : Buy the Creature Vault for a full set of monster cards. No other Vaults or Guides add anything you need. Guides can be handy to buy as PDFs though.

What to buy after the Core set.

Generally speaking, after the Core set I would say the Adventurers Toolkit is a nice addition. It fills out the Core set with equipment for another player and a bunch of careers that really should have been included in the core set.

After that, you should be looking at the 4 big expansions;

Signs Of Faith (Priests, Diseases and Nurgle)

Winds Of Magic (Wizards, Mutations and Tzeentch)

Omens Of War (Fighters, Criticals and Khorne)

Lure Of Power (Nobles, Social Encounters and Slaanesh)

Pick in whatever order seems most relevant for your game.

I strongly disagree with Ralzar's assessment. There's actually a ton of new content in the Player's Guide and Creature Guide and Vault! He is mostly right about the GM's guide though, it's of dubious utility.

Lengthy post on exactly what’s new in the Player’s Guide :
http://transitivegaming.blogspot.com/2013/07/whats-actually-new-in-wfrp-players-guide.html

• TL;DR version of that link: While the Player's Guide is mostly a reprint, it actually has a ton of tiny corrections, advice, and corner-case rules. The biggest changes and most important new rules are to Healing, Advancement, default Difficulties, and the section on "Freestyle" banes/boons/comets/stars. Those alone make the book a worthy purchase for dedicated Warhammer fans. I’d say get it. You want to read the Healing chapter very thoroughly, but for the rest of it if you’re already familiar with the coreset you can mostly get away with just reading all the new sidebars. Those sidebars and the expanded healing rules fix a number of critical problems in the game system.

Lengthy post on exactly what’s new in the Creature Guide :
http://transitivegaming.blogspot.com/2013/08/whats-new-in-wfrp3-creature-guide.html

• TL;DR version of that link: Creature Guide has a huge number of new monsters, some new NPC mechanics, plot-hooks and setting material. I strongly recommend it for all the useful content. Note, however, that it is poorly edited and organized. The Creature Vault has most of the crunchy mechanical content from the Guide in convenient card form, and can be really helpful. Sadly, certain critical new rules in the Creature Guide didn’t make it into the Creature Vault so it’s really hard to use parts of it (especially Swarms) without having the Guide as well.

Lengthy post on exactly what’s new in the GM’s Guide :
— Dang it, I never finished or published that post, and I don’t think I’ll get around to it today.

• Looking at my notes and half-written draft of the post, I am reminded that there’s a lot less new material in the GM’s Guide. What new content it does have is mostly clarifications and ideas for getting better value out of some of the more controversial GM tools in the game. So if you feel like the Party Tension Meter, Rally Steps, or the 3-Act Structure are confusing, or clumsily-executed, you’ll appreciate the expanded coverage they are given in the GM’s guide. If you’re already happy with those mechanics as-is (or hate them so much you threw them out) then the GM’s Guide probably isn’t worth your money.

I prefer the Guides to the cards, but you still need dice. If you are using the "toolkit" as noted on the back of the guides, or a digital dice roller for it, you don't need dice however.

Reference sources for advancement/leveling is extremely important for players. The cards are helpful for play, but they are an absolute useless crap-pain in the bumps for anything else.