Hey, folks! I've been speaking to a few members of this forum and they've said they would love to run demos of Warhammer. When I told them I've been doing so for quite some time and have a pile of materials I custom made for it, they asked for copies. This got me to thinking that maybe others would be interested in the same thing.

A bit of background: My local gaming store is Go4Games , here in Metairie, Louisiana. When I moved here from Boston, the owners asked me to run Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and get people excited to play it. They gave me a free copy of the core set and an open invitation to do things however i wanted.

The first thing I did was to come up with the demo characters. There were 4 core characters: Leopold Fiegler (a scribe), Kazgan (the Dwarven Troll-Slayer), Gothard Meyer (the smuggler), and Adred Liess (the commoner). Except for Kazgan, they were all human and they all had fully written backgrounds for any players who were interested.

The next thing was to make custom character sheets that weren't so hard to read. They were meant to be simple and inviting. They were also designed to be folded up so that you could tuck the cards inside (though I just used a Ziploc bag for all components).

Here is a low-res screen shot of the front of Leopold's sheet...

And here is the back...

Now I had to come up with some ground rules for the game. I decided no one would ever "own" these characters. It would be first come, first served. I also decided the characters would never gain any experience, which is why they're all built with seven advances under their belt*. This makes for a very good--but not overpowering--character. Finally, I made a post on the Go4Games forums (and in the shop) that explained my "rewards" system for players who buy into the game. You can find it under the " Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition: Super-Amazing-Demo-Game Swag " post.

Basically, anyone who purchased a game item from their shop would gain in-game benefits. This led to a lot of discussion with people about fairness and balance, but it worked perfectly. The game was never unbalanced, the shop made money, and everyone had a great time!

The next thing was coming up with an advertisement. I made two of them. One for the shop's bulletin board and the other I mounted to foam core and stood up on the table while we played.

Finally, after playing for a while I created some expanded materials such as my clue cards (which have been discussed elsewhere on these forums), an initiative tracker (shown below; this was also mounted to a foam core stand-up with little sticky tokens to represent all combatants), extra characters (for those days when you get more players than you expected), a tuck box for the wound cards (this I was never happy with, but if you put those cards in protective sleeves the suckers will fly all over the place unless they're in a box!), and enemy combatant tracker sheets. I also made blank versions of my character sheets and special worksheets for new players to join the game with a minimum of fuss or complication.

I hope this helps. Post here if you're interested in any of these materials. Also, let me know if you've got any questions.

Sincerely,

Steve (of the Red Fez)

(NOTE: I've edited this post and replaced a couple of images with low-res ones so that it wouldn't be so hard for people to view them on mobile devices or with slow connections).

* - I create my characters with a few very minor differences. You might notice that I don't believe an advanced skill should be "untrained" when you've spent something on it during character generation. This would lead to scribes not really knowing how to read and write or burghers not actually knowing Tradecraft (i.e. the reason they're a burgher in the first place). Once character generation is over, we go back to the normal rules.

Any advanced skills that were taken during character creation are marked as trained. If this bugs you then feel free to change it but before you do, consider this: is a newly minted character really going to throw your game out of balance with his or her awesome education skill?

Edited January 9, 2014 by Steve (of the Red Fez)

I almost forgot a few really important things I did that fixed a few issues.

First, enlarge the party card. It's WAY too small right now and not engaging for everyone. I enlarged it to a full page and kept it in the middle of the table. This made it much more noticeable throughout the game and made it much easier to read at a distance.

Second, if you're going to use the location cards, enlarge them too! At their current size they are almost useless. It's difficult to even see the picture. if you blow it up to either a full page or a half page then it becomes far more effective in setting a scene.

Third, (as I've posted elsewhere) do not start your session by teaching the rules or giving any kind of oral history of the Warhammer world, the demo characters, the adventure, or anything else. Start out with an exciting scene (do not use the dice for this... just keep it simple) and teach the rules as you go. This also means you don't "pause" the game if a new player sits down in order to teach them anything. Just throw them in and teach them as you play.