All I Want for Christmas

Compliments of the season, whatever you celebrate at this time of year.

It’s been a good year for me: the final volumes in The Enemy Within Director’s Cut have been published, at least in electronic form, and just a few days ago the Kickstarter campaign for the Vaesen Britain and Ireland Sourcebook topped $700,000, making almost 65 times its funding goal.

Another thing I’m proud of this year is my involvement with Rookery Publications. For those who haven’t heard, this is a new indie tabletop RPG studio that I have co-founded along with Andy Law, Mark Gibbons, Lindsay Law, and Andy Leask. We are completely self-funded so this is a spare-time venture for most of us, but we confidently expect to release the first few system-agnostic* fantasy roleplaying supplements in our Coiled Crown product line early in 2022.

*That’s right. We are designing everything so that it can be used with any rules system. It sounds like a tall order, but playtest results have been very positive. In fact, some testers successfully adapted our first adventure for various SF and horror games, as well as a wide range of fantasy roleplaying games.

While we were working on those plans, we also started doing a regular weekly stream called Inside the Rookery, where we chat with guests from all across the industry about all manner of things. We’ve had a fantastic array of guests so far, and we plan to keep on going in 2022. We also have an occasional series called Beside the Rookery, which takes a deeper look at a specific topic. You can find past streams on our YouTube channel.

The streams are supported by a Patreon campaign, which you can find here. Starting at just GBP 1.50 (USD 2.00 or EUR 1.77 at the time of posting), you can become a Rook and enjoy Patreon-exclusive blog posts as well as monthly masterclasses on various aspects of RPG design. So far I’ve shown how to create multi-plot adventures like those in the Rough Nights and Hard Days collection for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and Andy Law has shared some of the secrets of his multiple award-winning cartography.

So if you want to give us a gift this holiday season, please check out the Rookery’s Patreon page. It’s a gift to yourself, as well.

Developing WFRP

Ever wondered what the collective noun for a grim and perilous gathering of WFRP developers is?

The answer to that question and more can be yours when, for the first time ever, WFRP developers from all four editions of the game – Graeme Davis, James Wallis, Chris Pramas, Jay Little, and Andy Law – gather to answer your questions.

So, mark this date in your calendars: Wednesday 27th October at 21:30 UK time.

If you want to pre-submit questions, head over to the Rookery Discord: https://discord.gg/KGzxJw7Taw

Or, turn up on the day and comment on Facebook, Twitch, or YouTube. Our host, WFRP writer and editor Lindsay Law, will take your questions live and put them to the panel.

If you want to see our previous streams, head over to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheRookery

If you want to know more about Inside the Rookery, head over to our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/InsideTheRookery

Inside the Rookery

I’m proud to be a part of Rookery Publications along with fellow veterans Andy Law, Lindsay Law, Mark Gibbons, and Andrew Leask. Between us we have over a century of experience developing award-winning tabletop roleplaying products for some of the biggest and best publishers in the business, and now we’ve decided to go out on our own. One commentator called us “a roleplaying supergroup”.

We have some great things planned for our ground-breaking, system-agnostic*, modular** Coiled Crown line of tabletop roleplaying products. But that’s not all we do.

Every week, we do a streaming show called “Inside the Rookery”, which goes out live on Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube. We discuss topics related to gaming in general, we have guests on now and then (and there are some great ones lined up for the rest of September), and we let you know how things are progressing with The Coiled Crown.

The streams are open to all. They are live every Saturday at 7 pm UK (2 pm Eastern, 11 am Pacific), and past shows can be found on our YouTube channel.

To help support our weekly streams, Rookery Publications just launched a Patreon campaign. Please take a look and support us if you can. Rewards include our undying gratitude, special status and exclusive channels on the Rookery’s clamorous Discord server, patron blogs and more!

Want to know more? Watch as Andy Law and Lindsay Law give you a tour of the Rookery’s Patreon offering, along with a peek at our vibrant Discord community!

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*That’s right, system-agnostic. Whatever your game of choice – even if it’s not even fantasy – we show you ways to incorporate our products into your games.

**We like to think of our approach as like LEGO sets. You can use everything as given, to create an absolutely awesome campaign with a stunning setting, a staggering plot, memorable NPCs, some terrifying original monsters, and an array of optional adventures. Or, you can pick and choose what works in your games, change the order, mix it up with other things to make something completely new that no one even thought of before. It’s yours to do with as you please – well, that’s true of every roleplaying product you’ve ever bought – but the difference is that we know it, and we’ve planned to support you in however you choose to use it!

Great Cats and Elven Beastfriends for WFRP4

Those of you who have seen the Enemy in Shadows Companion for WFRP 4th edition will have seen a mention of “great cats” in the chapter “On the Road.” This little encounter features a werecat as well – a creature never seen before or since in Warhammer. It all dates back to the very first days of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay in late 1986.

I’ve blogged about “On the Road” before, and if you are interested in why and how I wrote this piece you can read all about it here. As the Warhammer setting developed, werewolves and other were-creatures disappeared: to the best of my knowledge, the last mention of a lycanthrope in an official Warhammer publication was in a WFRP 1st edition adventure called “The Howling Season,” published in the Warhammer Companion (which Cubicle 7 has just made available in electronic form). That was published by Flame in 1990.

Lycanthropes in the Old World are a subject for another day, when I have more time than I do today. But since Andy Law just posted an intriguing short article on cats in the Old World – complete with a Henchman career – I thought I’d take a moment to tell you what I know about the great cats of the Old World’s forests.

It started, like most things Warhammer, with a miniatures ad in White Dwarf.

Game stats for Warhammer 3rd edition appeared in Warhammer Armies, with a name doubtless inspired by a fantasy movie from 1982.

I made sure that the 1st edition WFRP rulebook covered all of these beasts, including the cats. I imagined markings like those of a European wildcat (Felis silvestris), but a size and shape somewhere between cheetah and mountain lion, like the miniatures.

…and I wrote up a Beastfriend career for Wood Elves which appeared in the Warhammer Companion (did I mention that you can get this rarest of WFRP supplements in PDF form? I’m sure I did.) which was reprinted in Apocrypha Now.

And there it ended. The great cats disappeared from Warhammer lore and were forgotten. When the Enemy in Shadows Companion went to Games Workshop for approval, the mention of great cats raised some eyebrows because no one remembered them. A small text box was added to the 4th edition version of “On the Road” for the benefit of surprised readers, along with a stat box for the cats themselves. (Sorry, I’m not going to violate copyright and show it here, but then you’ll already have it in your copy of the Enemy in Shadows Companion – or the one you’ve been meaning to buy, right? Right?)

Well, then, all this is very interesting, but who cares, really? I suppose it depends on whether you like cats, or Wood Elf careers, or both. One day I hope I’ll get round to writing up a Beastfriend career for WFRP 4th edition, but until then you can improvise one.

Start by creating a Wood Elf Scout or Hunter character (or some other career, at the GM’s option) with suitably high scores in Animal Training and possible Charm Animal and Animal Care. If these skills are not available within the career path, follow the Training rules on page 199 of the WFRP rulebook.

Next, create the beast using the stat block from the Enemy in Shadows Companion (What? You still haven’t got a copy? Do I have to stop being subtle?) and run it through the Henchman career in Andy’s blog post.

If you prefer a Beastfriend with a hound, Andy’s got dogs pretty well covered here. For bears and boars, you can find base stats in the Bestiary of the WFRP rulebook. After that, you can either design your own Henchman career, or use the Trained Trait to cover the beast’s abilities.

What do you think? If you design and/or play a Beastfriend using these improvised rules, comment below and let me know how well it worked – or didn’t work. Meanwhile, I will add a 4th edition version of the Beastfriend to my long, long list of things to get round to when I have the time.