Learning Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

I’m starting to learn Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, third edition, published by Fantasy Flight. Warhammer has been around for quite a while, both the roleplaying game (RPG) and the miniatures game. I have been interested in the RPG, but never had the opportunity to play a Warhammer game. So… what do you do when you want to play something and none of the local gaming stores offer sessions in the RPG of your choice? You buy all of the books and then con (“invite”) your friends to share the painful process of learning a new system together.

There are two options for buying Warhammer. You can either buy the huge boxed core set or you can use the Players and Game Masters Guides. The core set includes basic rule books, plus all of the nifty pieces, dice, and cards you can (optionally) use to play the games. The two hardback guides include the rule book contents from the core set and several of the expansion sets. However, none of the cards, dice, and nifty pieces are included.

There are lots of videos and web sites for learning about WFRPG.

Learning about the game

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3e Google+ community
• Good video from Fantasy Flight of the different new parts of the game
• Fantasy Flight presented a seminar at GenCon about the Third Edition (series of five videos)
• RPG Geek tutorial on learning WFRP
• Warhammer FRPG videos by Webhead123 on YouTube: game mechanics, character generation (part 1 and part 2), skill checks, action cards, and talents.
• Morton Stromgal’s videos on how to play Warhammer on YouTube. His eight videos discuss game mechanics, magic, character generation, skill checks, and combat.
• TheOutsiders’ channel on YouTube has a bunch of videos on Warhammer, including reviews of the kits, tips for GMs, explanations of how initiative works, etc. (Search their videos for Warhammer.)
• Explanation of how disease works with a character in WFRP
• Reckless Dice podcast explains game mechanics, has example live play, character creation, etc. The character creation podcast is very good (except someone breaths really heavy arg).
• Apathy Blog’s monster index
• Online dice roller which includes stats.
• Dice pool roller from RPG Geek. It’s a downloadable SWF.
• Fortune Point cards
• List of dice rollers

Resources for players

• Fantasy Flight WFRP resources
• Gitzman’s WFRP resources, including reference PDFs, fillable character sheets, game master references (awesome!), and PDFs of the action cards. Gitzman also has Warhammer Maptools resources.
• Order of Gamers resources for WFRP 3e
• Character generator on Malleus (could be second edition, but adaptable to third edition)
• Rules summary from Order of Gamers
• Rules summary from Count Dimon
• Winds of Chaos site has lots of resources, including critical hit scales, combat tracker, maps, trade tools, etc. Some of the content is third edition, some is second edition. The site also has scenarios.
• Liber Fanatica resources for WFRPG
• Great idea for organizing the contents of the WFRPG kits
• WFRP career planner shows all careers entries and exit paths. (Mostly second edition, but it provides great info.)
• Resources links to official sites, fan sites, forums, etc., on Kalevala Hammer.
• Emrikiol has some excellent summaries on this FFG WFRP thread
• FFG RPG forum for online play

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