Role-playing Rants: My honest thoughts about the current state of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition

Last week Cubicle 7 dropped a bunch of info about their future WFRP releases. It's quite impressive, and it actually made me rethink a lot of things about the current edition of the game.

Yeah, no scenario review this week, sorry. You see, on the 30th of April we've been given a long and impressive list of upcoming 4th edition titles from the developers at C7. You can find it here. Among these we have a bestiary of sorts, a book about magic, both human, elvish and dwarf (in the form of runes, naturally), more parts of the "Enemy Within" remaster and a bunch of other sourcebooks. All in all, that's pretty impressive.

Is it finally time for the 4th edition to pick up the pace a bit?

Yeah, I'm not even kidding. That is genuienly impressive stuff. Mind you, I don't believe that we'll see any of these titles this year, but kudos to the C7 team for giving us a long and easy to read list of books which we might see... someday. Perhaps.

You see, at this point I am kinda dissapointed with Cubicle 7, to put it lightly. It's been two years since the 4th edition was released (after a delay), and so far the available titles for this game are few and far between. Aside from the rulebook, we have the starter set, "Rough Nights and Hard days", which is a finely written remaster of the "Rough Night at the Three Feathers Inn" with some new bits added, and a single part of the "Enemy Within" remaster (man, 4th edition is really riding on the ol' nostalgia factor, isn't it?). Plus a bunch of scenarios, building plans etc.

In my opinion it's really not enough. For a game that is on the market for almost two years, to have such a limited assortment of books is just unacceptable. It really is. I'm sorry C7, I am giving you a lot of slack, but what the hell are you guys doing? First you promise us literal mountains of gold, lots of cool titles, expanding the game beyond the tired and tested borders of the Empire, a new TEW and tons of other stuff, and then you don't deliver on that promise. You simply don't, and you're not telling us why. You let go of some of your best authors, like Andy Law and Ben Scerri (again, without any real explanation), you bring the works on the "Enemy Within" remaster to a halt, angering lots of people who preordered the game and paid a lot of cash for it. After almost two years there is no sign of a dedicated magic book or a "Sigmar's Heirs"-style compendium, no bestiary... Until now.

Why? Why did it took you so long to even announce these titles? What was your reasoning behind this decision? It just doesn't make any sense! If you're making such huge gaps between each major release, you are hurting your fanbase. Not only that, but you also irritate and alienate them with such infrequent and constantly delayed release schedule. This is not cool! 

Oh, and don't even get me started on the GM screen, which is almost a meme by now.

I don't get it. Yeah, you're a rather small company, and WFRP is huge when it comes to lore, plus creating all of the necessary rules (which, by the way, are great in the 4th edition). So why are you also start working on the Age of Sigmar RPG and a new version of Wrath & Glory, a game that met with less than a warm welcome from the fandom. Do you really think that "repairing" a medicore title, instead of focusing on a much more popular one, is a good buisness idea? I don't, and a lot of others don't think so as well!

Perhaps the reason is that you've been forced to work on these two games by Games Workshop, when you've scored the rights to WFRP franchise, but if that's the case, then you should be more open with us, your customers and the fans of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and just say how the things are right now. Your lack of communication, long periods of silence, and throwing a digital scenario or two as a means of mending things is not ok. It's bloody not ok and it's a really scammy way of treating your target audience.

You're constantly silent about what's going on, and honestly this is the biggest problem here. More and more people are getting constantly frustrated at the lack of updates, and why are so few, major titles actually being released, and you're not telling us jack. If you'd be willing to confess that yes, this is too much for you to handle, and you've simply bit too much to chew, then at least we could try and understand you. At this moment your approach to your customers smacks of arrogance and indifference. I don't get it. Same with letting go of Laws and Scerri - don't feed us the corporate "they've decided to work on other projects and we wish them all the best, blah blah blah" bullshit, because no one's buying it. Especially after Andy Law's deleted tweet about his work being butchered. Man up and face the consequences of your decisions and actions!

On your last post about the upcoming WFRP titles you've pretty much covered your asses with this little gem of a paragraph:

"Any details on unreleased products are subject to change as Morrslieb waxes and wanes. Attempts to infer a precise order of release from the above is likely to result in madness and mutation – you have been warned!"

Oh man, that's fucking golden. Really, I love the cheeky, in-character statement that essentialy says "we'll release these books when we bloody want to". I don't believe, even for a single second, that you'll actually release any of these titles within a time frame of a single year (not to mention the ones that you're not telling us about). If you can't release  a single title without a major delay, saying that you will produce 14+ new ones within the next 12 months is just painfully unfunny. Especially since you didn't gave us any timeline, not even an approximate one. This is simply unprofessional.

Cubicle 7, you guys made probably the best edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to date. I'm dead serious here. The rules are crisp and well written (except for combat, but that's just my opinion), the books are beautiful and really capture that WFRP feel in just the right way. 4th edition is the shit, make no mistake about it. However, I am not envisioning a bright future for this title, and it's solely because of your shoddy release schedule, lack of updates, lack of communication, weak smokescreens in the form of single scenarios, like the new "Deadly Dispatch" adventure, and the overal neglect of this fascinating and venerable franchise. Your fans don't deserve this. We don't deserve this. We are paying real money for the books that you're producing. People have pre-ordered titles which are currently suffering enormous delays, like the printed version of the "Enemy in Shadows", which was scheduled for the August of 2019!

Not only are you facing a real and present threat of GW pulling the plug, but also a lot of folks won't be buying any of your other games, after witnessing the massive screw ups on your part. You've lost the license to produce the "One Ring" RPG and there's talk that it happened because of your constant delays and being unable to meet deadlines on time. We, the fans of Warhammer, don't want for this to happen to WFRP. Only someone really naive or new to the hobby might think that GW gives even a modicum of crap about this game. It was always a side project, which got restarted (probably) because of the success of the Total War: Warhammer games, something which also contributed to the birth of the upcoming Warhammer: The Old World (a game which will only gather a small group of enthusiasts with deep pockets, as is always the case with products from Forge World). If GW will see that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is constantly underperforming, then they will simply pull the plug. If that happens, there's no telling if WFRP will ever manage to get back on its feet. For some reason I doubt that there would be a 5th edition of this game...

That said, both of these titles are simply not that important for Games Workshop to allow for their exsitence, if they'll be facing any major issues with their production. You will lose the license to WFRP, if you continue to screw up like that. Worse, you'll lose customers. Visit fanpages like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition and WFRP Game Masters on Facebook, and read the reactions to your latest news - that's all there is to say here.

Oh, and to those who are defending Cubicle 7 by saying things like: "they're small company", "COVID-19 contributed to the problems in the industry" and "just enjoy the game": no. Not one of these arguments is valid. As a company, they've made a lot of promises, and people are right to expect from them to fulfill said promises. As for the COVID-19 - a lot of delays, most of them in fact, started to occur waaaay before the outbreak. Sure, I don't mind them not sending the first part of the new TEW prints to the people, but the fact is that this first part was scheduled for printing back in 2019, in August! If I remember correctly, the Coronavirus wasn't ravaging the world back then.

Finally my favorite argument about "just enjoying the game"... Oh man, I do enjoy it. I really do and I want to continue to do so, but for this to happen I want new books. Not short scenarios in a PDF format, some of which are just remastered version of the classic WFRP adventures, but new, thick books, full of excellent lore and rules, and ideally proofread. Seriously, I've heard the stories about the "Enemy in Shadows" PDF. Cubicle 7, do you guys even have a quality control in your company?

Seriously, even goblins would make a better job of finding and correcting the many mistakes which plague these books...

So to close this "hateful and overly critical" post, let me just say that I'd like for your statement in that upcoming releases article to be true. That said, as quite many of us, WFRP players, already stated, I'll belive it when I see it. For now I simply can't belive in your statements and promises. You've failed to deliver the goods on time too many times now, and there is only so much bullshit that I can take. So I wish you all the best, but I'm not holding my breath. You've made sure of it.

Until next time, when I'll review another fine scenario for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay!

Xathrodox86