Weekender XLBS: Warhammer End Times & Halloween Top 5’s!
October 26, 2014 by lloyd
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I woke up before the posting of xlbs.. Long live wintertime 🙂
Happy Sunday!
Watch “The Cabin in the Woods”. It is ScoobyDoo meets Cthulhu and has ALL of the tropes.
A good read for Warhammer would be the ‘Ambassador’ novels by Graham McNeill. They had the right blend of politics and battle that attracted me in a pre-Game of Thrones kinda way! 🙂
They were very good, but kind of limited in scope I would say for an introduction to Warhammer. Then again, I haven’t read them in years.
I’d tell someone to put an rpg group together, track down copies of 1st ed WFRP, The Enemy Within, Shadows Over Bogenhafen, Death on the Reik, and Power Behind the Throne, and then play through them. If you don’t like the setting after that, then it probably isn’t for you.
I think that if WFB wants to appeal to a new audience it needs to construct a new game from the ground up. I’m hoping that End Times is the first step in that process.
WFRP is great! For the campaign you mentioned I would strongly recommend to anybody who wants to try that…and you really should…you only play it with a really good and experienced GM to enjoy them. A novice GM would probably be in over his head and that will most likely kill of the hole thing of quite fast. Oh boy…how nostalgic 🙂
I was going to say something along exactly these lines, and it reveals actually one of the difficulties for getting in to WFB, which is that over the years it has changed a great deal. For a long time now Warhammer has been a very high fantasy, hero-centric, over the top, super-power fueled setting… which really doesn’t interest me in the way that the Fantasy Roleplaying Game did. Which is kind of ironic, as I think the change has been driven by GW’s desire to justify more large and expensive kits and to make it a less generic setting and… Read more »
Even back in the 80s, there was disconnect between WFB and WFRP because of the mediums they operated in. That became more pronounced in 1992 when WFRP was dumped and 4th ed took the WFB setting in a different direction. As you say, WFB now has moved more into high fantasy territory. The difference between Karl Franz in Empire in Flames and Karl Franz in the current WFB fluff succinctly sums up the differences. All of that said, I still think that anyone who plays the campaign, will still be left with an affection for and understanding of what the… Read more »
Yes, I agree. And in fact, my own views are not actually as black and white as all that. If I had a proper Warhammer Army these days, I would be very tempted to play some games in the End Times campaign. I’ve bought some of the plastic kits for converting to a (40K) chaos daemon army. And I would have bought both of the End Times books if they hadn’t both already sold out. That will be a test of GW’s commitment to the game I reckon: will they reprint the books to allow other players to get in… Read more »
If the End Times lives up to its name then GW won’t need to keep it in print. If it clears the decks for 9th ed then it’ll have served its purpose.
@Redben (can’t seem to reply to your latest comment directly) “f the End Times lives up to its name then GW won’t need to keep it in print. If it clears the decks for 9th ed then it’ll have served its purpose.” I agree. But if that is what they’re doing with it, it will come as quite a kick in the teeth to everyone who a) wasn’t able to get involved and b) who finds the system reset will make their ‘End Times-compatible’ armies obsolete. If they reset everything back to how it was as if nothing happened (like… Read more »
If a) is people who missed out because they got interested after the fact, then I don’t see that as a problem. GW shouldn’t have to keep outdated material from an earlier edition in print for latecomers and it usually isn’t hard to pick oop books up off the secondary market. If it’s people who want to play now but can’t because they can’t get the books then that’s a different issue and it would make sense for GW to meet that demand. For b), if there’s a quick turnaround from End Times to 9th ed which in turn invalidates… Read more »
Some more Phantasm, any hammer horror, the stuff, the keep and i could go on….
Happy Sunday.
Vampire: The Masquerade was the original Word of Darkness game, and spawned by far its most successful line. In it, vampires existed in a shadow society across many of the world’s major cities an engaged in mighty behind-the-scenes power struggles with each other. There were thirteen different vampiric bloodlines (which were like character classes) and seven of them had banded together to form the Camarilla. The Camarilla enforced the Masquerade which was designed to ensure that human society never discovered the existence of vampires. As Sam says, earlier interactions with human society, such as the inquisition, hadn’t gone well for… Read more »
I’ve used bloodlines in the third sentence when I meant clans. Bloodlines are related to clans but slightly different.
The game sounds awesome though 🙂
In case I didn’t mention it, it’s an amazingly good setting lol. I spent much of late-teens to early-twenties gaming in it.
“I spent much of late-teens to early-twenties gaming in it.”
Aha, the target demographic. 😎
Indeed I was. It made a great success of picking up post-school age rgp-ers, as well as well as female gamers.
Most of the WoD games, old and new are awesome.
My longest running setting is my Vampire the Requiem game set in Manchester UK.
http://darkerdaysradio.blogspot.de/2010/06/vampire_6651.html (formatting is a bit fubar given these were posts recovered from my old blog on livejournal).
Also, for ultra creepy, Changeling the Lost is excellent. That one I wrote an entire fan ebook setting using Venice as the location.
Started VtM when it first came out in August, 1991. Didn’t stop until 1996 (Camarilla, Sabbat, Independents, you name it), and by then I was already deep into its companion games Werewolf the Apocalypse and especially Mage the Ascension. @redben is absolutely right, these games were epic back in the day. Vampire in particular played up the whole personal tragedy theme, letting you start with far more power than most RPGs do, but also saddling you with all these crushing weaknesses and the knowledge that . . . sooner or later, you’d “Fall to the Thirst.” This “you’re doomed from… Read more »
On Darker Days Radio, we did some rapid fire overviews of some of the games a while ago. Descriptions for three of the games can be found here http://podcast.darker-days.org/e/darker-days-radio-episode-29/
I’ll see about running us all a game of it some day Warren. One condition, you can’t play as a Malkavian. We’d be there until Gehenna if you were given free reign over a completely insane character.
A wise house rule. Malkavians were one of those ideas that was a lot better in principle than it played out on the table.
The Malkavian I played for a Dark Ages game was a French noble, who was a seer, and his madness was OCD where he wrote in his journal before sun rise. I actually kept a little journal for exactly that reason. And even I couldn’t read what I wrote half the time. A few diableries later (totally unplanned) he was in the Church of Caine, and had learnt how to cause madness either by the written word, or by music. Thus he had turned half an army by writing in blood a sigil on banner, and blowing a horn gifted… Read more »
I knew I’d get at least one reply along those lines. Doesn’t change the fact the most Malkavians were painful to rp with.
Yeah, Malkavians, or most attempts at playing “mad” characters are generally tainted by poor research by a player on mental illness.
I don’t know about anybody else but for me, 40k as a game has lost that x factor that made it fun, I just don’t enjoy playing it like I use too. I still enjoy the story etc though. but fantasy on the other hand I’m enjoying heaps at present and the end times is exciting, it has shaken things up a lot. looking forward to getting my hands on the second book specially since I play warriors of chaos, daemons and beastmen. The hordes of chaos have returned.
When I read Warhammer fluff – particularly the novels – I find it pushes me towards WFRP, Warhammer Quest or Mordenheim.. smaller, more personal games where anyone can be the protagonist – there is no cardboard cutout of a space marine with sign that reads “You must be this tall to matter”. I know there are some pretty epic events in the Warhammer universe e.g. Storm of Chaos but apart from the satisfaction of assembling and painting (hah!) a large army, I don’t find myself drawn to those larger battles.
The Warhammer Fantasy timeline is as rich as the Warhammer 40,000 one – if not more so, in my opinion anyway. While you think the Horus Heresy is the most epic storyline the time of Chaos where High Elves shut down the massive maelstrom and the following story to do with the High Elves and Dwarves is one of he defining and epic stories out there. Nevermind the fact that you have even bigger moments with the Nagash story that spans hundreds of years from his time as a young man to the battles against Sigmar that set him up… Read more »
“I think people give Warhammer Fantasy a rough ride because Forge World and Black Library seem to have this bent towards Horus Heresy. If these companies put as much love and attention into Warhammer then it would be loved just as much. If they’d carried on and done the ‘Warhammer Fantasy: Black Fire Pass’ people would be ALL over it” To be fair to Forge World they did put the same resources into Warhammer Forge as they did with Horus Heresy. Unfortunately HH just blew WF out of the water in terms of sales. I have no interest in HH… Read more »
Couldn’t agree more Ben, the WFB storylines are fantastic and nearly every major event has massive implications on a global scale compared to 40K were it doesn’t matter if a Nid fleet eats a world because there are billions of more worlds, while the spread of the chaos wastes means that towns and cities are lost forever.
Also the Tamurkhan book was simply stunning beyond words, and we can only imagine how Black Fire Pass would have turned out if not for GW running Rick out of town.
I found it interesting that Warren picks the Horus Heresy as the way in to 40K. It’s a part of the setting I love, but it’s actually pretty different to 40K, being both Greek tragedy epic quests and distopian futility of war. Whereas 40K is in a way actually more distinctive. It’s become a cliche now, but the mix of fantasy tropes and looks, with the crazy religious authoritarianism with the Star Wars frontier-esque technology may not have been entirely original when it was created, and it is in turn ripped off by others these days, but it’s still quite… Read more »
I believe the Horus heresy gives a very clear underpinning for 40K and why things are as they are.
I certainly understood 40K a hell of a lot more after reading some of the Horus heresy not to mention they are much more readable than a lot of the codices etc 🙂
Yeah, I understand. I just think it’s funny that for a setting with so much written about it the best way in is to read an alternative setting! Also funny how much opinions vary about the GW books. I think the quality varies a great deal. I hated some of the ones I read years ago as a teenager and only started reading GW fiction again because I wanted to know what they were doing with the 30K setting. And then I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed Horus Rising. From there though, it goes all over the… Read more »
Happy Sunday!
Sam and Redben nailed it down for me. The Gortrek and Felix books are some kind of adventurous travelers guid through the “Old World” as is the “The Enemy Within” RPG campaign. For me those are the possible starting points to get to know more about Warhammer Fantasy background. Great to see GW didn’t skip Fantasy.
Cheers Tuskar
I’d like to see those unpainted first.
I have loads of PlastCraft stuff, and the surface detail is nowhere near that. At least in their older models their idea of a wooden shack was that you paint in the planks. No embossing, no nothing, you want surface detail, you paint it in.
Don’t get me wrong, I like their stuff. But a little truth in advertising wouldn’t hurt.
List rant time (you deserve it for posting lists 😉 Games: – Betrayal at House on the Hill. You want your cliches thick and fast, from an age where an older doctor/professor and a crazy lady accompanying children of different ages to an abandoned house was ‘just a bit of fun’. If he was Irish he’d be able to say “You t’ree explore the ground floor, I’m taking this young boy upstairs!” (…see what I did there?). Most betrayal scenarios that I’ve played have ended up very tense/close. – Pandemic: Can we just call it Ebola? – Game of Life… Read more »
I love Troll hunter 🙂
Pushed all my buttons!
Ah I should have included Troll Hunter, love that film
The WFRP Books are the best place to get into Warhammer in my opinion.
I would love to see warhammer rejigged and restarted, a skirmish game and then a larger battle game (but then I’d like to see a more indepth skirmish game for 40k and a epic style game again)
Revealing my age…
In Starsky and Hutch, Hutch = David Soul. 70’s actor and “pop” artist. Thank god for the 80’s.
lol
We’ll I gotta admit Warren some of those movies are on my list. Surprised to not see a couple mentioned though –
5. Pet Cemetary
4. The Amiteville Horror
3. Salem’s Lot
2. The Excorcist
1. The Entity
Enough to scare the crap out of anyone ;0)
Happy Sunday guys!
Warren, is this the film you were thinking of? The Video Dead: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Video_Dead
By Jove man I think you have found it! lol
Well if I can find it I know what I’ll watch for Halloween 🙂
Rpg – Ravenloft – Call of Cthulhu – Aliens rpg – Lord of the Rings RPG mines of Moria, or the 2nd age during the rule of Morkoth – the original judge Dredd rpg – night of the were-wolves Video games – The Dead Space series (PS3) – Cold Fear (PS2) – Blood Omen – the legacy of Kain (PS1) – the evil dead series (PS2) – the first 3 of the Resident evil games Movies – the Halloween ( original) – the evil dead series inc the latest remake – both of The Thing movies – Friday the 13… Read more »
How about Re-Animater (an version of the strange case of Charles Dexter Ward) – the scene with the dead cat is great. The second film had a head with wings attached. too.
great xlbs guys, in thinking with WFB that they may re do the whole game and setting, either on another planet / plane of existence or on an apocalyptic aftermath setting of whats left in the old world.
Great movie choices some i had completely forgotten about gonna have to dig them out again and watch. 🙂
If you want a ton of horror check out Spanish cinema, massive fans of Lovecraft there as well giving us not only del Toro’s work but also films like REC (not to be confused with the shite american remake) Dagon, The Devil’s Backbone, Here comes the Devil and the awesome La Sombra Prohibida. Can’t believe CoC didn’t make the grade, everyone loves a bit of CoC! Finally easiest way to introduce someone to Vampire the Masquerade is to ask have they seen Underworld? If they answer yes then congratulations you pretty much know everything about the WoD vampire society you… Read more »
Oh! Dagon! I’ve been meaning to watch that for ages. I hear it is the.. er least awful of the movie adaptations.
Another to scare the crap out of Sam – The Amityville Horror (as it’s “allegedly” based on true events) 🙂
Yes I know the story behind that. It is based on true events in a way. There was an investigation carried out on the house, and the occupants did tell stories. The researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren carried out the investigation on the house and hired a horror fiction writer to write the account (as opposed to someone who writes journalistic reports). The writer said that many of the accounts were conflicting and he was encouraged by the Warrens to ignore inconsistencies and work it into a story. With good reason too, it’s the story that made them famous.
The Frighteners.
I missed getting a movie in ,but TRICK R TREAT has become one of our HALLOWEEN favorites these last few years . It’s four short stories tied to one,Warren will love it . It is classic American Halloween small town legend 70s feel, not to gory but maybe not good for little ones, or Sam
That’s one of the ones a friend of mine is intending to make me watch this month