A Grim World of Chocolatey Adventure

Heh. Glad my purchase brought a smile to your face Eric. As for me, I'm happy that after a year and a half of saying I was interested in the game, saying I was reading the 1st edition rulebook, encouraging you to run Enemy Within for the 10d6 crowd, playing Enemy Within with the 10d6 crowd and having lots of fun (including poor Heinrich's humiliating jig), saying how fun it was and asking you to run it again, saying the new edition of WFRP looked nice and I was interested in it, asking if you were planning on running it, saying that you should run it because it looked fun, mentioning that I liked fun and Warhammer was fun, stealing your dictionary and crossing out the definition for the word "fun" and handwriting in "see: WARHAMMER," and then returning it to your desk with the book open on the new definition for "fun," hiring a plane to skywrite "Warhammer Role Play Is Fun -- Signed Jon" above your house, altering my license plate to "WFRP4ME," legally changing my name to "Jonathan Kislev Funhammer," and mailing you a copy of the new rulebook with the developer's autograph in it, with the inscription, "Your friend Jon told me to tell you that this is pretty fun," that I have in fact apparently finally convinced you that I am willing and excited to play Warhammer Fantasy Role Play!

Hooray, and let the random character generation begin!

As for my copy, it smells like chocolate.

You know that smell Borders has? Not the urine spray in the bathrooms, but in the actual store where there's a faint, sweet smell? For whatever reason, this book is suffused with it. It's neither a good nor a bad smell, just there. I don't know what to make of it.

So far I've read the first hundred and six pages of the book and overall I'm very impressed. Some notes:

1. Very nice art and production values. My favorite touch is the border artwork depicting all manner of monsters, axes, skulls and violence in a style that I would describe as a combination of classic illuminated manuscripts and Sergio Aragones' margin drawings in Mad magazine. This is completely appropriate given the fusion of the old-world aesthetic and grim humor that seems to define the game.
2. Terrific writeups for the careers, skills, and talents. The writing and editing is generally very tight. Very few wasted sentences or filler, almost every line communicates detail about the world. I've read lots of RPG books, and few of them are this well-done.
3. The writeups for the races are short, but well-done. I especially like the foul-mouthed, pie-loving halflings. This is the first game I've ever wanted to play a halfling in.
4. Magic is great in this game. I haven't read all the rules yet, but basically being a practitioner of magic gives you great power, but starts you down a road of Faustian deal-making that in the end is likely to either get you warped by Chaos or nailed to a tree and burned by paranoid villagers. Good stuff.
5. Seems like a lot of complaints online have been about the Bestiary. Actually, I think it's fine for the purposes of this book.
6. OK, two minor downsides. Map of the Empire mostly useless because the binding obscures most of the map = boo. Character sheet not very well-designed, and also not available on-line = boo.
7. But that's it! Overall, lots of "yay's" and only the couple of "boo's." One of the better put-together books I have for sure. I really like the clarity of purpose in the books, and I appreciate the simplicity of the system.

Aaron, what do you think about getting a game together in the next couple of weeks? The intro adventure isn't a barnstormer, but it seems like a good way for me to learn the system, and it's also short enough that we could probably do it in one session. I'm sure I could get one or two of my roommates interested as well.

A Big Bucket of Sloppy Man-jam

I don't know if any of you read Ain't It Cool News with any regularity, but if you do you might find this Penny Arcade strip fairly amusing.