Category: Games Workshop

Supplement Supplemental! (Cults, Forests, Creatures, Screens, and Catalogues)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, BRUGE, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams1 Comment

Time for another article where I give quick breakdowns of supplements I’ve looked at lately. This time, it’s mostly Basic Roleplaying-based, with supplements for RuneQuest, Pendragon, BRUGE, and Age of Vikings, but I also dip into the grim darkness of the far future to see what’s going on with Imperium Maledictum.

The Gods of Fire and Sky (RuneQuest)

This is the latest volume in the Cults of RuneQuest supplement series; this one covers the pantheon ruled over by the sun-emperor Yelm, whose members take in everything from abstract illumination through to humble cooking fires. Some of these deities have been alluded to in other volumes in the series; The Lightbringers, for instance, is defined in part by the constituent gods’ involvement in the Lightbringer’s Quest to bring Yelm back from the underworld after Orlanth, the lead Lightbringer, killed him in the mythic before-time and came to badly regret the consequences.

However, there is a very clear logic to why these deities have been put into this book: the pantheon as a whole represents a particular cultural outlook, rooted in Dara Happa and with outposts elsewhere, which offers a direct contrast to the outlook presented in books like The Lightbringers. Indeed, the Yelmian version of the narrative has a rather different emphasis, in which the divine justice doled out by Yelm is so potent that it reached out beyond the grave and caused his killers to die, recasting the Lightbringer’s Quest less as an epic journey and more as a penitential pilgrimage of Orlanth and his co-conspirators to apologise to Yelm for being bad, and for Orlanth to sacrifice himself to bring Yelm back.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Cubicle 7 Catchup)

On By ArthurIn Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Referee's Bookshelf, Starter Sets, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP3 Comments

Time for another entry in my occasional series profiling RPG supplements I’ve been looking over. This time around, I’m finally getting around to giving a good look at some Cubicle 7-published stuff that’s been sat on my to-read pile for a while.

Starter Set (Imperium Maledictum)

As they pretty much do as standard for all their games, Cubicle 7 have made a Starter Set for Imperium Maledictum – that’s their “Dark Heresy by other means and with a broader range of potential patrons than the Inquisition” Warhammer 40,000 RPG, not Wrath & Glory, the somewhat newer Warhammer 40,000 RPG system oriented towards somewhat higher-powered, faster-paced action. It’s fine! There’s some nicely-presented sample characters, there’s a reasonably detailed and involved scenario which allows you to dip into various different types of play, there’s some useful play aids, and there’s a nice rundown of a hive-city offering lots of detail for future adventure.

It does, however, prompt in my mind the question of “who are starter sets for?” Should an RPG starter set pitch itself in such a way that participants who have never played a single RPG before can pick it up and get firm, careful guidance in setting up and running their first games? Or should tabletop RPG publishers in the English-speaking world simply assume that because Dungeons & Dragons is so dominant in the marketplace, nobody is ever going to start playing with any other RPG system ever and so there’s no point making your starter set beginner-friendly, and you are better off writing for customers who are basically RPG-savvy but might not be familiar with your system in particular?

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Supplement Supplemental! (Lower Deck Larks and Paranoia Farces)

On By ArthurIn 2D20 System, Games Workshop, Modiphius Entertainment, Mongoose Publishing, Paranoia, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Star Trek Adventures, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

Time for another entry in my occasional series of mini-reviews on game supplements I have thoughts substantial enough to write about, but lean enough that I don’t want to dedicate a whole article to them. For this go-around, it’s sci-fi comedy time, with one supplement taking its parent game in a funnier direction and a couple of adventure releases for a classic comedy-based game.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide (Star Trek Adventures)

As the title implies, this hardcover supplement offers a range of material drawn from Lower Decks, the Star Trek animated sitcom which turned out to be far better than anyone dared expect. Obviously, the main thrust is all about running scenarios inspired by Lower Decks – funny examinations of the sillier foibles of the Star Trek setting, focused on lower-ranking characters. Hell, even the front cover is a parody of the (dreadful) cover art for the first edition Star Trek Adventures core rulebook. That joke, however, will become a little dated now that the 2nd Edition core book has come out with much better cover art. So too will some of the system concepts in this need a little amendment, due to the shift in the system away from using D6s for some rolls.

Nonetheless, this book can work for both editions rather well. With character species being built on essentially the same scale between the editions, for instance, you can use the new character options here in either edition more or less as-is, and whilst some of them are a bit niche, others could absolutely be used with a more serious spin. Heck, even the niche ones can have their uses – there’s rules for Cetacean characters, for instance, which admittedly may have limited use in most scenarios but does open up the scope for unusual away team missions to water worlds where the players play their main characters whilst aboard ship and play a Cetacean away team exploring the ocean depths.

That’s kind of the genius of this book – you can absolutely use it for the sort of comedic tone Lower Decks goes for, but a lot of the ideas in it can also be used for more serious Star Trek scenarios, something which is possibly largely because Lower Decks pulls off a clever trick of laughing along with Star Trek but also taking it somewhat seriously at the same time. For instance, the concept of a “second contact” visit to a world which has previously experienced first contact but is now expecting the Federation to follow through on its initial promises can absolutely be played straight, and the refereeing advice here also includes a breakdown of major Star Trek tropes and how Lower Decks uses those to derive comedy, but at the same time the recurring tropes are also a rich source of ideas for more straight-down-the-line missions.

With baseline Star Trek Adventures already providing scope for throwing in lower-ranking supporting characters mid-mission (something turned on its head here with the guidance for throwing in higher-ranking supervising characters for much the same purpose), a supplement expanding on that is decidedly worthwhile – Lower Decks provides the perfect excuse to do that, and to offer a glimpse of the state of play in the galaxy after Voyager wraps up but comfortably before Picard season 1 fucks everything up.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Lands of RuneQuest, Horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, and Typos of Warhammer)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Scenarios, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP6 Comments

Time for another entry in my occasional series covering RPG supplements I want to comment on but don’t fancy doing a fully-developed article on individually. This time around, I’ve got some Call of Cthulhu scenarios, some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay releases that recently slipped out in hard copy, and the RuneQuest supplement Chaosium has been building towards releasing since they put out their new edition of the game.

Lands of RuneQuest: Dragon Pass (RuneQuest)

As the title implies, this is the first entry in the new Lands of RuneQuest series. Just as the Cults of RuneQuest sequence offers the full-detail breakdown of each of the various pantheons of the setting, these Lands of RuneQuest books are gazetteers offering a deep dive on various regions of Glorantha I’m not sure how many of these we are going to get – by contrast, Cults of RuneQuest has a fairly well-established plan set out for it – but it does make a certain sense of think of the two series as linked, because after all the original groundbreaking Cults of Prax supplement was a travelogue as much as it was an overview of the local sects.

Dragon Pass being the first region to get the Lands of RuneQuest is something of a no-brainer; you get beginner-friendly descriptions of it in the current core rules and the Starter Set, the adventures bundled with the referee screen and in The Smoking Ruin and The Pegasus Plateau are all set there, and with the release of the Lightbringers, Earth Goddesses, and Lunar Way volumes of Cults of RuneQuest the major sects of the region have been covered, so it’s by far the best-supported locale when it comes to officially released material by Chaosium themselves. (The Jonstown Compendium scheme for putting out fan-developed supplements has done a fine job of widening the scope of this edition, but only people quite deep into it can really be expected to dip into there that much.)

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Supplement Supplemental! (Lunar Pantheons, Cult Zines, and PDFs In Print)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Free League, Games Workshop, Mörk Borg, Mongoose Publishing, Ockult Örtmästare Games, Paranoia, Periodicals, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Scenarios, Stockholm Kartell, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP3 Comments

It’s time for another entry in my occasional series where I compile a clutch of brief supplement reviews. This time around, we’re going to continue our journey through the Cults of RuneQuest series and look at a series of different ways publishers have also compiled shorter texts into larger wholes.

Cults of RuneQuest: The Lunar Way (RuneQuest)

The Lunar Empire is one of the major cultures of RuneQuest – and, in many campaigns, will tend to be the lead antagonists. This is in part because the major cultural conflict in Dragon Pass – one of the first areas of Glorantha to be detailed, going back even before the original release of RuneQuest to the old White Bear and Red Moon boardgame, which was the product that Greg Stafford originally founded Chaosium to publish and was the first glimpse of Glorantha the public ever saw.

That boardgame, in fact, was all about the conflict in the Hero Wars between the forces of the Lunar Empire and their Sartarite foes under Argrath. and in effect that basic story has resonated throughout RuneQuest ever since. The latest edition has followed the lead of the first two in presenting Dragon Pass as the first area of Glorantha it introduces you to, both in its core materials and the Starter Set, and the fact that there’s this easily-understood conflict there between tribal barbarian groups resisting an encroaching empire probably contributes to this.

The Lunar Empire is so called because it ultimately serves the Red Goddess, who dwells on the Red Moon that hovers stationary in the sky above the centre of the Empire; the Red Emperor himself is part of the pantheon led by the Red Goddess. Back in the mythic era, before the Great Compromise of Time was made, there used to be a Lunar deity, but she did not survive the wars of the gods and so for its first few ages of conventional time Glorantha had no Moon to speak of. Then the Seven Mothers – Heroquesters who have now achieved apotheosis – enabled the ascent of the Red Goddess, returning the Lunar concept to creation. Yet by doing so, they necessarily dabbled in Chaos, the medium through which thing which missed out on inclusion in Creation can creep their way in…

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Supplement Supplemental! (Lustria’s Secrets, God’s Teeth, and Arkham’s Almanac)

On By ArthurIn Arc Dream Publishing, Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Delta Green, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP20 Comments

It’s been a while, but I’m back here with another round-up of game supplements I read recently. This time around I’m looking at thick books touching on difficult subject matter. Two of these are guides to fictional places which riff on places in the real world but have crucial differences; one of these gets very, very real indeed.

Lustria (WFRP)

As the title suggests, this is a thick supplement describing the continent of Lustria – the Warhammer Fantasy world’s equivalent of South America. (North America is Naggaroth – a brutal place colonised by the cruel, sadistic Dark Elves.) Whilst the Empire is a fantasy funhouse mirror version of the Holy Roman Empire, Bretonnia is the France equivalent, Albion is Britain and so on and so forth, the course of the colonisation of Lustria has taken a very different course in this setting – for Lustria was the stronghold of the Old Ones, the failure of whose science led to the contamination of the Warhammer world with Chaos, and much of it remains firmly in the hands of the lizard people, led by the enigmatic frog-wizards, the Slann.

That said, the lizardfolk have an aesthetic inspired by Pre-Columbian cultures like the Aztecs, Inca, and so on. This gives rise to some headaches; it means that whilst several European cultures get represented in the setting with distinct, fully-developed human societies, an entire continent’s worth of people kind of get erased and replaced with non-human caricatures. That it’s a colonised population suffering this indignity kind of makes it worse.

To be fair to Cubicle 7, this is not a problem of their own making – it’s Games Workshop’s setting, and whilst they have been admirably happy to let WFRP hit its own tone distinct from the wargames in this edition, they’re hardly going to let Cubicle 7’s team outright redesign an entire continent to address this issue. Equally, though, they didn’t have to grasp this nettle; just like they’ve largely skirted around the flavourful but, in retrospect, extremely dodgy issue of Chaos Dwarves, they could have kept Lustria firmly out of the spotlight, said “there’s all manner of rumour about what’s out there but the fact is it’s out of the scope of the RPG and your PCs will never find out for sure”, and leave it at that.

Instead, they’ve made the creative decision to open up the RPG somewhat to exploring other regions of the setting – the Salzenmund and Sea of Claws supplements providing avenues to get Empire-based characters off on seafaring adventures to other lands – and so this means they have to tackle Lustria and flesh out both the lizardfolk and the various attempts to colonise the region.

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Supplement Supplemental! (Gloranthan Mythology, the Romano-British Mythos Horror, a Far Future Bestiary, and an Old World Miscellanea)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Golden Goblin Press, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP, Wrath & Glory1 Comment

Time to do some housekeeping again with my regular series of articles in which I pass brief comments on RPG supplements I have something to say about, but not enough to say to fill an entire article.

Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology (RuneQuest)

Last time I did one of these articles I covered the first clutch of volumes issued Cults of RuneQuest, the massive multi-volume collection of RuneQuest cult information for the current version of the game. Most of the volumes in this series concentrate on providing deep dives on the deities and cults of a specific pantheon, but there’s two exceptions. In the previous article I wrote about one of these – the Prosopaedia, a sort of system-free master index of gods and heroes.

This is the other “general” volume – a deep dive into the overarching mythologies of Glorantha, the monomyth which keeps cropping up in the different pantheons, and the deep history and ancient cosmology of the word. It opens with a Foreword by the late Greg Stafford himself (whose work underpins much of the Cults of RuneQuest series), and simply by reading those few pages I felt I understood Greg’s take on mythology and how it fits into Glorantha and how you can make an interesting RuneQuest story out of it much better than I did previously.

The rest of the book does not disappoint. Whilst some readers may prefer a “bottom up” approach – tackling the mass of Cults of RuneQuest by beginning with one pantheon or another and concentrating on the specifics of the cults – this offers a complementary “top down” look at the legends of the setting, and in doing so can both help you get the best out of the pantheon-specific volumes and get a better handle on the underlying ethos of Greg Stafford’s creation.

Some of the features here may seem idiosyncratic – in particular the set of mythic maps, showing the world of Glorantha at different stages of the God Time that preceded conventional time. However, part of the whole schtick of Heroquesting in the setting is embodying, re-enacting, and to a certain extent enacting mythic tales that took place in that time – and so knowing what the lie of the land was like at a particular phase of the God Time can be massively helpful when it comes to cooking up Heroquest-themed scenarios for high-level play.

Other features are just plain useful. There’s a generic breakdown of the template that all of the individual cult entries in Cults of RuneQuest use which is mighty useful, but at the same time too long to be sensibly reprinted in all the volumes. If I’m remembering correctly, at one point the plan was for Cults of RuneQuest to be a pair of two big, fat, super-chunky books – much like the Guide to Glorantha – but that was shelved in favour of the larger number of smaller volumes that the collection is now intended to span. My hunch is that had the “two big books” plan been gone with, this volume would have been the introductory material put front and centre, and I certainly think the rest of the Cults of RuneQuest volumes are significantly enhanced if you have this to hand.

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Imperium Maledictum: A Broader Darkness, a Greater Heresy

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams9 Comments

Cubicle 7’s Imperium Maledictum RPG – their latest game in the Warhammer 40,000 universe – has been available for a good while in PDF, its core book and referee screen pack has emerged in hard copy, and I’ve had a chance to play around with it a bit. Back when it was announced I predicted, based on a close reading of Cubicle 7’s announcements, that it would essentially amount to a third edition of Dark Heresy, with the scope of the game expanded from “You are a rag-tag bunch of agents working for an Inquisitor” to “You are a rag-tag bunch of agents working for a powerful patron, who could be an Inquisitor but other options are available”.

On that front, Imperium Maledictum delivers – it’s the clear system descendant of the Fantasy Flight Game-era Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, and it has a focus on comparatively low-powered characters carrying out missions of a potentially clandestine nature such as covert investigations. As promised by Cubicle 7, PCs are agents of powerful patrons; in fact, patron creation is the start of the character creation process. Which Imperial faction your patron works for, which other factions they are on good or bad terms with, their personal quirks, and the resources they have available to them can all have an effect on play, and all of these will tend to be shaped somewhat by the nature of the patron in question – so working for an Inquisitor will feel different to working for a Rogue Trader.

The factions available include the Administratum (the Imperial bureaucrasy), the Astra Telepathica (the psyker-hunters), the Adeptus Mechanicus (tech-priests), the Ecclesiarchy (the clergy), the Imperial Guard, the Imperial Navy, the Inquisition, and Rogue Trader dynasties; you can also work for an “Infractionist”, which is the “you work for an organised crime boss or the leader of a trade guild, not for the government” option. To my eyes, this means that right out of the gate the game has good support for not just covering the same sort of territory as baseline Dark Heresy, but also the sort of “you work for the Ecclesiarchy”/”you work for the Adeptus Mechanicus” concept that supplements like The Lathe Worlds and Blood of Martyrs pointed the way towards, as well as some flavours of Only War game (such as one focusing on investigations on behalf of the Commisariat or similar rather than high-octane front-line action).

It’s less well-suited to the lower-powered flavour of Black Crusade game, since out of the book it supports PCs from the criminal underworld but not outright heretic PCs – that feels like the sort of thing which perhaps could go into an appendix in a Chaos-themed supplement, mind. At the same time, it wouldn’t be completely unviable to homebrew a “cult leader” patron type based off the patron examples here to nudge the game in that direction. Although you can work for a Rogue Trader dynasty in this, the action isn’t likely to be much like Rogue Trader, which casts the PCs as the commander and bridge crew of a Rogue Trader ship – the PCs are more like an “away team” dealing with missions which can’t be handled from the bridge of the ship.

Imperium Maledictum does not even pretend to support something like Deathwatch (and thus also can’t handle the Chaos Space Marine tier of Black Crusade); you can’t make a Space Marine character, there’s no Space Marine patrons. This makes sense – fundamentally, that’s the sort of power level which Wrath & Glory handles better anyway, and it was evident from their revised version of that game’s core rules that Cubicle 7 recognised that, refocusing the game around its strength and pruning away subsystems which weren’t working and, in some instances, didn’t really reflect the sort of play Wrath & Glory is best at.

With Wrath & Glory catering to higher-level play, the “why can’t I play an Inquisitor?” feedback which led to the creation of the Ascension supplement for Dark Heresy (and, later, the somewhat higher power scale of Dark Heresy 2nd Edition) is neutralised – it’s much more viable to simply play an Inquisitor in that. This frees up Imperium Maledictum to more overtly and clearly embrace the playstyle which Dark Heresy 1st Edition was going for, but which on its original release didn’t entirely match what some wanted from a Warhammer 40,000 RPG – namely, a grubby, low-powered, leverage-every-advantage WFRP-in-space deal.

If you’re buying into that sort of thing, you’re probably one to let the dice land as they may – so random generation of your patron, your character, and a swathe of other things besides is available. Not mandatory – but there’s XP incentives for letting the dice decide rather than making your own picks from the options, which can help push past decision paralysis in character generation. The useful booklet with the referee screen (which, thankfully, is in the correct orientation – with the individual panels in landscape orientation, rather than the portrait orientation Fantasy Flight incorrectly insisted on using) offers even more handy tables for quick inspiration.

Taking all that into account, if you were hoping that Imperium Maledictum was essentially going to be Dark Heresy 3rd Edition, you got what you wanted here – and you got a toolset allowing you to undertake a somewhat broader variety of campaign concepts than that, albeit at the same power level. It’s certainly a better tool for the sort of gritty, street-level investigative campaign Dark Heresy excelled at than Wrath & Glory is, and since that’s the sort of thing which interests me more than higher-powered games in the 40K setting it has edged out Dark Heresy itself as my favourite Warhammer 40,000 tabletop RPG.

Supplement Supplemental! (A WFRP Grimoire, a Cthulhu Railroad On Ice, and a RuneQuest Encyclopedia)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Scenarios, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, WFRP9 Comments

It’s time for another Supplement Supplemental article – part of my ongoing series where I put reviews of supplements where my thoughts aren’t sufficient for a standalone article, but where I do have something to say about the books in question. This time around I have a significant rules update and magic resource for WFRP, a chunky Call of Cthulhu campaign, and the first volumes in a major new series of RuneQuest resources.

Winds of Magic (WFRP)

Winds of Magic is Cubicle 7’s magic-themed supplement for WFRP 4th Edition. There’s a tweaked magic system in here, adjusted to address longstanding complaints like the issues with Channelling in the baseline rules, much as the combat-focused Up In Arms supplement provided a revised combat system; one suspects that if Cubicle 7 get around to doing a WFRP 5th Edition/4.5 Edition/whatever, we will eventually see those tweaked systems folded into the core rules.

However, just as Up In Arms offered a host of additional material based on combat and combat-adjacent matters, Winds of Magic also offers a wealth of additional stuff under the broad umbrella of magic. Unlike Up In Arms, it has some significant previous supplements to model itself on – because a good chunk of this is dedicated to providing detailed breakdowns of the eight Winds of Magic, and their associated Colleges within the Empire that study them, much as was provided in 1st and 2nd Edition with the Realms of Sorcery supplements.

An approach, this cleaves somewhat closer to the 2nd edition Realms of Sorcery than 1st Edition, in terms of focusing on how magic is practiced in the Empire, rather than trying to cover a large range of non-Imperial magics above and beyond that. The arrangement of material differs somewhat – after providing general overviews of the history of magic and the colleges, the writeups of the individual colleges are provided along with the broader discussion of the Wind they are associated with (including the additional spells offered here), so each Wind-specific section covers everything specific to that Wind.

Between this and a wealth of NPCs, details on item creation, additional spells, magical locales, and other fun details, this is likely to be useful to most referees. As a result of excloring well-trod territory, there’s a fair amount here you’ll have seen in some variant before, but having versions system-adjusted to the new edition is handy, and the thought given to how the information is arranged means that this may be the best-organised version of “tentpole WFRP magic supplement” yet.

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From Salzenmund To the Sea of Claws

On By ArthurIn Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP4 Comments

With their revised take on The Enemy Within campaign finished, Cubicle 7 have been freed up to offer a wider range of brand-new material for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition. Just recently I received my hard copies of Salzenmund: City of Salt and Silver and Sea of Claws, two supplements which can each be used individually but have useful synergy – Salzenmund being a major port of the Empire, and the Sea of Claws being the sea you’ll sail directly into when you go downriver from Salzenmund.

Salzenmund: City of Salt and Silver

This supplement not only provides a look at the titular city, but also offers a broader guide to Nordland, the region of the Empire it’s located in, as well as some nice details on mining and smuggling within the Empire, brief but handy guidelines on creating Nordlander player characters, all sprinkled with scenario ideas, NPCs, factions, locations, and all sorts of other material either to spice up a brief visit to Nordland or to form the background of an entire Nordland-based campaign, most likely using Salzenmund as its main base.

The book specifically depicts the region as it exists after the Turmoil – which is the in-character term for the events of the Enemy Within campaign, particularly the climactic Empire In Ruins segment. The “canonical” end to Empire In Ruins involves a shift in the political geography of the Empire, conveniently explaining how the distribution of Electoral Counts and the like changes from the overview offered at the start of The Enemy Within to the situation as it was in later iterations of the setting.

This may bug some, depending on which version of the political map you prefer, but for the purposes of running a game based in Salzenmund it’s actually helpful, because it means that Nordland has its own Elector Count and is no longer under the thumb of Middenheim – a political development which obviously gives rise to lots of possible avenues for adventure in the region, with lots of scope for the PCs to side with one faction or another. If you really want to run it pre-Enemy Within, you could either ignore the stuff about the new Elector Count entirely or simply have the political shift happen through some other means.

On the whole, then, it’s another new city supplement, in the grand tradition established by supplements like the original Middenheim book and Marienburg: Sold Up the River, and which Cubicle 7 have kept alive in this edition of the game with material like their updated Middenheim: City of the White Wolf and their brand new Altdorf: Crown of the Empire supplement. Obviously, for it to stand out it really needs to offer something distinct from the others, and in this instance I think it does.

Naturally, it’s a potentially useful gateway to seafaring adventure, and so is potentially useful for anything using Sea of Claws; in that respect, it’s perhaps a more convenient port of call to begin such things, because Marienburg can also perform that function, Marienburg is an independent city-state off in the Wasteland, which is going to be a bit trickier for Imperial PCs (which most WFRP characters will be) to reach than a city in the Empire itself.

In addition, the political situation as the newly-elevated Elector Count Gausser seeks to cement his rule and drafts ambitious plans to strike out into the Wasteland is nice and spicy – different enough from that in Marienburg to give the city’s internal politics a very different feel, but connected enough that if you have Marienburg: Sold Down the River (or if Cubicle 7 opt to put out an updated version of the supplement) those two books could very happily enrich each other, making the pairing ideal for running a campaign based around the rivalry between the two cities.

Beyond this, the smuggling and mining aspects of the town are also potentially useful and could feed into more Empire-focused campaigns – you could have the PCs come to Salzenmund to pick up some goods to smuggle, or dispatch them from there to take goods to the rest of the Empire, whenever you want to transition between a Nordland-based scenario to something taking place elsewhere in the Empire.

In short, this is the sort of supplement which could potentially enrich any WFRP campaign, unless you simply have no interest in even briefly visiting the region – and it makes a good case for Nordland being worth a visit at that.

Sea of Claws

This is constructed as the big seafaring supplement for WFRP – despite the title, it’s got system stuff to cover sailing anywhere on the Old World’s seas, with rules for ocean-going vessels and journeys, expansions of the trade system from Death On the Reik, seafaring careers, maritime monsters, and whatnot. (We also get some details on the cults of Manann and Stromfels, the accepted and illicit gods of the seas.)

That said, the title is not a complete misnomer, because it also offers a guide to the coastal regions of the Old World bordering the Sea of Claws, giving a taste of what a party may encounter if they make a stopover on the coasts of Bretonnia, the Empire, Norsca, or the Wasteland. None of these offer especially deep dives – the Marienburg writeup is perhaps the longest, but even that’s only a few pages, and I suppose other supplements may be in the pipeline to offer deeper looks at some of those subjects. Nonetheless, it gives you a fairly extensive bench of locales to work into any seafaring voyage in the region.

Although wider in geographic scope than Salzenmund, Sea of Claws is perhaps narrower in utility; I can see a way in which a clear majority of WFRP games would be able to use Salzenmund in one respect or another, but you may find that Sea of Claws is of limited utility if you intend to run a campaign which stays firmly onland, though even then some of the coastal settlements described may be of use.

In particular, Sea of Claws seems to be a supplement that exists in part to provide a mechanism to help get characters to other areas of the Old World, which Cubicle 7 can then outline; a Lustria supplement is already out in PDF. This sails into dangerous waters. The Old World setting, set as it is in a fantasy funhouse mirror version of historical Earth with quasi-Europe getting by far the most attention and development and having been largely developed in the 1980s and 1990s, is the sort of setting where if you set your game in the Empire and its immediate environs you can at least gloss over some of the dodgier and more problematic bits of worldbuilding, whereas if you go roving around the globe you’re in the position of either rehashing material which hasn’t aged so well or needing to develop a whole new take on it.

I suppose this is the challenge which Cubicle 7 have set for themselves in trying to go for a more globe-trotting range of supplements for the line; once I get my hard copy of Lustria, I’ll take a looksee and think about whether they’ve succeeded or not.