WFRP Questionnaire II

Back in issue 19, we asked you for your thoughts on Warpstone. Many thanks for all those who took the time to respond. It is much appreciated. Particular thanks to Peter Rutkowski for his detailed and lengthy comments. Apologies for the time it has taken to publish the replies. Although the feedback is a now a little out of date, it has proved very useful.

The winner of the prize draw is Thomas Larue and he will receive a Warpstone subscription.

If you have any comments on the points below, then please let us know or visit the Critical Hit forums (where there have been some related topics previously).

We learnt the following from your replies;

Most having reading Warpstone since issue 3 or 10.

Most of you began playing WFRP over 10 years ago, but there are a few new players out there.

Scores for the various parts of Warpstone were good - almost all being 3 to 5 (out of 5). Scores seem to show that we are generally doing a good job.

Strong opinion for less fantasy and more background.

No scenario or article stood out as the best or worst, with the votes widely spread. Often same scenarios appeared in both. Just to show you really can’t tell what people will like.

Critical Hit was by far the most popular website. There were a few mentions for Strike-To-Stun and Garrett Lepper’s site.

Some Quotes (Editor comments in italics)

One thing that would improve Warpstone

Greater variety of writers. This is something we always welcome. Certainly over the last couple of issues I think we have managed to do this.

Get away from traditional fantasy

Presentation of NPCs which can be used freely with one or pages of background and scenario ideas. We dropped doing NPCs after the last questionnaire showed they were unpopular. Doesn’t seem to be that much call for a return.

Improving Warpstone? The more of 'normal' social behaviour and culture there is, the better WFRP in its current WS-influenced state of existence gets. It’s not just “Let’s go up the mountain and, kill a dragon and his 20,000 Orc allies and get the treasure". Admittedly, WS has very little of that but the Dawikni are such a step back as is the "Early Empire" if used as a setting for WFRP. In-between d20 Swashbuckler, Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade etc. there's enough room and many aspects of our world to explore and use to effect in WFRP.

One thing we should stop

Missing deadlines We try our best. Really.

Letting Tim Eccles do the reviews

Interviews These are so few and far between that I think we continue to do so where important.

One article that we should write in Warpstone

Random book Excerpts for libraries as handouts.

Smiths and weapons

“Book of lairs” style encounters. I.e. An encounter for each monster in book.

Guide to the Moot Not planned. Le Grimoire are doing this as their next release.

General Comments

I've been to the Warpstone website, and I think that there should be more updates and 'stuff', for lack of a better word, posted there. I feel that once you've read the articles and material that is on that site, and there are some useful things there, there is no other reason to visit the site apart from checking if there's been an update, which is quite rare, so just posting an article or whatever once a month would be nice.

P.S. Please, please, pretty puh-leaaaaase (Whine, Moan, Throw tantrum): Tell your authors - or edit it yourselves - to stop bringing in names with double vowels and soft consonants. Like "Hoover" instead of "Hofer". That's Dutch, so correspondingly the population of The Empire appears to be 90 percent Marienburg descendants. Remember harsh clipped way of speaking in gut-wrenching portrayals of Germanic militarists like the Indiana Jones-movies. Of course, the more sensible Black-Adder- or awlty-Towers-approach is preferable. One sourcebook no self-respecting WFRP group can be without is a German-English-dictionary (pocket at least). There is enough of our tongue-breaking vocabulary in there for everybody. This goes out to the WS readership (so to speak): "Go forth and give the latest Potty-Harry-novel a miss! Invest in Harper Collins! Or Chambers! Or thou shalt be roasted to linguistic death over a very small fire t Imperial Witchhunter-General Eitel Melchior Diede von Bodelschwingh-Tiefstetter."

Almost all [articles] are good. And to my personal taste, any article looking beyond game mechanics and background - lets call it the intellectual fabric holding WFRP together or exposing its contradictions - makes WS an immediately worthwhile read. (On themed issues: I wouldn’t mind seeing the odd discursive article and linked adventure, fiction and background material, but one ought to work from the ‘essay’ onwards). This of course makes me a mandatory Tim-Eccles-fan. But he always appears to fail on some major issue. See the sociological premise for Freikorps private armies, or take the Parle-Vous-Warhammer discussion, where one needed to state that “Old Worlder” is a nod to linguistically unchallenged game-play and to D&D ignorance. Simply dispense with it, Reikspiel becomes the national language (High German) and GMs just state characters without the appropriate language skill cannot understand foreigners and have a hard time (rolling against intelligence) to get what some odd provincial yokel blathers. Nevertheless, the fact that articles like Tim Eccles for example "To Fight, Or Not to Fight" by John Keane make you think.