40k has had tabletop RPGs to go alongside the wargame for quite some time. While not the first, Dark Heresy 1st Edition released by Black Industries in 2008 was the first of the more modern systems. Like one month later they lost the license to Fantasy Flight Games who put out more splats and more games, as well as a second edition of Dark Heresy in 2014. I loved these games. Each one was a very focused system on a certain type of adventure in the 40k universe with shared percentile dice roll-under mechanics. Dark Heresy was about working for the shadowy Inquisition as investigators, Death Watch was about being HUGE SPACE MARINES and fighting HUGE ALIENS, as well as the politics of inter-chapter co-operation. Black Crusade was about being vile heretics of all stripes and vying for the favor of your god, Rogue Trader was about being a billionaire pirate space merchant price and flying around unexplored areas to make yourself even richer, and Only War was about playing as the dogged men and woman of the Imperial Guard, forced to face down the worst threats in the galaxy with a lasgun and a prayer. The games were by no means perfect but each of the themed systems did a very good job at capturing what made each facet of the 40k universe interesting, and more importantly what made them interesting to play. Then in 2016, after Dark Heresy 2nd edition had only a small handful of splat books compared to the continued support of say Rogue Trader and Only War, Fantasy Flight announced they were ending their partnership with Games Workshop and therefore all future development on the 40k RPG line.
May it rest in peace
I was crushed by this. Dark Heresy 2nd edition, while by no means perfect, made a lot of improvements to the core systems. I was so so badly hoping for a Rogue Trader 2nd edition to be released, since Rogue Trader is such a unique concept but the system itself is badly dated and has so many things wrong with it I could make them a blogpost all on its own. I will not pretend to have all the facts here as to why it happened, there is much speculation that GW was not happy about FFG's Star Wars spaceship game being an indirect competitor for Battlefleet Gothic. I think we all knew this wasn't the end, because despite all their failings as a company GW is not just gonna let this pile of money fester out of their reach, but no one knew what was gonna happen next.
What happened next was Ulisses Spiele getting the 40k license and teasing their new game, Wrath and Glory. At first I was sort of excited. As much as I love the Fantasy Flight line the games themselves are very heavy on rules and after running them for so many years I was just weary of how long combat takes and how many little powers and things you have to account for. Perhaps a lighter system is just what 40k needed. Then it came out that this was a catch all single system that would allow you to play anything and everything. Imperial Guardsmen? Yup. Aliens? You bet! Space Marines? But of course! All side by side and in the same ruleset and book!
This was a massive red flag to me. 40k has some absolutely massive power disparity between the archetypes mentioned there. Space Marines are of positively mythic power, and although the specifics change based on whoever happens to be writing at the time it is generally agreed upon that one Space Marine is basically on a whole other level of power from all but the absolute strongest, most experienced and well equipped human. How could you possibly bridge that gap so that the Imperial Guard player doesn't feel utterly outclassed at all times in combat, and more importantly why would you want to? The same goes for all the other powerful things players can be. They touted a tier based system, where the different archetypes had a minimum tier they could be, but players could increase in tier as they "leveled up" so to speak. So theoretically an Imperial Guardsman and Space Marine in the same party would be on a mostly level playing field, with the Space Marine being closer to baseline and the Guardsman being a high level veteran. This sounds okay on paper, but an Imperial Guardsman and a Space Marine fighting together as equals kind of flies in the face of all established canon and sort of ruins what is interesting about both archetypes, in my humble but utterly worthless opinion.
Not willing to discount the game just yet, my online group got ahold of the playtest materials they released as part of free RPG day. I was very eager to give the system a try since I was desperate for a new 40k game and wanted to see if my fears had any basis in reality. Feel free to scroll down if you don't care to read my long winded hot take on the system.
There are serious spoilers for the playtest adventure inbound, so if you ever have a mind to play it (spoiler alert I seriously recommend you don't) stop reading now and scroll down to the all caps text.
Ulisses preview of the free RPG day materials
Keep in mind I am working largely from memory here so I may get small details wrong, feel free to let me know in the comments.
The playtest had all preset characters and no chargen rules. The options were very rag-tag, a Commissar, an Imperial Guardsmen, an Inquisition Interrogator, a Priest, a Sister of Battle and goddamn Space Marine of the White Scars chapter. I picked the Guardswoman because she seemed badass and the fighting men and women of the Imperial Guard have always been my favorite part of 40k. We ended up with all the characters on the adventure except the space marine, who we sort of collectively agreed was wildly out of place even among this group of misfits.
The adventure was not really very good. Don't get my wrong, we still had fun and Emperor bless our poor GM for trying to plug the holes and make it work, but the whole thing just reeked of being written by someone who had no idea about 40k and was not familiar with the setting at all.
The pitch was that the party was flying around with a Rogue Trader fighting chaos or some other bad stuff in the current canon date, which is roughly 200 years after the fall of Cadia and the galaxy is split asunder by a massive warp rift. Why is a Rogue Trader fighting a war? Why do they have this ragtag group of misfits on their ship, and why are these people working together? Possibly because of the tragic breakdown in chain of command, maybe the RT had a personal stake in the worlds being fought over, it is hardly the most unusual thing. The starting hook though is that this rag-tag party of Imperial servants is on the way to an Imperial Shrine world with a huge and well staffed hospital, to visit an Imperial general or something that had been wounded in the fighting.
This was a little jarring. 40k is not exactly known for its sentimentality, especially not the kind of characters the party was made out of, so the idea that a friggin Space Marine was just popping by to give this general some flowers and a get well soon card seemed a little silly.
The face of a woman on a special mission from the Inquisition to give you a box of chocolates and a hug after your appendix removal
I won't bore you with the details but the gist was that a doctor in the facility who was secretly a nurgle lad was engineering a zombie plague, and the local security force had been covering up/lying about these smaller outbreaks for no real discernible reason since I am pretty sure we conclusively determined they were not in on it, but also there was somehow no information leaks at all despite all the personnel involved in the coverup. Once you discover the plot you have to stop this guy before he busts a fat plague nut in the planet's watersupply that is behind a single hatch in a lightly guarded building. The dude has a ton of health since he has that nurgle juice in his veins and our GM added the space marine player character as a chaos space marine fighting alongside this dude in the final fight, which was a cool touch.
Enough about the story though because mechanically I had some issues with the system. The first was that it is staggeringly hard to die. It is similar to DnD in that when you hit 0 HP you are downed, and have to make death saves each round. The difference is that the roll is made with a d6. a 1 is two failures, a 2 or 3 is one failure. Anything else is a success and a 6 is a critical success, meaning you stand back up. The thing is, you only need a single success to stabilize but three failures to die. And to add to this, getting hit while you are downed just makes you roll again. This means that getting shot at while at 0 HP is just as likely to heal you as it is to hurt you, and brings up some bizarre implications such as the ability to toss a grenade into a group of downed allies and stabilize half of them, maybe even have one heal to 1hp. I am told that the full rules made it so that failing even one death save had some longer term consequences which is a good step, but as far as I know frag grenade first aid is still a risky but viable option.
The second thing I took issue with is the meta point economy. Wrath and Glory (two separate terms not the name of the game) are both types of meta currency players can use in the course of the game and one of them (I believe it is Wrath) is shared among all players, and you can shift extra successes into your Wrath pool if you get extra successes or 6s or something when making an attack. This led to a rather strange scenario in the final fight. As the Imperial Guardsman my lasgun couldn't really scratch the paint on the Space Marine, so as the fight went on we killed the evil doctor by bursting him down and had to contend with the large boy and a swarm of zombies. I was on zombie duty while the Commissar dueled the Marine with her power sword. The fight was close and she badly needed meta points to get an edge in the fight. This put me in a kind of silly position. I could have sprayed into the horde of zombies and killed most of them, but the "optimal play" was to open up full auto with as many shots as I could on a single zombie so that I could maximize my chances of getting some points for the Commissar to use.
I know this seems like a minor gripe and really it is, I have always been the kind of player to do what is cool rather than what is optimal, but this struck me as a point of bad design. In my opinion mechanics should serve the fiction, and should generally not make players do things that seem completely nonsensical in order to win, or in this case not let an entire planet die of the space plague. In spite of all this the battle was pretty climactic and cool, the Commissar saying a snappy one liner before mortally wounding the space marine and causing him to blow himself up with grenades.
My opinion on the rest of the (admittedly incomplete) playtest rules was just okay. Nothing stood out as terribly interesting and I really didn't like the reload system. Seemed like we had fun in spite of the rules rather than because of them, and as far as I was concerned my fears about a universal system making different types of characters very samey were confirmed. I also share the complaint many have expressed in that it just doesn't feel like a good fit for 40k thematically, too light and breezy, not grim or dark enough. Many will argue that is the direction 40k has been heading in general with the recent canon advancements, but that is a topic for another post I think as this one is already hilariously long winded
Please read my fanfiction its right here on this stick
END OF MY HOT TAKE AND ALSO MODULE SPOILERS
So that was that. I know a lot of people probably disagree with my take and I don't blame them, I didn't think the system was great but it also wasn't offensively bad. I just felt (and feel) that it was a bad fit for 40k and that's not really something you can quantify but I can see why people would disagree. I will say for its part combat did run faster than the FF line of games and it is probably easier for a newbie to come to grips with the rules.
Eventually the main rulebook came out. I seem to recall some people being upset with slow distribution making obtaining a physical copy a huge pain in the ass, and I still see people say that the core book has some serious issues with poor organization and editing.
And then....well a whole lot of nothing. Radio silence. Ulisses had made some lofty promises about support in the way of splatbooks expanding options for various player characters and races, but after the core launch WanG's fans were left waiting with not a damn word about where these books were or even any info on their development at all. Nearly a year in fact. Fans were hoping for some news at the recent Warhammer Fest, but while Cubicle 7 was showing off stuff on their Warhammer Fantasy 4th edition RPG Ulisses was nowhere to be seen. This was pretty shitty. I didn't terribly like the system but I know lots of people do and many were feeling kinda cheated.
Friendship ended with Ulisses Spiele now Cubicle 7 is my best friend
Then we got the recent announcement, Ulisses is now assisting in transferring the game to Cubicle 7, who promises to do an overhaul of the core rules as well as deliver on all the supplements Ulisses has promised. I am particularly curious what this means for people who have already shelled out a considerable sum of money for the complete current rules and materials. It has to sting to have paid for a hard copy of the core rules only to have the company go silent for a year and then another company declare they are releasing a revised version. It would be simple enough for Cubicle7 to give free revised PDFs to anyone who bought the main book but another matter entirely to give them hard prints of the new one, and I seriously doubt that would ever happen. As far as I can tell current buyers are stuck with what they have and are likely feeling swindled by this bait and switch, and it is hard to blame them. No one seems to know why the change happened as of yet, but most suspect it has to do with the spotty quality of the core rules and issues with its production and distribution. Perhaps more information will come out down the line.
But where does that leave us now? Hopefully in a pretty good place. During the whole span of complete radio silence on Wrath and Glory products I was sort of hoping against hope that the whole thing might get scrapped and started anew simply because I am not a huge fan of the core mechanics. Selfish I know, but it is what it is. However Cubicle7 at the wheel is an interesting turn of events. I am personally a very big fan of what they have done with Warhammer Fantasy 4th edition, being a huge fan of the 2nd edition of the same game. I have my doubts that the game will turn into something I personally enjoy since they are keeping the core mechanics the same but I think they can do the setting and lore much more justice than Ulisses has so far, simply because their treatment of Warhammer Fantasy's Old World setting has been quite good. My greatest hope is that we get some very robust Rouge Trader and Imperial Guard themed splatbooks that I can steal for use in my own games, but at this point only time will tell.
The future of 40k Tabletop RPGs is a little uncertain, but I think it is in good hands. I hope all the current WanG fans out there get what they want out of it but I also hope, again selfishly, that the revisions turn the game into something I personally would enjoy. I am sure I have missed details and got 1001 things wrong so feel free to let me know your own opinions and any facts I missed or misinterpreted. Thanks for reading this massive wall of text.
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