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Robin Dwyer-Hickey
United States
Alexandria
Virginia
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(I originally posted this review on Infinity Games.)
The Old World Bestiary is a remarkable book quite unlike any other RPG bestiary you will have encountered. It presents a by-no-means comprehensive list of monsters of the Warhammer world, but it does so in such a rich and original way that the reader can overlook it's limited scope.
The book is divided into two sections - the first, and most interesting, is framed as a collection of accounts, rumours and myths about each monster taken from the inhabitants of the Old World themselves. These are intended to give objective views of the monsters and give us an idea of how they are perceived in Warhammer's unique setting.
This presentation allows monsters to remain cloaked in the ignorance, misconceptions and superstitions of each reporter. Most monsters are also given their own chance to describe themselves, which gives the GM an insight into their racial or social motivations, their character and beliefs about themselves. Given the bias of each account, though, these insights are more like clues to stimulate the GMs imagination. Areas are still left in shadow and perhaps that is for the best, since it allows us to incorporate the monsters into his own interpretation of the Old World as we see fit.
In a game like Dungeons & Dragons where the general object of a given encounter is tactical combat this first section would be interesting, but not entirely useful. In Warhammer, where atmosphere and social interaction is stressed, and where combat is fast, brutal and bloody, it is most suitable. Warhammer's very specific and individual setting demands a book like this, where nothing is as it seems and not every word can be trusted.
The second section of the book is reserved for the GM and lists the technical profiles of the monsters themselves, in alphabetical order. It's disappointing after the genius of the first section, but that's inevitable. It might have been more ergonomically pleasing if the two sections were combined, with monster stats immediately following the accounts about them.
The monsters are divided into groups in the first section, but alphabetised in the second section.
Actual game information about the monsters is brief - a few generic careers are listed and each monster is given a 'slaughter margin' indicative of how an averagely trained soldier might cope in a fight against them.
Where the WFRP system falls apart, however, (and this is no fault of this particular publication) is when dealing with some of the larger and mightier foes. WFRP is not an open-ended system like D&D and cracks show when a dragon or giant proves to be only slightly tougher than an Imperial Knight. Once you reach a certain level, there is no more room for granularity in the system. Adding more Wounds or Talents does not neccesarily make the threat more interesting, it just makes the combat either tedious or impossible. This, though, is a fault of the game system and given the fact that we play Warhammer mostly for its rich setting, simple mechanics and focus on 'normal' life, it is also forgiveable.
Information on daemons and the undead is sparse, but this is probably deliberate, since two excellent resources on these foes followed the publication of this bestiary - Tome of Corruption and Night's Dark Masters.
Overall I recommend this book - given the nature of WFRP, it is not as indispensable as D&D's Monster Manual, but it manages to justify it's existence by the genius of its conception.
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Old Scratch
United States
Unspecified
Unspecified
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Not quite unique.
This has been done before, such as the Bestiary for the Arcanum system with naturalists notes and the stats in the back and the Monsternomicon with notes at the beginning describing the monster from a subjective experience of the author.
The problem with this is that all the rumors and comments and quotes are nice to read, but they are remarkably ineffective for use in play. So with half the book being stuff intended to merely amuse the GM while reading the book, this product has some significant problems.
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Andy Leighton
England
Peterborough
Unspecified
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Old_Scratch wrote: Not quite unique.
This has been done before, such as the Bestiary for the Arcanum system with naturalists notes and the stats in the back and the Monsternomicon with notes at the beginning describing the monster from a subjective experience of the author.
The problem with this is that all the rumors and comments and quotes are nice to read, but they are remarkably ineffective for use in play. So with half the book being stuff intended to merely amuse the GM while reading the book, this product has some significant problems.
That rather depends. If the creatures are common then no it doesn't help much. But in the case of WFRP I can quite imagine that the tall tales and rumours about a creature can be used to great effect as part of the scenario leading the PCs to use the wrong weapons or the wrong tactics in fighting the beasts.
I don't know Arcanum but rumours, shadowy half-truths and outright misdirection is par for the course in the WFRP world.
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Old Scratch
United States
Unspecified
Unspecified
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andyl wrote: I don't know Arcanum but rumours, shadowy half-truths and outright misdirection is par for the course in the WFRP world.
If that's what they were. But it's more an excerise in writing than use in play. What you've actually got are long scripts, and nothing can kill a game quicker than opening out a book and reading two or three paragraphs out to the players.
Like I said, they're an excerise in entertaining the reader. The applied use of then in the actual game is very low for most of them. Over 60 pages of the book have little application. They're there to entertain. As a way to pad the book out and evoke a little bit of the Old World atmosphere to the reader, it is successful. As an actual game product, half of this book is relatively worthless. I mean, has anyone ever actually used "The Scholar's Eye" segments of the Unicorn entry?
Don't get me wrong, I gave this book a 7 or an 8, but it was in spite of the the first 70 pages which are relatively worthless within the context of actually playing the game.
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I'm not convinced that it's really fair to compare this to the Monster Manual, because the play styles catered to by WFRP are quite different to D&D. In particular - and especially since the classic Enemy Within campaign promoted and popularised the investigative elements in WFRP - going after monsters isn't a matter of randomly strolling into their lairs - or if you do end up doing that, you're at a disadvantage. Smart parties research the foes they are hunting before they set off to take a beastie down, and that's where the IC material in the book is really useful.
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Joel Daves
United States
Westminster
Colorado
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Old_Scratch wrote:
Don't get me wrong, I gave this book a 7 or an 8, but it was in spite of the the first 70 pages which are relatively worthless within the context of actually playing the game.
I'll have to join in on disagreeing with this. While it had it's Doomstones, "classic" WFRP was much more about story telling and character interaction than hack and slash. My first encounter with the game was very much like some of the better parts of The Enemy Within - while it had it's fights, most of it involved other aspects of role-playing, such as trying to figure out how to get past that army of Orcs besieging the city, because direct combat would only get you dead. That first game (and TEW) shaped how I've run and played in WFRP and many other games since then. And in those games, I'd rather have the first part of this book than the latter.
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