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Jaime Lawrence
Australia
Sydney
New South Wales
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Evil Bob: Lawful good since 2038!
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Here I sit, poised over my keyboard, coffee at the ready, preparing to unload my thoughts on Winds of Magic (and its companion volume, Liber Mutatis) at you, but I find myself strangely uninspired. This is through no fault of the product, but rather, because so much has already been said about this supplement that I feel like I’m lacking an angle. Casting my eyes through the book, I make it from one cover to the other without being struck by anything amazing. Dejectedly putting the book down, I see what sits beside it on the table and suddenly, my angle comes to me.
So how about this: Winds of Magic is exactly what you expect. Liber Mutatis, however, is a vital and game-changing supplement that ramps WFRP up a level.
WoM is a competent supplement; it gives flavour to the different schools of wizardry and introduces some deeper mysteries of magic that likely won’t ever be explored officially, all in the first two chapters. From there, it moves into ideas about why Wizards go adventuring and an examination of the other styles of magic in the Warhammer World. Ho-hum. The mechanics for all of this magical stuff is packed into the fifth chapter of the book and the final chapter discusses how to play a wizard.
Don’t misunderstand me, all of this is well handled and shows Fantasy Flight’s usual standard of production value, art and functionality, but there’s nothing here that I couldn’t have extrapolated from the core box set; at this point, I’m only buying WoM for the pieces that come with it.
Speaking of which, there are some cool bits. The location cards in this game continue to fascinate me, the extra basic cards mean that you can have two Wizards in the same doomed party and the spells are pretty funky too. It is a bit upsetting that the variety of spells is limited, but then again, it also reflects the flavour of the Warhammer World to have limited resources…
But enough about the extras, let’s get to the main event. Liber Mutatis is the first significant development in the backstory to Warhammer since the base set was released. The book details Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways and his cult, not only offering history and details about them, but giving a solid example of how to use them through a great adventure, The Winds of Change.
The book’s examination of Tzeentch is comprehensive and, pleasingly, works at many levels. It begins with Tzeentch’s history and interaction with the other Chaos Gods, but gets down to the nitty gritty of what a cultist does day-to-day and explanations of how the Weaver of All Fates can enact a plan over centuries, using even the smallest of pawns.
The book then moves into a discussion of corruption, why anyone would want it and how it works in game. Let’s face it, no-one really wants to turn into a murderous blob of random flesh, so why risk corruption? The answer is that it plays on the things that people want the most – power, respect, the satisfaction of desire – and it can do this for your PCs also. A little bit of corruption can give them a bunch of power and some will be excited to play the tortured soul, losing his battle against the influence of evil.
Tzeench’s Minions get a more detailed treatment than the other minions of chaos (previously seen in The Creature Guide), which is nice, but really just a lead-in to the adventure. Winds of Change is about a group of cultists and a demon who are trying to summon a group of chaos creatures into the Empire by kidnapping mages and using their essence to create Feathered Fiends. The setting and NPCs for the adventure are extremely well fleshed out and it is designed to scale well for parties of any level. More to the point, it shows how to use Chaos, or Tzeentch at least, in adventures beautifully.
Winds of Magic isn’t essential for every game of WFRP, but it adds a tremendous amount to the game in terms of fleshing out for the villains, options for the players and inspiration for the GM. It scores 8 feathered fiends out of 10.
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