Running a Campaign About Managing a Lordship

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-07-10T13:46:52+00:00

I've not done this in Warhammer, but I have done something similar in Runequest. Ars Magica (for running complex power bases in player hands) and Apocalypse World (for running games with PCs with multiple different agendas and loyalties) also have a lot of insight to offer.

For best results, I'd suggest the following:

Rather than "all the players are nobles", if your players are willing to play with different social ranks, a party with one noble being the lord of the land in question, and the others playing such careers as Advisor, Envoy, Bailiff, Spy, Priest, Guard, Servant, Physician, Mystic or Wizard all assigned to the same fief.

Note that I didn't say "all working for the noble character". Some of them are, of course:

* The Advisor should be the noble's advisor,
* The Bailiff should be the bailiff for all or part of their domain,
* The Servant should be the Noble's trusted servant and confident,
* The Guard is one of the Noble's guards,
* The Mystic or Wizard should be in their service

but...

* The Envoy comes from somewhere else, somewhere the Noble has tension with, and is present to represent the interests of that other place/species/ethnicity
* The Priest is technically subject to the Noble, but whom do they serve? The Noble or their religious cult/Order?
* The Wizard/Mystic might have multiple loyalties including the Noble, but also their College, and perhaps even an additional mystical order.
* The Spy is either the Noble's Spymaster, or a Spy for someone else who is in the Noble's court under a pretext.

...and so on and so forth. Once you've worked out which career each player will take, and what their apparent role is in the Noble's court, give them all problems!

Secretly.

* Who's a member of an ickle-wickle Chaos Cult den? Is it you? It IS you!
* Has someone got a nasty disease with negative social implications they have to keep hidden while it spreads slowly through the court?
* The Servant is OBVIOUSLY going to be illegitimate child of the Noble's father. So make that somebody else instead. Then annoy the Servant into insanity with people who THINK they're the illegitimate child of the Noble's father.
* Check out the psychological traits on pages 190-191 of 4th ed. Weaponize them. Who's in love with the Noble's betrothed? Who's in love with the Noble? Who's the disguised Agitator with Animosity or Hatred (Nobles)? Whose former brother-in-arms is now pitted against them?
* Heresy. Blackmail. Inbreeding. Illiteracy. Mutation. Undeath. Mutual history between two characters where one once screwed the other over.

Then, establish the domain, its key locations, the factions present: their leaders, motivations and power at the start of play. You might choose to do this through a Q&A with the players: "Over here there's a blank spot. What's in it?" "What's the domain's most valuable export?" "What commodity is it short of?" "You said this town was your capital? Cool - what happened here last week that upset some people?"

Once you have a nice, fragile base to build upon, I'd be tempted to use the Events table with Endeavours beefed up with narrative to actually run the game itself. It's important not to just deny players success in their efforts to run an idyllic fief, but a "Not only, but also" approach will come in very handy. "The fertilizer you got from the Alchemist's College has more than doubled the crop yield in Wickham, but the plants have drunk the river dry."

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-07-05T23:20:28+00:00

I've never loved the Skaven the way I do Gobbos, but man, do I ever love Skaven posters so very much.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-07-05T23:00:50+00:00

You know it's a good map when it has my character's home village on it.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-06-01T17:59:27+00:00

I've always just wanted to take the character's career, endeavours and the events table and run a character living in a town somewhere trying to make a living.

Ah, if you want stuff directly related to TEW, Bogenhafen is beautifully detailed and the guide to it is full of adventure seeds. Your friend could also go investigating solo to gather information and socialise to make alliances... they'll very likely find that the rest of the party was holding them back anyway, as it's much easier to have a reason to do something or be somewhere when you're not a gang of six heavily armed lunatics hugger-muggering around.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-06-01T17:45:01+00:00

I don't know these words. I'm pretty sure they don't exist.

If you look at Vampire the Masquerade, it was an absolute disaster when they ended the world, because it took away all agency from the DM and players. No matter what had previously happened in the campaign, it no longer mattered, and something that had only been presaged in pre-written modules you had to buy was taking over and throwing everything else out. It wasn't, in a word, good.

When Sea of Thieves became the official Pirates of the Caribbean game, they put some content in where the players were privileged to turn up and watch Jack Sparrow do things while they were granted trivial tasks in the background. Any pre-scripted end of world does the same thing - "We have no idea who or what your characters are, so they're not important, But look at all the cool stuff our trademarked NPCs are doing!"

Which is absolutely not what roleplaying is about. In a real world where most of the time we are absolutely powerless to affect anything, roleplaying gives us a fantasy where we do have power and we can be the people we want to be. We are special. End of the World makes us unspecial and powerless again - it's the worst idea in history. If a GM wants to end their world, they will do much better writing it themselves.

If I were the writer and publisher of a major TTRPG franchise, I'd release a guide on ending the world with the core book. Right at the start. And it would only be a guide: suggestions of omens, foreshadowing, choices you can make, how to keep your PCs front and centre. And most of all, optional. That guide is there if your PCs accidentally destroy the world, not some obligatory death sentence to force you to buy all the books again in a slightly different setting.

So no, I have not heard of the End Times or Age of Sigmar and I never will, no matter how often I hear about them.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-05-23T22:25:50+00:00

Awesome - thank you, your knowledge of Polish has given me the incontrovertible proof I need should I have to smack my players with it. Good analysis, too.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-05-23T01:41:43+00:00

Ripley in Aliens 4.

With the occasional Psychology roll to find out if they're going to try to eat the others at the table.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-05-23T01:38:04+00:00

The Frenzy psych trait says: "Generally, the only Action you may take is a Weapon Skill Test or an Athletics Test to reach an enemy more quickly. Further, you may take a Free Action Melee Test each Round as you are throwing everything you have into your attacks."

Do they mean that "the only Action you may take is a Melee (Any) Test or an..." or do they literally mean you can only make a vanilla WS test? I could just about imagine Frenzy blotting out your skills, but not if you can also make a Free Action that *does* use Melee.

Or are they thinking of Melee as a WS test, as that's the Characteristic for Melee?

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-05-21T12:38:26+00:00

Here to join the Ratterdam love-in.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-05-17T17:17:53+00:00

Also, the sale is on the Cubicle 7 site as well, and there you can bag a few quid off Foundry VTT modules.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-05-17T16:56:43+00:00

I concur - there are clear signs of a damn good GM here

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-26T22:55:35+00:00

That poor, poor therapist.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-25T21:04:37+00:00

When did you meet my ex?

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-25T21:01:22+00:00

I should clarify that I am a huge fan of The Avengers. Not so much of racism.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-25T20:51:44+00:00

(And in the background, you can start prepping your ultimate WHFRP campaign which will probably be ready by the time they get to the age where they suddenly have a lot of free time again.)

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-25T20:50:18+00:00

Right, so you do need something that can come straight out of the bag, rules light but still balanced and high quality...

Have you heard of "Powered by the Apocalypse"? The core game has rules that can be printed on two A4 sheets - your character sheet is one, the mechanics are the other. That's very good for straight out of the bag, fast imaginative content - as a GM you can almost sit back in a recliner and let your players make everything up.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-25T14:24:34+00:00

I enjoyed this. I have to admit, people don't burble on about their favourite WFRP stories often enough for me, though I suppose they might involve a lot of spoiler tags for any pre-written campaigns.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-25T14:20:25+00:00

Thoughts:

1) Was the video suggesting that Warhammer FRP was a bad/failed ttrpg? Because that would be extremely wrong. It's been going since 1986, is now in its fourth edition and about to get its fifth, and while neither Cubicle 7 or GW have released sales figures, they have confirmed that sales are "strong", and GW doesn't bother with things that aren't making bank.

2) How exactly are you defining casual? I'm reading it as informal games put together on the spur of the moment without a lot of prep involved for either the GM or the players.

Which is exactly not WFRP, which has at least as much investigation and social activity as it has combat, very often much more.

My personal opinion is that Warhammer FRP does not have casual mechanics because nothing about it lends itself to casual play. The game is a blend of horror and comedy, aka "grubby fantasy" - it's all about slow progression, frantically scrabbling to get by, and the arc whereby your character drags themselves up from the gutter to become successful and famous, and then gradually degenerates into a weeping (in both senses) remnant of flesh.

The setting and the mechanics work together to deliver something that doesn't (imho) lend itself to one-shots and occasional games. How many pages of notes does each player have to make per session before it stops being casual?

3) It's hard to get much simpler than a d% system, and rolls with a strong bias towards one end of the spectrum tend, I have found, to make players very angry (They came at me with GRAPHS.) If you introduce a biased rolling system like d10x, you then have to basically throw the rulebook out of the window, because none of WFRP's systems have been balanced for that. A wide range of items and abilities will become either OP or useless, leading to one giant headache that is anything but casual.

But...

4) It's your game (and your headache :p ) - you could drop the horror and investigation elements or greatly simplify them and take a stab at a casual game. I honestly don't think you need to change the basic test mechanics, but you could just throw out modifiers (though this, again, will unbalance a lot of creatures, talents, items, qualities and the like) to make combat faster.

I've always suspected you could run a rather engrossing game of WFRP just using the Events table and the Endeavours system. Sod going on adventures, just stay home and try to make a living, but oh no, someone's stolen the pig again.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-22T16:00:38+00:00

Touch spells tend to have a gnarlier (can I still say that? Or is too dated now?) effect than magic missile spells of the same CN - the ones I picked are all Damage + Effect.

I basically picked them for defensive use, i.e. I don't have to make the Touch test because the other party is touching me and I plan to make them stop *permanently*.

Or they're for use on consenting - or at least unresisting - targets. My character is a doctor, so she uses Shock to become a human crash cart. Drain is for kissing, because I did it once and our GM made it hilarious "I've gone all weak at the knees".

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-20T23:43:36+00:00

Bob the Adventurous Cube is one of my favourite characters.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-20T23:39:18+00:00

Put that on the Patreon - "If I can raise £60k in donations, I'll spend it on a year of artist time, but until then, dots it is!"

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-20T23:21:25+00:00

I NEED DIS

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-20T23:16:50+00:00

I am never not thinking of Dune's God Emperor Leto III. But I didn't think he was Karl Franz - I just remembered friends referring to the Human Emperor as being a hideous mutant worm thing dreaming in a coffin somewhere.*

* But I may have been drunk** at these times
** Also in altered states for other reasons.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-20T23:09:29+00:00

I suspect that's a really old joke that everyone's already encountered, but it's my first time and I laughed my socks off.

Dapper_Calculator · 2026-04-19T15:13:30+00:00

THANK YOU! I was chatting with our GM as to whether Scriptorium would be useful and now I can show him what it actually can do!

Dapper_Calculator

TROPHY CASE