10 Useful Things You Might Not Know About WFRP4e on Foundry VTT   

10 Useful Things You Might Not Know About WFRP4e on Foundry VTT

 

Hi everyone, I hope you've been enjoying the Foundry offerings thus far in terms of modules and systems. If one thing's certain, it is that Foundry is absolutely packed with features, and that's not even counting the thousands of modules available that add even more. However, today, I want to discuss some features specific to the WFRP4e system that many new users might overlook.

 

1. NPC / Creature Generation

 

One of the most time saving and powerful features of the system is the combination of NPC/Creature sheets and Career items. Player Characters use career items for guiding their progression, spending exp, etc. NPCs and Creatures however can use them to instantly generate stats, according to the career.

 

Here's a situation: One of the player characters has become diseased and has decided to visit the local doktor, and unfortunately you have no statistics to use in diagnosing the character. Well, let's start generating.

 

First, create a new NPC-type actor

 

Let's give the a real name, type /name in the chat window to generate a random human name. I got: Timo Kirchshalt.

 

Make sure to enter the species you want to use in the "Species" field. This sets the characteristics to their average values (as per player character creation). Once you have a species, you can then use the C, S, and buttons to randomize characteristics, add species skills, and add species talents respectively.

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Now let's think of a broad backstory in terms of a career-path. We'll say Dr. T started out his profession as a simple herbalist but later in life became more interested in the medicinal aspects of herbalism and uses it in his practice. So, Herb Gatherer -> Herbalist -> Physician's Apprentice -> Physician -> Doktor The Careers tab should look like this:

 

Now, all we have to do is simply check "Complete" and it will advance the characteristics, skills, and talents for that career to be considered "complete". Once finished, check out their stats!

 

You might find the list of Talents overwhelming, as it adds all of them in the career, so feel free to trim it down by clicking the trashcan on the right.

 

Lastly, upon completing a career, it sets their status accordingly, and if you want to give them some income money, simply click the coin button!

 

Creatures and Careers

So how do creatures work? They are a bit simpler. They still have the C, S and buttons, but you can simply drag and drop careers onto them and it will advance them accordingly.

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2. Module Content Updater

When you first activate an official WFRP4e module, it will prompt you with a dialog to "Initialize" the module. This means it takes the compendium content (in storage, unloaded) and imports it into your world content (actively being used, loaded on startup). However, when a module content is updated, such as fixing typos or stats, that update doesn't affect any content you've imported into your world. How do you get the updates?

 

In the past, you had to remove all the content from your world and "Reinitialize" through the Module Settings, which just imports all the content again.

 

  

Now, you can instead click "Update" as opposed to "Initialize" to open the module updater.


 

 

This window gives you options on what content you want to update, this is important because, as is clearly stated in the window, this process will remove any changes you've made to the documents being updated. There's also an extra option to "Exclude Name Changes." The idea behind this is that if you've taken an actor from a module as a baseline, and changed it completely for your own needs, you wouldn't want that to be updated, or rather, reverted back to its original form.

 

3. Dialog Modifier Sources

Needless to say, there's a lot of effects in the WFRP4e system, and they deserve their entirely own tutorial, but this tip may help you in grasping what they do. One type of effect automatically fills in the Roll Dialog based on contextual data: shooting a larger target, condition modifiers, range modifiers, or hundreds of different other things.

 So, you click on a skill to roll it, and the dialog is prefilled with a terrible malus to your roll, what's up with that? Well, simply hover over the modifier box and it will tell you the possible sources.

 

This may not seem terribly useful now, but when you start getting conditions, diseases, criticals, and other effects such as from spells, it can help you narrow down why the modifier is prefilled the way it is.

 

 

4. Actor Configuration

 

A question I often get asked is how do I change the size of a token? It keeps reverting! Well, by default, the size of a token is automatically determined by their Size trait (or lack thereof). You can disable this feature (and much more) in the actor configuration menu, found at the top of all Actor sheets.

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Here, you can turn off various auto calculations, change what hit location table the actor uses, and change how many "equip points" they have.

 

To explain equip points, it's essentially just how many hands they are considered to have. One handed weapons take 1 point, two handed weapons take 2. But, if one were to receive blessings from Chaos  suffer the terrible fate of gaining mutations, at least you can be more well-armed! Note: you can always turn off the equipped weapon limit entirely in the system settings.

 

5. Skill Advancement Modifications

Some talents in the game change how you can advance skills, in particular, Witch! and Craftsman make certain skills cheaper, and always advanceable. This is easily achievable by tinkering in the relevant skill's sheet. Open an owned skill's sheet by right clicking it in the skills tab, the last 2 fields are the relevant ones here.

 

Force Advancement Indicator: Check this to always have the Advancement Buttons active on the sheet, so you can spend XP on the skill easily.

 

XP Cost Modifier: Enter a number here, negative or positive, to alter the amount each advance costs for this skill.

 

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6. Journal Pin Zoom

 

Hereafter the tips are thankfully pretty quick and easy. If you have a big map full of Journal Pins such as Reikland, Altdorf, or Castle Wittgestein, you can zoom directly to locations of an open journal with the "Pin" header button.

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7. Morrslieb Rising

So Morrslieb has risen, but you didn't overlay the map you're using in green. Well, luckily, the system can do that for you! You can find the button in the Left Side Canvas Tools -> Lighting Controls (Light bulb) -> Morrslieb Toggle (Filled Circle)

 

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8.  Wear and Tear

 Weapons and Armour in WFRP4e can incur damage, either by the ineptitude of the wielder or skill of the adversary. To reflect damage to weapons or armour, simply right click their values in the Combat tab to damage them, and left click to repair.

 

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9. Divide and Conquer

 The inventory tab has some handy usability features: Splitting and aggregating. Right click on an item to split the quantity off into a new item, then click the "Qty" button to aggregate them.

 

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10. Non-encumbering Containers

This feature has multiple uses, such as dropping a sack, or leaving items in a room at the inn, or pulling a cart, sometimes you don't want a container to count its encumbrance onto the owning actor. Simply click on the "Enc" label to toggle this behavior.
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Hope this helps you in your games! Feel free to let me know (or maybe if I missed something!) on Discord: Moo Man#7518