Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition

For eight years, the winds of magic have blown and held at bay the darkness that has crept ever closer to home. You and your party have faced everything that the World of Legend could throw at you and stood defiant.

And now, the time has come to take the fight to the forces of Chaos with a brand-new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The culmination of everything we have learned through almost a decade of grim and perilous adventures, these rules have been forged into the quintessential version of the game.

Join us as we run through just some of what you can expect to find in the new rulebook.

A Streamlined but Perilous Ruleset

We’ve taken a long look at how the game works at the table and made changes to ensure that gameplay flows as smoothly as possible. Our major design ethos for this edition was to build on the lessons of the past while eliminating any stumbling blocks we found. All Tests rely on their respective core mechanic, cutting down on complicated rolls, while remaining true to the flavour of their original forms.

This means that there’s a single set of core rules that players and Gamemasters can use across the game. The result is a system that can be picked up quickly and allows for faster, more fluid gameplay, without sacrificing any of the depth that makes Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay such a beloved system.

When making a Test, you roll against the number on your sheet, with difficulty and other modifiers applied to the resulting Success Level. Rather than first adjusting the number you need to roll, the calculation is handled after the roll, keeping the process consistent and making Tests faster to resolve.

A Better Toolkit for Gamemasters

This approach also means we have been able to expand the support we give to GMs, with a whole host of guidance, rules, and outcome tables for the scenarios you’ll encounter during play. Whether you're cheating at cards, honing the edge on your handcrafted axe, or coming down with a case of the Galloping Trots, the advice you need to apply the rules is right there!

We wanted to make sure that the scenarios you encounter all the time just work. For example, there’s now a more straightforward system for knocking out unsuspecting foes, making stealthy gameplay much cleaner.

The rules are designed to support roleplaying rather than replace it. We give you a framework for determining outcomes and consequences, but it’s flexible enough for every GM to add their own flavour.

Combat with Consequences

We’ve also made some changes to how combat runs. The World of Legend is a dangerous place, and we want its combat encounters to embody the frantic, heart-racing situations that are found within. To this end, armour can no longer save you from critical hits. You can't take any encounter too lightly, as an unlucky blow could see you bleeding from a nasty gash or left with a lingering injury.

Combat is much faster, with the new Momentum system capturing the push and pull of a desperate melee, adding a real bonus that's much easier to keep track of. Momentum grants you an Advantage on many Tests, and can be spent to power useful Talents and other abilities. There's very little bookkeeping — you either have Momentum, or you don't, it's that simple!

This makes the ebb and flow of combat easier to track while keeping fights unpredictable and dangerous.

Fate, Fortune, and the Price of Failure

Resilience and Resolve have also been removed. There is now only Fate and Fortune to help you out when things go badly, giving characters fewer resources to track while preserving those crucial opportunities to survive the dangers of adventuring.

Combined with the changes to critical hits and combat, this puts greater emphasis on the consequences of failure. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is a perilous game, where a bad decision, an unlucky roll, or picking the wrong fight can have serious consequences.

Characters and Careers

Character creation is still Career-focused, but we have reworked the process for both creating and advancing a character.

Species, Characteristics, Careers, Skills, Talents, and the other elements that define your character remain at the heart of character creation. Careers have also been reorganised alphabetically, making it easier to find a specific Career when creating or advancing a character.

For those who prefer to let fate decide, random character generation remains an important part of the process, with rewards for embracing the results of your character's Species, Career, and Characteristics.

Skills have been brought in line with the core ruleset, meaning less reliance on complicated mechanics while delivering the same distinctive flavour of outcome. Talents have seen changes too. They no longer simply add a modifier to a broad range of Tests; instead, they focus on doing something cool or interesting.

Built from Your Feedback

We have also taken some fan-favourite systems, such as those found in The Winds of Magic and Up in Arms supplements, and folded them into the game's core ruleset.

This brings more of the options and systems developed throughout fourth edition directly into the Core Rulebook, giving players and GMs more to work with from the outset without needing to look across multiple books.

Further to that, the new Rulebook also contains an updated, easier-to-use Bestiary, providing a broad range of creatures and enemies ready to bring the dangers of the Old World to the table.

The Next Chapter of a Forty-Year Story

While the new edition makes significant changes to the way the game plays, the foundations of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay remain familiar. If you know fourth edition, you already know much of what you need to sit down and play fifth edition. Fifth edition is also backwards compatible, so all of the adventures and supplements you already own work with it!

We refined the parts of the system that we felt could work better and brought more of the rules we loved together in one place. The result is a new edition that streamlines the experience without losing the depth, danger, and character that make Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay what it is.

We hope you enjoy this new era of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and can’t wait to share more of our upcoming books with you in the near future. Thank you to everyone who has taken this journey alongside us.

Oh, and most importantly of all…

There is still a small but vicious dog.