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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition

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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition


  • EDITORS NOTE: Welcome current, future, and prospective players! I'll be attempting to flesh out this wiki for the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game. This will be specifically for the second edition of the game.

Please feel free to contribute as if I do this myself, it will take quite ( a lot) of time.

I'm still deciding how I want to split this wiki up and not just dump a ton of information up front so, changes to formatting may be a bit jarring in these early stages.*

Resources for Gameplay

The complete series of books for this edition of WHRPG are openly available with a quick search with your preferred search engine, so I won't really use this space to detail every rule. I wish to give an overview so you can see how the game would be played, some cheat sheets, FAQ, and clarifications that tripped me up when playing. I welcome and even urge you to contribute to the FAQ section (coming soon!) as well. The more of us on this, the better it is for everyone.

Below are some resources of tools, mapping software, downloads and character generators:

Rules Books to download

Character/NPC Generator

For Story Purposes, Provides Worldbuilding Information


So I'm still new to the way Roll20 works, but as I understand, the use of macro's wouldn't really be needed while using the character sheets provided here. When the game is created by the GM, he or she will be given a choice what character sheet templates to use. Despite the slightly poor ability to get a good plain text export of the sheet for printing, the advanced character sheet created by Axel Mellgren,makes short work of any macro's that I can tell. All rolls can be done from the character's sheet provided by Axel Mellgren take care of the rolling, as long as you fill out the sheet properly. As far as I can tell, the macros needed to roll the specific scores and attributes are accurate and all work. You may wish to create customs of course, but so far I haven't the need. I have yet to use to "Simple" character sheet version, but it appears as though it has the same functionality, but presented on a more simple page that looks to be more printer friendly.

How the Dice Mechanics Work

A thing to note about dice in WHFRPG, is that the system uses a "percentile" based system. Don't worry, put the calculators away and wipe up the sweat. It's easy stuff, and when you're using the rolling system provided by, it makes it even simpler than it would be if you were playing offline. Here's how it works:

Your character will have a list of traits, or stats. These are things like Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, Strength, Intelligence etc. Theses stats or "characteristics" as the game officially calls them, are rolled up during your character creation process. Now I'll explain more about this later, but for now, Let's assume you have a character with a Weapon Skill of 30. The way dice work in this systems is that you roll d10's. Sometimes, you will be asked to generate a number between 1 and l0. To do this, simply roll one die and read the result. When you roll this way, try to roll as high as possible (unless stated otherwise)

The other type of dice roll in WHFRPG is called a percentile roll. A percentile roll uses two d1O to create a number between 1 and 100. Now you *may* be tempted to say that you can just roll a 1d100 and be done with it. But no, do not do this. There are many times and situations where you literally need both numbers separated. We'll come to those situations later, but for now... just roll the 2d10, and the chatroom roller will add them together for you anyway.

TL;DR - Roll 1d10 for simple things, and 2d10 for things like attack,and skill checks, xd10's for spell casting (it's up to the pc how many to use)

The Playable Races

The character creation process starts with an important question: What race do you want to play? In Warhmnmer Fantasy Roleplay, you can choose from four: Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Human. Each race has different strengths and weaknesses. An overview of each race is below. The bonuses, and abilities of each I'll lay out in the later section.Once you've read these over, pick the race that appeals to you most. Then you’ll be ready to move on to the next step, generating Characteristics.


Dwarfs are a short but burly and resilient race of warriors and craftsmen. Most live under the mountains in mighty holds, with mines extending deep beneath the earth. They are immediately recognizable and short-tempered and they are legendary for their ability to hold a grudge However, Dwarfs are a courageous people and undeniably loyal to their friends and allies. They are struggling to preserve the remnants of their mountain kingdom from Orcs, Goblins, and other foul creatures. Dwarfs have strong ties to the Humans of the Empire and many are now a part of Imperial society.


Elves are a lithe and graceful race easily recognized by their pointed ears and hawkish features. They have a glorious yet tragic history and are renowned for their archery, learning, and wizardry. Elves have an innate understanding of the ways and currents of nature, particularly the forest and the sea. They despise those that destroy the purity of nature, be they proud Humans, greedy Dwarfs, or evil Ores. V/hile they can be aloof, they have sacrificed more of themselves for the good of the world than the other races can ever know.


Halflings are a small but dexterous race who look like Human children to the untrained eye. The fact that they cannot grow beards only reinforces this impression. Although they tend to be pot-bellied, since they eat twice as often as any other race, they are capable of great stealth. When combined with their well known skill with the sling, Halflings can prove to be surprisingly stubborn opponents. They are, however, largely a peaceful people, content to farm, eat, and smoke pipe weed. They are proud of their families and all Halflings can recite their family lineage back ten generations or more.


Humans are the most common race in the Old World and the founders of the Empire. While they are neither as tough as Dwarfs not as wise as Elves, Humans are a vibrant and energetic race that has achieved much in a short time. They are tremendously adaptable, which is both a great strength and a serious weakness. ‘Whilst many heroic Humans have fought against the tide of darkness, it is an uncomfortable truth that they also provide the lion’s share of the hordes of Chaos.

Character Stats

Your PC is defined by Characteristics, which represent your character’s raw ability in a variety of physical and mental areas. These are broken into two groups, the Main Profile and the Secondary Profile. The Characteristics in the Main Profile are rated on a scale of O-100, with higher scores being better. The characteristics in the Secondary Profile are usually rated on a scale of 1-1O and again higher scores are better. Here's a sample of what your character's profile may look like:


If you all are familiar with D&D and most any other roleplaying game, these stats should be moderately familiar, but provide a slightly bit more granularity in my opinion, than the D&D stats.

Main Profile Stats

Weapon Skill (WS) - This is your characters innate skill with a melee weapon. Doesn't specify strength, but just overall how handy you are in close combat.

Ballistic Skill (BS) - This is your character's innate skill with a ranged weapon. Like Weapon skill, it's how good, and skilled you are at the art of long ranged weapon handling.

Strength (S) Your characters overall strength and physical ability to move things, and brawniness.

Toughness (T) Represents your characters ability to withstand a blow, take a hit, resist poison, not faint from blood loss etc.

Agility (Ag) Represents your characters ability to move quickly, reflexes, dexterity, and reaction to events.

Intelligence (Int) Represents your character's intellect, ability to reason, power of deduction and knowledge of the world around him/her.

Will Power(WP) Your mental toughness, resolve, determination, and ability to withstand mental stress.

Fellowship (Fel) Represents your charm, leadership, personal charisma, and social acumen.

Secondary Profile Stats

Attacks (A) This is your character's ability to strike and how often those strikes land. This is the maximum number of attacks you can make in a round.

Wounds (W) This is your character's general vitality, and "HP". How much damage you can take before falling.

Strength Bonus (SB) This is your character's ability to inflict damage and wounds to a target. Derived from your character's Strength.

Toughness Bonus (TB) Derived from your character's toughness. Used to resist damage from outside attack.

Movement (M) Your speed to move across land. Mainly used for combat scenarios.

Magic (Mag) Represents your character's magical power. This is rare trait to acquire and is generally dependent on your career and training.

Insanity Points (IP) Represents your character's state of mind. The more points you acquire here, the more your character loses his sanity and can be influenced by...darker forces.

Fate Points (FP) Fate is your luck, and "destiny". Can be used to avoid some pretty awful things like...death.

Generating Character Stats

So, your starting Characteristics are heavily influenced by your characters race. To generate the Characteristics of your character’s Main Profile,you’ll need two 10-sided dice. Or..if you're using Roll20's chatroom, you need that button that you click that says 2d10 :P The Main Profile stats are 2d10, + whatever racial bonus you get. The different rolls that you need per stat are given on the table 2-1, that I've included below. Match the Stat with the race that you chose and look at the modifier. For example To roll your Strength, if you were an Elf, you would roll 2d10 and add 20.

Most of the secondary profile stats are derived from your prior rolls, and table numbers and racial traits. Here's how you determine each:

Attacks The base number of attacks that you get is always 1. This can be modified with the choice of a career that adds to this value.

Wounds (W) You would roll 1d10 for this and then consult the table 2-2, "Starting Wounds". I've included it below for reference. Wounds are basically the "Hit Points" that your character has.

Strength Bonus (SB) This number is the first digit of your Strength Stat from your Main Profile. (Hopefully it's atleast higher than 19 then!)

Toughness Bonus (TB) This number is the first digit of your Toughness stat from the Main Profile.

Movement(M) These are given to from your race. As before the table is below.

Magic (Mag) Everyone starts with 0 but your career will determine your bonus. (surprisingly Elves don't have an innate magical ability)

Insanity Points (IP) Starts at 0 (thankfully!! Though starting out with an insane character would be fun...hmm)

Fate Points (FP) To generate this, roll 1d10 and consult the table 2-3 which I have put below.



Don't forget! If you don't like the way one of your stats came out, you can invoke the rule of Shallya's Mercy and go for the base stat of your race + 11 instead!


So aside from your main and secondary profile stats that you generated, your race also comes with some abilities that you get. It gives each race a unique flavor from each other. As the list is a bit long, I will not be posting each of the races starting Skills and Talents here, but note that the are on page 19. Also as a GM atleast for myself, I would recommend the idea of letting players have a bit of freedom with these starting abilities. Look at it this way, a Dwarf raised in one part of the world is going to have different language, and skills than a Dwarf who grew in a different area. Everything comes into play in the skills we develop and learn, even things like climate, terrain, political views, etc.. So I figure if the player character can justify it with a backstory, then allow them to maybe swap a skill or talent out for one more suited to the origin of their character.

What are these alleged racial traits? Well, your character gets two types. Skills and Talents. Skills are things learned. Either by being born into a certain race, or learned by developing the skill due to a career, or just a skill that you cultivated due to your environment. Skills are split into Common Skills and Advanced Skills. Common or basic skills are things that any 'ol fool can attempt (at a -30% penalty) even if he doesn't have that particular skill. They represent things that you can try valiantly even if you're untrained in the art. Then there are Advanced Skills, where they actually require your knowledge and training to perform. For these, you must actually have bought or have a class or race that has that skill. Advanced skills literally can not be attempted without them. Some of these I have problems with, and as a GM you should feel empowered to switch some around if you feel an advanced skill should be considered common. Below is a list of the basic and advanced skills from the Core Book.

    • Note that if you are using the Advanced Mount rules located in the Advanced Mounted Rules section, there is 1 more advanced skill, available called "Attack with Steed". This is defined in the Advanced Mounted Rules section.



The other set of bonus you receive is something called a Talent. Talents are different from skills in that they really aren't something that you test for, it's more of some ability that you naturally possess. For example, if you choose an Elf as a starting race, you automatically get the "Excellent Vision" talent, as well as "Night Vision". If you picked a human, you get to choose your talents! Goes to show how versatile humans can be. Talents can give you some really interesting abilities and a very good way to carve out the uniqueness of your character. The same rules apply as for talents. You get a few depending on your race/career, and then from there you can buy them for 100 XP each. Talents though don't stack, so there is no "talent mastery". Though as a GM, you can change this. Some talents, lend themselves to the idea of being able to 'master' and perhaps gain an additional bonus, or extra attack. Here's a list of Talents from the Core Book:


Leveling Up aka "Advancing" Your Character

So if you're familiar with the sort of "gold standard" of RPG's Dungeons and Dragons, then the mechanics of increasing level and stat points have set the way for many many carbon copies. This is something is changed up in WHFRPG. There actually are not real levels in the game per see. The experience systems works in a very free form way, and it actually took a few read throughs to 'get it'. It basically amounts to this... The GM is given discretion to hand out XP as he see's fit. But as a scale characters can 'spend it' 100XP at a time to increase certain stats, or buy skills, or enter new career paths etc... See the table below for the list of how to use garnered (and hopefully well earned!) experience points:


As shown above, the PC's can choose how to spend their gained experience points. Generally GM's should let their PC's spend it hamper free, but things like career changing may require additional requirements such as actually having access to the training required, or tutelage of studying under someone to learn the art. To not get in the way too much of gameplay I wouldn't put *too* much into this though, as it may deter players from actually trying to advance.

A brief look at each option... For 100 XP you can take a +5% to a main characteristic stat. Now you can't just choose any stat you want. It has to have one that has option to increase. It will depend on your career which ones are available to increase. An example below is from the Baliff Career:


So for example, the Baliff here, after obtaining some XP can choose to spend 100 of it to add +5% to his WS, BS, S, Int, WP, or Fel. That five% advance though may only be applied to one of those, he can not choose to put the 5% increase in T or Ag. Likewise, notice that the WS,BS,S,WP have a +5% while Int and Fel have a +10%. This means that those can advanced twice, at 5% at a time (and for another 100 XP of course!) Like the other stats, you can only do this in 5% increments. So if you wanted to max out your Fel, you would first spend 100XP for the first 5% on Fel, then later on, another 100XP for the final +5% in Fel.

As the 3-1 Advancing chart above shows, you could also spend 100 XP on adding a +1 to your secondary stats. The same rule applies, you can only buy the +1 advance to stats that have a +x number. So you can't add a +1 to Mag if your a baliff.

In addition to these, you can also use your XP to switch or "upgrade" to a new career. Of course you must first meet the entry requirements of that career as well.


There are a ton of weapons in the Old World, and due to the nature of the grim and perilous world, anything can be used as a type of way to defend yourself. Weapons are broken up into types, or 'how' they are used, such as snaring, defensive, slow, piercing, impact, unreliable...etc. Each one of these qualities has an affect on the attack,damage, speed, safety of using it. Armor has a similar role and gives you the ability to use "basic" armor rules, and "Advanced Armor" rules. The basic armor rules are simple and good if you're starting out, especially since you'll probably be light on armor anyway. Basically if you're using the Basic Armor rules, the following applies:

No Armor: +0 Armor Points Light Armor: +1 Armor Point Medium Armor: +3 Armor Points Heavy Armor: +5 Armor Points

This goes a long way to simplifying the the more advanced armor system. That being said, the advanced armor system is really fun to use, and if you find yourself in a game where combat isn't constant, and you have some time to give, I'd really suggest running with the Advanced rules. Further down is combat rules, which will expand upon this, but basically for attacking and assigning damage, characters have six locations that can be hit. Head, right arm, left arm, body, left and right legs. So instead of having a generic +3 with Medium Armor, if you use the advanced rules, you're head may have a +1, cause you have a light cap, but maybe your torso has a +3 because you are wearing poor quality chainmail.

Combat, Damage, and Armor

Ohh boy, here we go. This will be as concise as I can make it. Again the pdf books for 2nd edition are available so for a full understanding you'll want to refer to them. Let's break this down into steps.

Making an Attack To start an attack on an opponent, you must use an attack action:

  • All Out Attack
  • Charge Attack
  • Guarded Attack
  • Standard Attack
  • Swift Attack

To attack an opponent in close combat, you need to be within 5 feet, and for ranged attacks, you need to be within the weapon's range and line of sight. With these requisites, you can proceed with the attack.

1. Roll to Hit Roll 2d10 for percentile dice. Refer to your Weapon Skill characteristic for melee attacks and your Ballistic Skill for ranged attacks. Remember you need to roll equal to less than the characteristic.

2. Determine Location of Blow Now that you scored a hit (or not) determine where your blow struck. Take the attack roll, and reverse the order of the dice roll. So if you rolled a 37, then your hit location would be 73. then check the chart here:


2 1/2 Dodge or Parry Attempts This step is an inbetween stage that represents an optional attempt to beat back an attack of melee. This can not be used when taking an attack from a ranged weapon. You can attempt to parry the attack if you entered the parry half action stance at the beginning of your turn, OR if you are brandishing two hand weapons. If you make a successful WS test, you have succesfully fought off the attack, and no damage is dealt. Likewise if you have the Dodge advanced skill, you can make a Dodge skill test at this time and if you succeed, the attack did not hit you and you are in the clear!

3. Roll Damage Now that you have the location of where your blow strikes, roll 1d10 and add the damage for the specific weapon you're using. As seen in the Core Rule book and Equipment and Arms of the Old World, most melee weapons have damage of your Strength Bonus with a modifer, +1d10. For example look below at the chart for melee weapon damage. In the damage column for a Great Weapon, the damage is equal to your Strength Bonus, and you would add the 1d10 roll to this. Likewise the damage for a dagger is your Strength Bonus with a -3 modifier. Then you add the 1d10 roll to that. In general Melee weapons use your Strength Bonus while Ranged weapons have a fixed value for damage, of course exceptions apply, such as with javelins, throwing axes, and whips etc. Meleeweapondamage.jpeg

4. Opponent Reduces Given Damage Now that you have the total damage that you can potentially deal, that total is reduced by the Armor Points and Toughness Bonus that the Opponent has. So to use the example from the Core book: Given a Ballistic Skill of 42%, if you shoot a goblin and get a 25%, the attack succeeds. You reverse the order of the dice, and the 25 becomes a 52%. Looking at the hit location table, this means it hits the goblin on it's left arm. Now roll damage. The bow you're using has a base damage of 3. Roll 1d10, and let's say you get an 8. 8+3= 11. The goblin being targeted has a toughness bonus (TB) of 2, but has no armor that protects it's arms. So 11-2 = 9 Wounds it takes. Good shot!

5. Record Damage If you suffer any damage despite your toughness and armor, it is reduced from your Wounds total. Same goes for whoever you're attacking. The balance of the damage dealt, from the person's Toughness Bonus and Armor for that body part, will reduce his/her Wounds total. If you or your opponents reach 0 or below wounds, all subsequent attacks are considered critical hits. More about Wounds/Critical Hits/Healing/Damage in the next section.

Combat Rounds


When not embroiled in heated combat, in general time and actions don't really need to tracked. Usually using actions, skills and moving isn't really needed to be tracked in normal roleplaying timing. But when combat started, things need to slow down, and be tracked and managed. As each player and opponent gets a turn, you can perform certain actions in these turns. Very similar to Dungeons and Dragons. Some actions require a full round of focusing just on that action, but some actions can be done quickly with much less time. Actions that require the 1 full round, mean that you can only perform that one single action and nothing else. These are called Full Round Actions. Actions that can be done in half of this time, are called (get this...) Half Round Actions. This means that you can perform two Half round actions in one of your turns. I won't go into each action, but the ones that will be used most often are most common. These include:

All Out Attack (Full Round Action)

Aim/Standard Attack (Two Half Actions)

Parry/Standard Attack (Two Half Actions)

Ready/Cast (Two Half Actions)

Channeling/Cast (Channeling is a special action for magic users. See the section on Magic for more on this.)

Use a Skill/Talent (Full Round if trained. Half Round if talent boosted or have skill mastery for it. Extended Rounds if the character is not trained in it.)

The amount of time required for the skill is directly proportional to the ease and mastery of the skill. Generally most skills should take a full round action if the character has that skill. If the character has a talent that increases his ability for the skill, or has skill mastery on that skill, they the GM should consider reducing the time to a half action to perform.

Free Action The third type of action. They, as the name implies, cost no time to use. So this is on par with perhaps, yelling an order to a party member, or kicking something out of the way, drawing your sword at your hip, etc. There is no formal list if free actions and should be up to the Game Masters discretion.

Again, those are just a few of the actions. The full list is in the Core Rule Book.

Special Combat

There are a few combat scenarios that require some special rules, including fighting with two weapons, ranged attacks, unarmed combat, and grappling. These tricky situations pose some adjustments to the normal rules of combat. Let's take a look.

Two Weapon Fighting

Brandishing two weapons is a skill that has it's advantages and disadvantages. The following applies to duel weapons.

Characters must use one of the following weapon types in their primary hand. Dagger, Flail, Foil, Hand Weapon, Morning Star, or Rapier.

In the secondary hand you can have a Buckler, Dagger, Hand Weapon, Main Gauche, Shield, or Sword-breaker.

Now, a character can use either hand to make an attack, and any attacks made with the subsequent hand will suffer a -20% Weapon Skill penalty. Also as a bonus, you can choose to parry an incoming attack as a free action. This is opposed to having to make a parry stance as a half action.

Mounted Combat

In the Core rule book, combat involving a mount isn't really expanded on and just has the general extra rules:

Basic Mounted Combat

  • Anyone attacking a mount and rider can choose which one he wants to allocate damage to.
  • When measure distance, use the mount's speed/agility
  • To ride a mount, you need a saddle/harness and a Ride skill test. Without the Ride Skill, it's a -10% to -20%.

Just to give you an idea of the stats of some of the mounts available:

Destriers.png Destrier2.png

So basically if you're mounted, you would use the mounts Movement (M). Now that basically covers mounted combat. There's not much here, so let's check out a sort of expanded version the rules for mounted combat.

Advanced Mounted Combat

The following rules are not official, but customized rules that seem to work rather well.

1.While mounted, the rider and the mount serve as 1 unit. To resolve hit locations during combat, use Table below:


2. For combat purposes, there are two main categories of mounts: Common Mounts and War-Trained Mounts. See below for a description of each.

Common Mounts

Common steeds include the usual sorts of beasts that people ride for mundane purposes. If you are using these Advanced rules, ALL Common Mounts, now have the Skittish trait.

Skittish: Whenever this creature takes damage, it must immediately attempt a Will Power Test. On a failure, the creature immediately moves at its movement rate away from the source of its injury. At the start of each of its turns, the creature is entitled to a new Will Power Test to calm down. Each turn it gains a +10% on this Will Power Test. On a success the mount calms down, and can be brought back under your control. On a failure, it must use its action to continue fleeing.

War-Trained Mounts

War-trained steeds include destriers,light war horses and other similar creatures used specifically for combat. Generally War-trained mounts are more intelligent and have an actual amount of Attacks in their profile. Notice below how this Elven steed has 1 attack. It is a war-trained mount.


3. Mounted Bonus: While mounted, you gain a +10% bonus on all Weapon Skill tests made to attack creatures on foot. If you have the Ride skill you gain a +20% to the Weapon Skill test instead.

4. Unmounted Penalty: Using a Lance, or weapon specifically designed for mounted combat assumes you are using the weapon on horseback. When used on foot, the lance loses all weapon qualities, requires two hands, and puts the bearer at -30% WS when attacking.

5. Ranged Penalty: While mounted, you take a –20% penalty on all Ballistic Skill tests when using a two-handed missile weapon.

6. Expanded Actions: A couple of new available actions are available. See below for the new actions available when mounted:

New Actions

Calm Mount (Full Action): When mounted on a creature with the Skittish Trait, you may substitute a Ride test for the creature’s Will Power test.

Urge Mount (Half Action): You may urge your steed to move up to twice its Movement Characteristic. The movement must be then made immediately.

Mounted Charge (Full Action): This works the same as the Charge Attack action in the Core Rules, except the bonus against opponents on foot is cumulative with the bonus for charging. So the mounted charger, would receive +30% to his/her WS for the attack.

Trample (Full Action): When mounted on a war-trained steed, you can trample your opponents into the ground. Your mount moves up to twice its Movement Characteristics and can move through enemy creatures. For each creature through which you move, you may test Ride. On a successful test, the enemy takes damage equal to 1d10 plus your steed’s Strength Bonus. Each additional target after the first imposes a –10% penalty on your Ride test. Opponents may Dodge this attack, but they may not parry it.

7. New Skills: When using the Advanced Mounted rules, one new skill becomes available.

New Skills

Attack with Steed:

Type: Advanced

Characteristic: Agility

During combat this is a Full Action; while mounted on a war-trained steed, you may combine your attack with that of your mount. If you hit, your attack deals additional damage equal to your mount’s Strength Bonus.


Instead of inflicting damage, a character can attempt to grapple and immobilize an opponent. A character can attempt a grapple with either a charge attack or a standard attack. This is resolved as follows. First, the character must hit with an unarmed attack, then (if successful) the opponent must take an Agility Test. If he fails, he is grappled. Both characters are incapable of dodging or parrying for the duration of the grapple, and any outside melee attacks against them gain a +20% Weapon Skill bonus. The only action a grappled character can attempt is to break the grapple (a full action). This is an Opposed Strength Test. If the grappled character wins, he breaks free. Otherwise, the grapple is maintained. On the grappling character's turn, he can take a full action to simply maintain the grapple (this requires no roll) or he can attempt to damage his opponent, which requires an Opposed Strength Test. If the grappling character wins this, he inflicts normal unarmed damage. (S.B -4) If his opponent wins, no damage is inﬂicted but the character is still grappled. A grappling character can voluntarily end the grapple on any of his turns.


So let's go into a bit deeper into what damage is, how it's dealt with and other related factors. Above in the combat/damage/armor section, we briefly discussed it. Here's a bit deeper a look. There is also ways to mitigate damage, or 'stem the bleeding' so to speak.


So a character can take as much damage up to his or her wounds total. Wounds are pretty much a 'buffer' before the character is actually hurt severely. Taking damage, once your Wounds have been reduced to 0, means that most likely you'll be in a world of permanent hurt! Disability, loss of limbs, and given the "perilous" nature of the game, often death.

The overall state of your characters health is split between:

Not Wounded - You're fine, no damage or wounds.

Lightly Wounded- You have more than 3 Wounds, but less than your total. In general with some R&R you recover 1 wound per day. Stop being a pansy and get back into the fight!

Heavily Wounded - You have 3 or fewer Wounds remaining to your name. Without doing something silly like living in the Old World, you regain 1 Wound per week.

Stunned - You are disabled for a brief time. You can perform no action at all during the time your are stunned.

Helpless - You are unable to move or defend yourself. Opponents get a +20% WS bonus when striking you, and generally at +10% bonus to most checks against you.

Critical Hits

So when you do reach 0 for Wounds, and you take on additional damage, what happens? You or the opponent would then suffer critical hits. The attacker, let's say, scores a successful attack. He or she would roll for the location of the blow as per normal...Now, if the character receiving the blow is at 0 Wounds, the attacker would roll 1d100. This 1d100 roll determines the Critical value of the hit against the person with 0 Wounds. See the chart below:


As you can probably surmise from the chart above, critical damage is given values based on how many wounds "over zero" were caused. This is what the +x number is for the top row. If you did 3 damage, and the character was at 0 wounds, you would roll the 1d100, let's say you get a 55 and look to the +3 column (because you you drop the enemies wounds 3 below zero). This means that the critical damage given is 6. Keep in mind the location of the hit to the character suffering the blow. Remember the hit location is made by rolling 1d100. This is also used to determine where the critical hit will land. To help explain this let's use an example from the Rule Book:

Example: Jean-Pierre, a Bretonnian Noble, is fighting a band of maniacal Orcs. Despite his best efforts, the Orcs whittle his Wounds down to only 2. Then the Orc boss bashes him and succeeds in hitting. He then rolls 1d100 to determine the location of the blow. The Orc gets a 06, which means it's a head blow. So the orc smashes poor Jean-Pierre in the head with a big mace for 9 points of damage. The knight only had 2 wounds left. This results in a Critical Hit with a Critical Value of +7. (9-2=7) The GM rolls percentile dice and gets an 85. Cross-referencing this with the +7 column, the GM sees he’s gotten Critical Effect #7. He then looks at the Table "Critical Effects—Head" and reads the result: “Knocked out for 1d10 minutes.” He rolls a d10 and gets a 10! Jean-Pierre will be unconscious for 10 full minutes.

Ulric's Fury!

When a character rolls a 10 on their damage die, roll to hit again. If the second skill roll is successful, roll damage again adding it to the total. May continue rolling and adding until the die comes up other than 10. Better blow on those dice!

Unarmed Combat

You won't always have a weapon. Summon your inner Jackie Chan when this happens. Unarmed attacks deal damage equal to your Strength Bonus - 4. Likewise, any damage done, the opposing person's armor bonus is doubled.

Magic & Spell Casting

Magic is really fun in WHFRPG. I mean seriously, it's probably my favorite employment of magic in any RPG. The arcane in the Warhammer world is a dangerous, perilous (isn't everything?) and very superstitious method of channeling power. For many of the commoners of the Empire, and the Old World they have never been exposed to real magic use and are limited to tales and hearsay. Despite it's power and deep roots, magic and it's users are not common. In any case the user of magic must have some sort of gifted, naturally born with talent to use and wield it. The ability itself to channel magic is not something that can be learned. Furthermore some races are actually resistant to, and have no innate magic ability, such as halflings and dwarves. If you pick either of these two races, just know what you are not fated to be a magic wielder, but you do obtain some ability to resist it's harm as well.

"...To use magic is to give shape to the stuff of raw Chaos."

Types of Magic

In the Old World, there are two types of magic. Arcane Magic and Divine Magic. Below we can take a look and break down both types.

Arcane Magic and it's users are usually referred to as Wizards(Different areas of magic and location have different names for it's users of course). They invoke magic by almost pure will power, and raw energy. They view magic as something to study, devote your time learning about, and practicing it as if it were a martial art in unto itself. They believe that their own inner and mental strength is what powers them and the strength of the Spell.

Divine spell casting, and it's users are generally referred to as Priests (again different cults, and religions have different names for their devotees)

Learning Magic

Before you can even think of casting anything, your character needs to meet the following pre-requisites:

  • A Magic characteristic of at least 1 or more.
  • You must have the Channeling Skill
  • Ability to speak at least 1 arcane language.(Magjick, Daemonic, and Arcane Elf are the most common)
  • Must have the specific Lore Talent for the Lore you wish to cast. (Petty Magic, Arcane Lore, Dark Lore, or Divine Lore)

The Lores of Magic

The different types of Magic are broken down and applied by their Lore. As stated above, a spell caster must have at least 1 Lore as a Talent. The four main Lore Talents are:

Petty Magic:

Arcane Lore:

Dark Lore:

Divine Lore:

Fate and Fortune

-Last Page Edit 9/28/17