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Wrath & Glory Roleplay free beginner rules

Ordo Machinum

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Ordo Machinum Venerable Brother

Ordo Machinum

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Blessings Unheralded is now available on DriveThruRPG!

This comprehensive QuickStart includes rules, an adventure, a battlemap, a token sheet, and six 4-page pregen characters - everything you need to get started playing Wrath & Glory!

And for the month of July, you can use the following discount link to get it for free:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?discount=93635919e4

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N1SB Venerable Brother

N1SB

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Thanks very much for this heads up, Brother.  A few of my 40k friends are also my RPG group, will be sharing these.

 

I just flipped through the 4 pdfs and I really quite like this.  A detail I adored was the pre-made Guardsman character writing "CREED LIVES" on her carapace armour.  That shows this was written by someone very immersed in the lore, just as we are.  It's such a nice little touch.

 

I'm also seeing how they're kind of balancing the classes in this game, i.e. balancing a Guardsman with a Space Marine.  They have a Tier system and it seems like a basic Guardsman is Tier 1 whereas as Space Marine is Tier 3 to start with.  It turns out they would level up a Guardsman to Tier 3, with presumably more optional upgrades, to represent he is in fact some sort of Veteran Guardsman or Sergeant that has extra skills or benefits to make up for the difference.

N1SB Venerable Brother

N1SB

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I've had some time to think about this after a serious read-through. It took me awhile to put my ideas into words, because this game is very interesting.

Perhaps like you, I grew up playing D&D, RIFTS, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Vampire: the Masquerade, Legend of 5 Rings, and still continue to experiment with new systems like Savage Worlds. Every game has its own rules, mechanics, themes, etc., we all know that. There's always character optimisation, min-maxing, etc. Even beyond all that, there's some games with an Angle. It's like a schtick quite unique to the game, but it permeates everything within that game.

Wrath & Glory's Angle, imho, is it rewards a deep understanding of the 40k lore, more than the usual bonus for just RPing your character.

There's a mechanic that gives basically Command Point-like tokens/points you can spend on re-rolls or damage resistance, etc. The most reliable way to earn these is to achieve your character's personal roleplaying "Objectives", here's a sample from a Space Marine character's:

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Just looking at the top 3 Objectives, anyone can look up a Space Marine Chapter's Primarch on a wiki site of their choice, then shout his name in-game, that's fine. But describing what it's like to live on the Chapter homeworld before becoming an Astartes, it's not that so simple sometimes. Then there's details like Cadia, and you have to know the context of it in relation to the 13th Black Crusade, etc., how it's all interconnected.

I know many RPG settings have a lot of lore, but the difference is breadth vs. depth. I would posit other settings go for breadth, there's a lot of variety, lots of bits of lore scattered everywhere in different sourcebooks describing different parts of the setting, different people. 40k really goes for depth, because they revisit things over and over again, through 8 editions of codices/compendiums/compilations. For example, the Horus Heresy was really about a period of about a decade, but there's like 50 novels just about it. Even under different writers, there's such a deep understanding of what makes a certain Chapter's Space Marine tick, we completely intuit how they act and wouldn't act.

Example - people think all Space Marines just shout "For the Emperor!" Except a Space Wolf wouldn't. He'd call him "the Allfather" instead. It's those nuances.

If you're a member of B&C, you wouldn't even have to think about it, because you know the lore so well. However, someone who only played the Dawn of War series...which is already pretty good, might honestly not realise those details.

None of this is to say it's a problem. The game just rewards people who know the lore deeply. Just reading these rules just gave me deeper appreciation of how 40k lore is constructed. It really goes to a depth few other franchises delve into, as they generally try to expand for more breadth.

+++++

I'm just imagining a character that could be very rewarding for both a player new to 40k or someone really well-versed in it like us. I'm imagining a Guardsman who reads the weekly Regimental Standard with utmost seriousness...as well he should...treating it absolutely as fact. Each session he would recall something from the recent issues as his roleplaying objectives. That would be so mind-blowingly meta.

Ishagu

Ishagu

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That's all brilliant. I think this game would be best enjoyed by fans of the setting as you have pointed out, but the game encourages newcomers to look into the lore which is only a good ting for our community.

 

Rewarding players based on their ability and knowledge of the character they are role playing and the universe they inhabit is really cool.

  • 3 weeks later...
Redtoof Veteran

Redtoof

Posted
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So I grabbed it when it was free and I’m planning to run it on Monday for a group of 4. I made a post on my blog about preparing and initial thoughts (here: https://redtoof.blogspot.com/2018/07/preparing-blessings-unheralded-wrath.html). Mostly feeling positive about it, the adventure feels a bit railroady but the core rules seem nice.

 

After I’ve run it I’ll do a write up/review so hopefully that will be helpful to someone (at the very least, me.)

N1SB Venerable Brother

N1SB

Posted
Posted

After I’ve run it I’ll do a write up/review so hopefully that will be helpful to someone (at the very least, me.)

 

 

Thanks, Brother Redtoof.  I'll surely find your findings useful, so thanks to you and your playgroup for testing it for us.

 

Because I don't want to see spoilers in case my group wants to run this, I avoided the adventure, but I do want to see how the system works in practice, in gameplay.  I saw the pre-generated characters, and as always they're not quite as optimised as ones we make ourselves, but it looks like the mechanics were pretty straight-forward (players specialise in skills around the same attribute, there's at least 1 "face" in the party with high Fellowship/Charisma to do the talking, etc.)

 

After that, it's just down to how you gain and use Wrath and Glory points.  I took special note of the RP Objectives because it seems like feeding into Wrath points helps in accumulating Glory points, so it all starts with Wrath basically.  I for one am very curious how players will catch on to this mechanic.

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