I want to talk today about the new game Shadows of Brimstone, but in order for me to do that I really need to talk about another game first, and that’s Warhammer Quest.
(Because this post actually turned out to be so long, and have so little to do with Shadows, I’m actually going to break it into two sub-entries. Not what you were looking for? Well … it is my blog after all. Tune in tomorrow for the actual Shadows review.)
We need to step into the WABAC Machine and set our course for 1995. I remember it as if it were yesterday: meeting with my fellow Sith every Wednesday for Shipwrecks and to talk about this new show called Babylon 5… it was a golden age,
It was the year that Games Workshop released this amazing game to the world that pretty much took over our gaming group for the summer. So what was it?
Warhammer Quest was a game that bridged the world of board roleplaying games. It was the Daywalker of games. The game was originally designed for 1-4 players, and you took your characters on a series of … wait for it… quests.
Each quest had a backstory, some special rules, and unique rewards for completing it. It also had amazing flavor text about things like Karath-Nor and the Thrice-Cursed Shrine of Slaanesh. And there were a lot of skulls in the box. We actually had a game to count the number of skulls on the box, and topped out at over 70.
There were many great things about the game, but I think the thing we enjoyed most was that it gave us much of what we were looking for in an RPG, but it didn't require a GM: it was fully cooperative. (Note to the three people who might possibly be reading this blog who don’t know what a GM is, it stands for “game master,” the person who controls the rest of the world that everyone else, the players ruin things for). It actually had rules to turn the game into a full-on RPG, but we didn't use ‘em: it was full-on miniatures based dungeon crawling for loot that we wanted, and the game did not disappoint.
What did disappoint us was Games Workshop, the publisher. What we wanted out of Warhammer Quest was more. More monsters, more maps, more items, more… wait for it… quests. To a limited extent, Games Workshop gave us what we wanted: they did release some supplemental materials for the game in the next few years.
Eventually, however, the game died off, and left us fans making up our own heroes and quests. As the years went by, the game became harder and harder to find, and has become very expensive to acquire over the last few years.
That’s when we started to ask Games Workshop to do a relaunch of the game and give us new material. Yeah, I was that guy, who bugged their representatives at every chance I got. The truth is, it was not. Going. To. Happen.
And so the great game faded into history, and was thought to be lost for all time.
Many people who know me and my strange obsession with the game ask why I like it so much. Why I've called it The Game of Kings. Here’s why.
There are basically two three different reasons to enjoy playing RPGs. The first and most obvious is that it lets you spend time with friends doing silly things. You eat bad food, drink some creativity juice and generally make enough Monty Python references to get you removed from all polite company. Of that, there can be no doubt.
But the two other reasons are what I want to talk about here: they’re the story and the crunch.
The story is the part of the game where you and your friends create and tell a story in between all of the Mountain Dew and popular culture references. This can be a great part of gaming. In fact, it can be the very best part of gaming. The problem is that it absolutely requires a top-notch GM. That’s actually a pretty big problem, since the quality of all the GMs in the world is shaped like a bell curve, which means that most of them are average.
With an average or bad GM, a day of playing an RPG can consist of 20 minutes of real fun in four hours. I want those of you who read this blog but aren't gamers (meaning you’re typically the spouse or relationship partner of such a person), to consider that. Your significant other thinks gaming is important. It’s more important than having brunch with the in laws, taking a stroll on the beach, or going bead-shopping, yet at the same time I’m saying it can be 20 minutes of fun in fours hours. Yes, it can be like that.
The reason is that many (most, remember: this is a bell-curve distribution) of the people who rung RPGs can’t tell a good story. Worse yet, many of them run something called a sandbox game where they don’t tell any story: they give you a few of the ingredients at random and ask you to assemble one for yourself. Blindfolded.
Many of them put up deliberate barriers to getting towards the good and interesting things: if you’re tracking down the local school-marm who’s gone missing, and all evidence seems to speak to her abductors taking her to the Haunted Mines up in the hills, you spend as much time getting to the Mine as you do exploring the dangerous haunted parts. And, in order to be perfectly reasonable and realistic, much of the Haunted Mines are actually … not haunted by anything. They’re a largely empty mine shaft with twisting corridors that promise the thrill of adventure but only deliver tedious mapping and inventory management.
So what does that leave us with? The crunch.
The crunch is the numbers: the kewl things that your character can do and will learn to do over time. It’s the loot that they acquire off of the dying prospectors they come across, which they’re able to slowly piece together to make their character really awesome and effective in those exciting battles to the death. It’s a sort of a game within a game, really, and the thing is: this game doesn’t require the game master. The crunch is what makes the 20 minutes bring the awesome.
Crunch is something you can enjoy on your own, heck you can even have fun with it when you’re not at the game.
And that was where Warhammer Quest excelled: the crunch. You had a character who could do some cool and well-defined things of their own, but additionally they'd find nifty gadgets that would make it even easier. And the monsters all had interesting and well-defined things they could do as well. Sometimes they were maddeningly annoying things, but you'd eventually have to come to an agreement about how things worked yourselves: no GM, remember?
One of the sayings that gets to the core of what an RPG is, is “kill things and take their stuff,” and that’s certainly true, and that’s what the crunch of the game is all about: get cool stuff, have awesome battles and get even more cool stuff.
That's Warhammer Quest.
Now there are purists out there who will doubtless disagree with me. There’s nothing like people who've only had excellent GMs to make it seem like all of them are like that. And there’s also the sort of folks who enjoy mapping and exploring a lot of empty rooms in great detail.
But for everyone else, Warhammer Quest was the great crucible of roleplaying: it has all of the things you want in a game: exploration, danger, loot and plots that actually get resolved and has burned off all the mindless tedium. It's way better than bead shopping.
You’re looking for the Haunted Mines? Put up a mine entrance tile and get to it! The school marm will be there to be found and maybe you’ll save her, and maybe you won’t. It’s just that simple. It might be difficult: you might not all make it out, but at least it won’t be dull.
And maybe, just maybe, there’ll be the Blade of Leaping Gold for you to find.
So next time: an actual review of an actual game. Honest. Until then, Make Mine 20.
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