Welcome to the Tales of the End - a solo WHFRP blog.

To summarise in a single sentence, the idea behind this blog is compile everything related to my ongoing solo Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign into a single place. This will mainly consist of play reports, but as the project continues, may expand to include custom rules, lore dumps and whatever else I think of. 

Introduction.

First things first, some background. I'm using the 4th Edition of WFRP, although I'll be drawing on older sourcebooks for lore and inspiration. I'll also be referring to lore from the tabletop game, both the original Warhammer Fantasy Battles and the new rebooted The Old World. 

This is both the first time I've played WFRP, and the first time I've played any RPG properly (excluding a tiny bit of an old D&D starter in early school years), so it will very much be a case of learning as I go along.

I discovered the world of solo RPG's after rediscovering great solo game (Lord of the Rings LCG), but then subsequently moving to another continent. Add in long hours at my new work listening to Critical Role podcasts and re-reading Steven Erikson's Malazan novels, and I was keen to find something to satisfy the fantasy game itch. After a bit of research I dived in with a pen and paper solo campaign using a homebrew system. I went with a homebrew system because I found the big rulebooks that come with D&D and the like too daunting to try and learn, especially when handling both player and GM duties.

Whilst I've never played any RPG's, I did dabble with Warhammer Fantasy Battles back in school days starting with the old Battle for Skull Pass starter set. Life soon took over and the minis got stored away, but I never lost interest in the lore or the world. Even before The End Times I had brainstormed a few story ideas about rewriting the old Storm of Chaos storyline. This evolved into a re-imagining of the End Times supplements, in the form of a folder of paper notes and a hefty OneNote file. The main issue I had with this was the question of a final end product. I enjoyed the plotting, I just didn't have the time or patience to produce something from it. So recently I thought, why not combine this new discovery of solo RPG's with the my largely unused Warhammer End Times story concepts.

I still found the idea of learning a fairly crunchy RPG system daunting. I also wanted a way to recreate armies, or roleplay generals leading long military campaigns, which didn't really fit with what I knew about WFRP. This lead to a couple of false starts: I tried with a homebrew system solely using the Company rules from the Reign RPG to represent armies, then a more character based approach using the simple Freeform Universal system. Neither was particularly satisfying. So finally I caved, why not just have a go with the official game set in the universe. And here we are.

This did mean I have reconfigured my approach, rather than try to recreate or play through the events of my 'homebrew End-times' lore, I'll use my notes as a background and world-building for new, ground-level stories. I won't try and play as Karl Franz or Ungrim Ironfist, rather take the role of a foot-soldier in one their armies or a merchant in a city under their rule. As my first campaign has got underway, I've quickly found this approach is producing a far more interesting narrative. 

A Note on 'Canon'.

Without getting into too much detail it's worth mentioning what I'll be treating as 'canon' within my version of the Old World. Generally if it's in an official WFRP or WHFB books I'll use it as canon. On the other hand I'll be ignoring most of Black Library unless there are good summaries in the wiki (nothing against it, simply because I haven't read many of the Warhammer novel series). Where there is conflict, the newer version will generally take precedence, but there will be exceptions if I prefer an older version.

This will not include the events of either the official End Times* or the original Storm of Chaos (basically anything beyond IC2522), but I may include characters, locations and units from these time periods/books. Likewise I may introduce certain elements, characters or units from Age of Sigmar.

*Contradicting what I just said above there are certain 8th edition army book plot lines that directly led into the End Times that I will be rewriting completely (e.g. the Mallobaude and the Bretonnian civil war, and the kidnap of Alithra).