Saturday, March 8, 2014

WHFRP: High Elf Seer

Here are rules for playing a High Elf Seer in Fantasy Flight Game's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. These rules are unofficial and part of a personal project to make High Elves a more interesting character choice in the game.  The game itself is excellent and has a lot of support in the form of adventures, campaigns and additional rules.

As an homage to their futuristic counterparts the Eldar, this new high elf class concentrates on prophecy and visions of the future.  This is the second career on the High Elf Mage path. It continues in the tradition of the first career, but adds some mechanics that allow the player some manipulation of fortune dice.

Find the previous project entries here:


New Class: High Elf Seer
Requirements: Completed the High Elf Mage class.
Keywords: Academic, Arcane, Wizard, Intermediate

The incidence of High Elves gifted with the power of foresight is greater than any of the other races.  Elven mages in particular, with their frequent contact with the winds of magic, often receive visions of the future, though the meaning of these visions if often difficult to decipher.

Elven society values this ability and nurtures it when it is discovered. Powerful prophetic visions usually signal the coming of a great calamity and elven expeditions are frequently sent the world over to manipulate events to see that these prophecies are fulfilled or thwarted.

High Elf Mage Career Card: Each of the player's spells gain the following: Two Boons - Choose another character in medium range and choose whether to add one fortune die or one misfortune die to their next roll.

Primary Characteristics: Intelligence, Willpower
Career Skills: Channeling, Discipline, Education, Intuition, Observation, Magical Sight, Spellcraft
Talent Slots: Focus, Focus, Order
Advancement
  • Action: 2
  • Talent: 2
  • Skill: 3
  • Fortune: 2
  • Conservative: 1
  • Reckless: 0
  • Wound: 1
New Talent: Prophecy
Talent Type: Focus
Description: Once per session, before a character within medium range of you makes a roll guess if they will succeed or fail.  If you are correct add two boons to their roll.

Stance: 2 Conservative, 2 Reckless

Friday, March 7, 2014

WHFRP: High Elven Mage

The most basic wizard you can field in a Warhammer Fantasy Battles High Elf army is the Mage, and so this seems the perfect jumping off point for the High Elf Project. The High Elf project is my effort to make High Elf characters in Fantasy Flight Game's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a more interesting race to play.

High Elves are supposed to be the masters of all magic. It is by the efforts of their entire race that the world is kept from being plunged into Chaos. Elves taught magic to the human barbarians, establishing the first Colleges of Magic within the empire. In order to teach manipulation of the winds of magic to such a short lived race they had to simplify their knowledge.  In fact, human understanding of magic is a child's toy compared to High Magic, literally breaking down the complexities of spellcasting into a simplified color system.


New Class: High Elf Mage
Requirements: High Elf
Keywords: Academic, Arcane, Wizard, Basic

After a century of training elven mages are finally considered to have mastered the rudiments of spellcasting. Often a high elf mage are along with overseas diplomatic missions to help ensure their success or to advance the inscrutable agenda of their elven masters.

High Elf Mage Career Card: In addition to learning High Magic spells, the High Elf Mage may learn the spells of one other Order.  Choose the order when starting the career.  The High Elf Mage may swap order cards using the rules for swapping talents.

Primary Characteristics: Intelligence, Willpower
Career Skills: Channeling, Discipline, Education, Intuition, Magical Sight, Spellcraft
Talent Slots: Focus, Order
Advancement

  • Action: 3
  • Talent: 1
  • Skill: 2
  • Fortune: 2
  • Conservative: 1
  • Reckless: 1
  • Wound: 1

New Talent: High Magic
Talent Type: Order
Description: Once per encounter you may add two black dice to the difficulty of any spell cast within medium range.
Stance: 2 Conservative, 2 Reckless

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Project: High Elves for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

If you at all enjoy roleplaying games and you love the Warhammer Universe then why haven't you played Fantasy Flight's excellent version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay?  A group of friends and I have been running through a campaign for a while now and I've got to say it's really fun.

The game manages to keep the feel of the old version, where your character hopped from career to career as it advanced, picking up skills and abilities along the way.  But most of it has been streamlined now.  Abilities and spells are cards that you collect as you level up.  If you play like our group and take ownership of the cards when you select them then every character ends up with different abilities so they each feel unique.  The game uses a set of custom dice, which are interesting but also annoying.  The one set of dice in the main box is not really enough to go around when you have a table of four people and a GM all sharing them.



But after you've played it a while and looked at all the careers you'll notice that there's one group from the Warhammer universe that is particularly under represented.  Elves only have two dedicated classes, Swordmaster and Wardancer, and those are spread across High Elf and Wood Elf.  Not ideal if you want to explore what it feels like to be an immortal from across the ocean.

Stone Corridors was started to give me a place that could serve as an outlet not just for miniatures and battle reports but also as a place to offer up fan content, rules and scenarios.  Warhammer High Elves are supposed to be masters of magic for this setting and I think they deserve the rules to show this.  I've got some ideas percolating and I'm excited to share them here. Stay tuned.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

New Year Cleanup: Hobby Scorecard

Blog cleaning continues for the new year!  The hobby scorecard over on the right there is ready to be cleared in preparation for getting lots of things done this year.  So here now, frozen in amber, is the catalog of hobby activity for 2013.

Models Assembled
Warhammer Fantasy
Witch Hunter

Models Painted
Warmachine: Khador
War Dog
Doom Reavers (x6)
Devastator
Widowmakers (x4)
Sorcha

Warhammer Fantasy
Orc Boyz (x12)

It's not a big list by any means, but I did manage to get my 15 point Khador list completely assembled and painted.  That means that this year I can play with them and start expanding the list.  I already know the next ten points I want to add.

Finally, here are those Orc Boyz.  I painted them at the beginning of the year just as an exercise but I really like how they turned out.


Saturday, January 4, 2014

New Year Cleanup: The Bloggening

Like the rest of the planet, it seems, one of my New Year's tasks is to clean up my blog.  I don't like to call it a resolution. I won't be spending the whole year on this.  It's just something that needs to be done periodically and the beginning of the year seems like a perfect time. It's been a while since I gave the blog roll a good scrubbing so I'm starting there.

I've added links to the inspirational blogs by James Wappel and Studio Giraldez. If you don't stop by both those sites regularly please click through to get your socks knocked off.  Also added to the list is the fantastic Massive Voodoo.  It's a wonderful source for tutorials and general inspiration.  Each of these blogs are run by veteran hobbyists with buckets of awards under their collective belts.

It is with a heavy heart that I have also removed entries from the list.  These blogs have not been updated in a while so there's not much point in keeping them on the sidebar.  They still remain fantastic resources so for posterity I have preserved links to them here.

From The Warp - An excellent gaming chronicle and tutorial source.  Ron ran this blog for a long time and built up a pretty big community around it.  His tinkering and painting inspired not just me but all the members of my gaming group to try new things with our hobby.  He's on official hiatus so there haven't been any new posts, but the archives are worth just browsing. Here are some of my favorites.

40K for the New Professional - Various posts from this blog have helped to form my current approach to learning, gaming and competition.  Kennedy's insights on applying business practices to your hobby in order to plan and achieve goals were a revolution for me in how I think about gaming.  Unfortunately the blog is now completely defunct and the old posts are not accessible on that site.  Here's what I could fine around the web.

So here's to the new blogs and a fond farewell to the old ones!