On a whim, and without a smidgen of research, two days before the GenCon Deadline, I pre-ordered the fancy box set for Wrath and Glory.  About twenty minutes after getting the PDF I realized I'd made something of a mistake, but nevertheless I persisted.  

Four months and change later, after literally dozens of emails regaling me with all the manifold woes of assembling the goodies from Ulisses North America, they finally sent the damn thing out in early December and lo and behold, I has it.  Chock full of goodies like... decks of cards, plastic markers, poker chips, maps, adventures and a very fancy rule book, I has it.

I am torn between two possibilities to sum up the experience of going through all of this.

A small child making a pottery ashtray for a non-smoking parent or a craftsman doing 80% of the job then shrugging and saying 'that's close enough'.

The PDF gave me the first glimmer of this phenomenon with its handling of the source material for 40k.  Aside from choosing your class there is very little you can do to make 'your guy' actually... well... yours.   I mean: You do have some choices in skills and ability scores, but surprisingly not much once you've dealt with the various rules of assigning said scores.  I had thought, to give one example, that taking a Marine Scout and elevating him to a Battle Brother would give some of that complexity back in the form of having additional class traits, but no... you lose them as you advance, making a character grown from scratch exactly as interesting as one made at full power.

I may exaggerate slightly, but only slightly.  

I had assumed that a great deal of what made W&G so un-spectacular in its handling of the wealth of 40k options might be that it was simply trying to do too many things, but that's silly. Sure: played corrupted chaos or space elves is now right there in the main book, but many other games have such a wealth of options and don't manage to do badly by them.

An example of how this wealth is squadered, making for cookie cutter characters, perhaps?  Take the example of a Primaris Space Marine.  Now: By definition Space Marines of any sort tend to be a little 'cookie cutter', but Deathwatch was able to put out some three or four books of additional Classes just for Space Marines.  Well, if you are playing a Primaris Space Marine, you are playing pretty much the same character ever single time... and if you're using the Tier system, there are only two defaults; Primaris Marines and Inquisitors.  One problem: you WILL be an Intersessor Marine.   If that's greek to you, don't worry about it. But allow me to explain something about Primaris Marines: They come in many flavors. Intersessor may just be the single most boring example of a Primaris Marine. Its just a dude with a rifle who does rifle stuff. Shooting, y'catch me?  

But what ELSE can a Primaris Marine do? In 40k: you have the option to be a Chaplain, a Captain, a Librarian, an Intercessor, a Reiver (A badass commando who is probably a better fit for a 'generic' RPG class, in my opinion), a Hellblaster (a rifleman with a plasma gun... which arguably should be an option for the existing Intercessor since the only real change is weapons...), an Aggressor (Assault Tank Marine), or even a tank driver...

Mind you, I'm not some huge fan of Primaris Marines, but just about everywhere you look you see that only the shallowest of takes have been given on anything. Regular Space Marines have Battle Brothers and Scouts, Sisters of Battle have... Sisters of Battle.  In some cases (Space Marines...) there is at least a trivial effort to include options on multiple tiers, with Grunt Infantry having probably the 'biggest' spread of options.

Its not just in shaping your class. They included Rogue Traders as a class, and RTs get... a Starship.  What can they pick? Not much, really. Just a Frigate. Not much in the way of rules for it either.  The entirety of the Voidship rules is condensed into four pages, mostly filled with what manuvers you can make and critical hit tables.

Mind you, I'm not a fan of the old FFG system of 'collect as many feats as you can fit on two pages of closely typed text', either, but damn.

I get this feeling all throughout the rules, where they put in just enough to make it work, then stopped there, probably so they could focus on their cool wrath and glory points system.

Take initiative for example. The game has no real initiative system, instead its 'party member, then NPC, repeat until out of characters' with some gubbins stuck on from the W&G point system.  Five year olds look at that system of taking turns as patronizing as fuck.  

A great deal of the rules 'innovations' amount to codifying 'gm advice', which is never a good idea. I have no problem with the concept of 'fail forward' until you make it the only way any rolls are resolved.  There are no real stakes, as you'll always succeed.   It's better served as a form of advice, to be applied judiciously by the GM.

Mind you this: 'Good Enough' Attitude goes everywhere. The artwork is often quite attractive until you take more than a glance at it and see weird perspectives, flat faces or other minor 'errors' that creep in, or the art taken from the existing library that doesn't match the rest of the design work, but maybe I'm reaching a bit.

So...

First up, lets talk about the box. It holds everything they sent, with room to spare, yet they didn't put half the stuff in the box. Also, I'm not sure how I could USE this box, its more like fancy packaging... too nice to throw away, too useless for anything else.  I probably wouldn't have noticed... or at least commented... but as we go through I'll have dozens of examples of 'eh, nice thought?'.

So. Dice. Ten dice, one is red the rest are black. Wrath die, right?  No complaints. Well, one... its minor but their fancy skull wrapped numbers (each face has a design, growing in complexity towards six...) seem a little hard to read for something thrown in pools.  I honestly don't want to mention it, but since I'm picking nits, and I did notice.... well...

Tokens: There is a bag full of plastic tokens for the Pregen characters and the various NPC/Monster threats in the pregen adventures.  Big tokens for boss/large monsters and smaller tokens for people and people sized monsters.  They seem well made, glossy hard plastic, one side is 'painted' with the design, and therefore textured, but visually both sides are identical.  This was probably the first thing I noticed 'wrong' about the box set, however: Visually the artwork is crowded in and its almost impossible to tell at a glance what is on each token.  I sorted them all out, you've got about five 'mob' tokens for things like cultists, ork boys, grots and the like (each, not all together), and  finding the correct 'stack' was a process of elimination each time.   Maybe my eyes are going?

Cards: there are six packs of cards in the box. How necessary they are to play is... well. Ulisses seems to think they can make money selling accessories to their games. I noted that the New Torg is ruthless in demanding you have Torg Cards (which, of course, do not come with the book...), compared to the old Box Torg, which merely had cards (and rules) and, coincidentally, came with them...  There are two packs of wargear cards and one of talents&Psychic Gifts, which are all completely reduntant, since the cards are literally reprints of the information in the rule book. Then there is a card for Perils in the Warp, which is also just a reprint of the table in the book, but at least adds an option to rolling on a table, so not entirely useless.  Ditto that for the Combat Complications, and finally the Campaign Deck, which...  well, this is a deck full of special 'rules' that are dealt to players each session.   They get a grand sum of half a page explaining them in the rule book (so... something you can ignore!).  Now, on the main, these are a staple of gaming, but you get weirdness like "I am Alpharius" where a player may play the card and declare that someone in the scene is not who they appear to be.   Um... yeah, thats....  look its not exactly my cup of tea in gaming, m'kay?  As a GM and as a Player I like things to be exactly what they are planned to be, not some 'willy nilly' meta morphy schrodinger thing.   Interestingly, I also have two 'minipacks' of NEW campaign cards that came in one of the sub-packages in the set, so I assume of Ulisses is successful with this game, they'll keep on cranking out new campaign cards.

Anyway: Aside from the Campaign Deck there is NO ART on the cards.  Just a light grey background and some text.  See?  I mean: I don't really care about the useless cards, but if you're going to go through all that work to make them, why wouldn't you include artwork?  A picture of a bolt pistol to accompany the text telling me what a bolt pistol does?   Again, its like they ALMOST had an idea, then staggered off to get drunk and left it incomplete.

So, lets look at the poker chips. There are twenty of them. I sort of expected clay chips, but these are a high quality plastic. There's a sort of ugly generic symbol on one face, then either an Imperial Aquila or a Chaos Circle on the other face... I assume these are the Glory and Wrath markers.   So far, so good, though I could use a better design for the sigil, maybe two colors of chips rather than just the symbol? Minor details.  Its the number that bugs me.  See: Glory (ten chips) is fine, since Glory is a shared pool, and is capped at 6 or the number of players +2. Groups of more than 8 players would be rare, bordering on nigh-mythical. But Wrath? Each player collects their own wrath, and the Campaign Card Lost and the Damned allows one player to take up to three wrath from another player. Assuming that Three is a reasonably achievable (you START with 2)  amount of Wrath, you can see if you have four players (a common number...) you don't have enough chips!  But the GM has Ruin points, so we have one of two issues here.  Either there aren't enough Wrath Chips AND the GM has no Ruin Chips for his pile, OR we have plenty of Ruin Chips, but no Chips for Wrath (hint: Its this one...). Either way, this feels incomplete.      Nice chips, tho.

The Soundtrack: The collector's set comes with a CD of background music for the game.  Its nice and unobtrusive. Honestly, though? It didn't feel very 40k to me. Its not... you know.. ANTI-40k, just...  probably entirely subjective. Given that some tracks are supposed to be Eldar and some tracks are supposed to be Orky, I would have expected more variation in the music.  Its... blandly nice, I guess.  God help me, but I want to link to "We All Work Together' from Warframe, which is free to play, right about now. I will refrain.

Battle Maps: Warzones:  This 'set' is a plastic laminate folding battlemap. Sturdy, fairly high quality I guess.  The Map is two sided, which is nice. Also, right out of the packaging, where the maps are folded the paint/plastic cracked, leaving white lines.   Its not terribly big, as these things go, but neither is it small (29x37 inches for the curious).  Sort of middling sized you could say.

GM Screen: I'll admit it, I'm not a GM screen sorta guy, but this is probably one of the prettiest GM screens I've ever seen. Sure, the art is ubiquitous in W&G, but they didn't stint on production quality here.  Its three panels, I want to say quarter inch? Eighth Inch card, with softer/thinner joints so it opens and closes smoothly.  There are fewer numbers and tables inside, a lot of text, but its all rules text, and seeing as W&G is a very soft rule set, I guess that's to be expected. Nice touch: The sections of the rules have page references to the main book.  Honestly: No complaints here, well done Ulisses.

Escape the Rok: A beginner Adventure in two parts, first fighting Orks, then fighting Daemons.  I'm going to admit that I lost track of some things in the unpackaging. I assume this adventure came with six 'folio' type character sheets for the pregenerated characters (which I have...) because if it didn't then the adventure is incomplete.  But there is a bit of weirdness... there is a section of the booklet for the Pregenerated Characters, its all backstory text and interpersonal relationship crap, which... fine. However, the back page of each character sheet is... the exact same text. Redundancy Department of Redundancy called, faxed and emailed you about this... I'll talk about the Pregens separately, however.

Blessing Unheralded: Another Beginner Adventure!  This one is packaged differently. While Escape the Rok was a booklet, Blessings Unheralded is a... folio? The 'dust jacket' is not attached to the booklet for the adventure, and contains a 'battlemap' for use in the Adventure.  Then there is an uncovered booklet that contains both simplified rules AND the adventure, which includes a seventh 'pregen' character as an NPC, a bit of an oddity to toss to the party, given that they play entirely an inanimate mcguffin the whole adventure, then a sheet of 'tokens' just like the plastic ones covered earlier... except this bunch ALSO includes 'status' tokens.  Those might have been more useful in the plastic bonus set, but whatever. However: These are not punch outs... as near as I can tell you will have to cut them out of the card stock, which is reasonably light but still.  Lastly we get... a second set of the same Pregen characters. Hilariously these are neither 'different amounts of xp' nor are they identical.    What I mean is they made some incredibly trivial adjustments and printed off a second set of the same exact characters.  Specifically, they removed one paragraph of backstory text and replaced a generic icon with an equally generic 'ward admittance card' for 'this adventure'.  Also, the one I used to compare the two character sheets (Battle Sister Orten) has a typo on one sheet, but not the other.    

The Pregens: I guess now is the time to discuss this. I sort of don't want to, but it was so blatant that I almost have too, especially since they went out of their way to give me two god damn sets of the same character sheets.   So, the premise is that this is a warband assembled by a Rogue Trader (which, I should point out, is a playable character in the rules...) and sent out to help stablize the star system in which all this adventuring takes place.  We've got a Sister of Battle, a White Scars Space Marine, a Commisar and a Guardsman, a Priest and an Acolyte, all Tier Three, presumably to allow a Space Marine to be in the group.  Its... an odd bunch, but I guess it does bring a lot of the iconic 'roles' of 40k to the table.  Its also four women and two men (The Space Marine and the Priest).  I'll also note that the NPC seventh in the adventure is also a woman.  Combined with the classes involved, its a weird mix. This normally isn't something I'd even notice, but for how blatant it is.  Both the 'soldiers' are women (Honestly: I'd guess that if it weren't for the Space Marine being included, it would be much worse...) .  This isn't 'random', a 50/50 split wouldn't have caught my eye at all, if, say the Guardsman was a man and the Commisar a woman I wouldn't have blinked.  This isn't an attempt at representation (See also 50/50 split), and I'll note that looking at the Staff of the company in the credits, its a god damn sausage party until you get to the playtesters, and even there. Further: From what I can tell, gamers are split something like 66% male (which is something you can see in the Playtester names... though even 66% is a bit low!).   This, much like that utterly unnecessary sidebar in 5E D&D, is fucking nagging.  Stop it. I'll play chicks if I want to, and dudes if I want to.  The Future is not Female, and in 40k it might not even be Human.   I could go on, this is actually bad marketing for some solid reasons, but given that Ulisses is piggybacking on the compartively giant 40k phenomenon, I suppose its one area where they can 'get woke' without doing too much harm.
Rant off.

Moar Battlemaps: So, I don't recall these being packaged with anything in particular, but I also have two more battlemaps, much like the first except not quite as slick and plasticky.  I mean they ARE slick and plasticky, but not as much so. Good quality. Note too that these are two seperate battlemaps, each are two sided, so its sort of four maps now.  One 'obverse' side is a blank grey grid and the other seems to be a cantina or some other sort of indoors people place, in case you want a bar-fight, which are both good options for obverse map-sides.  Actually, aside from the sheer numbers of generic terrain battlemaps, I can't really complain about anything here.  Good job!

Posters: Three posters of the ubiquitous artwork, folded into standard sheet size, which is annoying for posters, but understandable I guess.  Weirdly, these are all double sided, with the same art on each side.... I guess in case you wanted to put them up in a window?  Seems like wasting ink/money at the printers, but ok.  Right now I'm keeping them in the ziploc baggy they came in, but only because I'm already struggling to put up all the posters and shit I already own.

Beginner's Rulebook:  A covered booklet about the same size as the Blessings Unheralded folio, only without the adventure, the pregens and the like. So... there are three copies of the rules in the collector's set.  This is a bit more than the other beginner rules, its actually pretty comprehensive except for character creation. Honestly, if I were running this game in the future (eh... maybe...), I'd probably keep this handy for my own use rather than the main book.

Dark Tides: This is a hardbound adventure 'chain' with five 'linked' adventures. I put linked in 'quotes' because the last adventure is Eldar Party Specific, which means you can't play the same group through the entire adventure, so... a separate chain of one, then.   Played straight through with one party you'll be levelling between each adventure, as they are designed with escalating tiers, with the fourth adventure being 'tier 4-5'.  Honestly, its not that long, so either you'll be adjusting the difficulty of the published material, power levelling your group to keep up, or trying to drag this out over potentially months (years?) of game play which it isn't really designed for. Or you'll run parts of it with different groups at different tiers?  I dunno... seems an odd choice to link these in a chain while not really keeping them playable as a chain. Still. Its five adventures, though like so much else about W&G, its all very glib and loose. Take, for example, the Gazateer for Charbydion, the planet of said adventure. In the FFG books, this would be a two page spread like a data-slate, covering all sorts of information on the world possibly including a map, Here... its five lines of beaurocratic form filling followed by a couple of paragraphs and no art, much less a map.  

The Box: I've mentioned this several times, but I'll go ahead and discuss the box. Its black, solid card stock, but not super sturdy. There is an inner box and an outer box that slides over it (technical term? I dunno...). Its deep enough that everything in the collector's edition fits into it with inches of depth to spare. It is NOT, however, deep enough to set the books in vertically (like a slip cover), so that you can put it upright on a shelf.   Honestly, and while this is the sort of trivial complaint that makes first world problems look deep, its probably the very worst design I can think of for this sort of product. Its essentially a sort of fancy bog-standard cardboard box, once you pull the curtains back. A hinged box, perhaps with a tray for all the extras (cards, poker chips, etc) would have been super neat, and given what I paid for this damn thing, hardly an over the top request. A deeper box that could double as a slip cover (or whatever. I'm not an expert on technical terms for boxes), even though wider than the books I've got need,  would allow expansion as more books are published, would be a simpler but equally valid choice.  THis is the plain (not vanilla... plain.) icecream of box choices.   I know, I know. I'm complaining about the box. Actually, I'm not. I'm exhaustively making hte point that Ulisses didn't really think any of this through at all, and went with the most obvious and laziest of choices at every step, or simply didn't pay attention.  This is merely one last data point in the set.

And that's everything, if you count my initial commentary on the basics of the rule set as the entry for the main book. No?

Ok: So my book is the leather (leather-like?) black book with brass corners and gilded title. Pretty and solid.  The interior art is a mix of 40k staples... some I believe from the FFG books... and new stuff. The new stuff is pretty at a glance, but a bit flat and characterless the longer you look at it, and sometimes the difference in art direction between old and new is jarring.  Its a solid tome, 450 pages, which even accounting for full page frontpieces for every chapter leaves a lot of pages for what is, ultimately, a simple system full of 'fill in the blank' catering.  With all that space where are the space ships for the Rogue Trader? You've got combat rules for space ships, but only three racial choices and no real customization. Where are the weird little bits of gear, not the bog standard 'Wargear' in every 40k product since the original Rogue Trader, but new and interesting things?   Not everything has to be reconstructed from a war-game, you know? Where are, oh, the local idiosyncratic forms of transportation? Cars, my man... cars! For that matter: Where is the setting?  

Disregarding the rule set, which largely will come down to subjective standards of enjoyment, I can't help thinking out unfavorably this holds up to its predecessor. In a similarly sized book you could create a character, run games, but also had chapters devoted to a whole subsector of the Imperium. FFG added to the 40k canon, adding dozens of star systems, setting up a living breathing playground for you to stomp around in, and they did it again for each new game in their line-up.  Ulisses... manages to add one whole star system, and that in their adventure series. In the main book are plenty of rules for travelling around, but nothing for setting.  Sure, you're not likely to get many groups of players that don't have at least one die hard 40k fan among them, but... its something lacking.

And ultimately that's what I found in every single piece of this box set. Something lacking.  Sometimes it was a small thing, like hard to read icons on dice or tokens, or card tokens needing to be manually cut out, or a soundtrack that was merely blandly inoffensive, or for that matter a box that doesn't sit on your bookshelf neatly, or a lack of art on the cards.   This entire product feels like it was coasting to the finish line, out of gas.    

What makes this so frustrating is that there are a lot of good ideas in here.  I can appreciate the effort it takes to somehow fit all of 40k into a usable rule set. Of course, that's what's lacking. Effort.  Sure: you can play a Rogue Trader in this 40k RPG... sort of.  Oh, we have the new and improved Space Marines gubbins.  Well, actually we just have a single representative of all that new stuff. We got aliens, sure. I mean: We have the Orks and the Elves. We left the Tau out.  

For that matter, its an odd thing to make choosing your 'race' a step in creation, when all the character classes (I mean Archetypes, my bad...) are inherently racial... which by itself is an impediment to making this the Universal 40k RPG it so obviously tried to be.  Why CAN'T Assassin be a generic class, with racial examples of Human Blood Cult assassins, Eldar... um.. harlequin assassins? and Orky 'Sneaky Gitz' all using the same basic framework?

Or do you have to be some sort of genius to recognize that one of the problems in FFGs vision of the 40k RPG is exactly reproduced here in Ulisses radically different take on the same idea: expanding through an ever growing list of special classes, unique to each 'race'.


It occurred to me that I've referenced Tiers a lot in this review, but for some reason I expect you readers to know how this all works.  So, I guess I'll close out with an overview of Tiers that may turn a bit ranty.

It is quite obvious to anyone that a Space Marine is much more powerful (in a firefight...) than an ordinary human, much less some ink-stained scribe.  Ulisses solves this by breaking game play down into tiers, from one to five, and placing each race (Space Marine is both a race and a class...) into Tiers, with the higher tier setting what 'tier' your character is. You can advance a low tier class to higher tier, so a lowly pick pocket rubbing elbows with an Inquisitor (Tier 1 and 4 respectively) can be equals, if that Pick Pocket is the best in the biz.

The Tier of the game (set by the GM) determines attribute caps (also determined by race) and skill caps, as well as how cool your gear can be.  

The Tiers of the classes appears to be entirely arbitrary, with Rogue Traders being set to Tier Two, while Inquisitors are Tier Four (In setting Rogue Traders are supposed to be on par with Inquisitors), while the Primaris Intercessor CLASS is Tier 4, while the Battle Brother is Tier 3, putting the common squaddie Primaris on par with an Inquisitor right out the gate.  

I am not a fan of this system. Its an artificial framework for evaluating ability that is backwards in implementation, at the very least.  It is a barrier to immersion and an unnecessarily complicated step in character creation.

Lets take an example to show what I mean. A common Guardsman is Tier 1, while a Commisar is Tier 3.  Obviously the Commisar is a higher social class, with greater authority... something that the game makes little to no effort to track by the way. But is there any reason to suspect that the Commisar is smarter, stronger, faster and more charming than the Guardsman? Is there any reason to assume the Commisar is a better shot?

Why?  The Tier system assumes ALL of this right out the gate.  The only level of the game that remotely makes sense this way is that the Commisar MIGHT have better gear, such as a Bolt Pistol and a Power Sword... though plenty of Commisars in 40k have lowly las pistols and chain swords, both of which can be found among the lowly tier one gaurdsmen and scum of the galaxy.

Mind you: Insofar as you create your character, you do it by spending build points, which are determined by the Tier of the game already, and Space Marines (the race) have a build point cost, as do Primaris, as do their respective Archtypes (er... classes...).

Its a nifty sounding idea, I suppose, but like a lot of things that sound nice, its actually an impediment, a bad idea. Roads to hell and all that, I suppose.   Mind you, its in good company, as FFG included an equally bad (if differently bad...) Level System in their take, creating a similar impediment to game play/character creation thereby.  



In conclusion:  I see this frequently with games derived from other properties... notably the Wargame field... where the game seems designed backwards, like making a building from the top down, to fit the preconcieved notions of the other property rather than designing the game as an RPG, though one drawing on (allowing, if you will) the style of play seen in... in this case, the Wargame.    Wrath and Glory, despite having a clear model to avoid most of those pitfalls, seems to have fallen down into that very well, creating an inferior and artificially limited version of the Wargame Warhammer 40k universe, rather than an RPG that happens to be set in Warhammer 40k's universe.   Compounding it is a very real sensation that Ulisses North America simply didn't put much thought into any of this, from not having the products ready to ship at release (four and a half months later, after numerous vendor issues, apparently), to lackluster design choices to nifty design choices that were nevertheless sub-optimal (the dice. Lovely and creative, but as noted, somewhat hard to read... for a dice pool based game!). This is not a labor of love, or the work of a detail oriented craftsman, this is a 'slap it together and put a price on it', and it shows.

Still: If you love 40k and RPGing 40k, and you love dicepools and loose, meta-mechanics, this is a completely serviceable product that can scratch your gaming itch.   I should point out that for all my bitching, I can't say I ever found anything actually WRONG with it.  It works. Its pretty.   Honestly I wasn't even planning to review it until the never ending stream of 'huh, well that seems ill concieved' grew too great to ignore when I was going through it.   Hell, I even feel like I've cheated you all by not going through the rules with a fine toothed comb, but focusing instead on production choices.  

Especially since I'm vaguely certain that you can't actually buy this edition anymore...  Look at me, ma, I'm status signalling!

Great review, Spike! Very informative.

Quote from: Spike;1070034Look at me, ma, I'm status signalling!

Your status is either "finding a corner to stuff another dust collector" or "add eBay to chores for January"!

Thanks for falling on the chainsword for us!

Sounds like the Savage Worlds fan made 40k stuff is still unbeaten.