Warhammer 40,000 has had a long and winding road through the role-playing game landscape, and the history of that would fill an entire feature. Today we’ll be providing an introductory look at the Wrath & Glory system, which has been published by Cubicle 7 Games since 2020. Whether you’re a longtime RPG fan or you’ve never rolled a twenty-sided die, I’ve aimed to keep this primer both accessible to those new to the hobby while still having useful information for the veteran alike.
Cubicle 7 is the current licenseholder for all Warhammer RPGs, and they currently publish three for Fantasy (Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing, Age of Sigmar: Soulbound, Warhammer: The Old World) and two for 40K (Wrath & Glory, Imperium Maledictum).
Each of these has a different mechanical system and thematic focus, with Wrath & Glory aiming more at ‘heroic’ role play versus the crunchier and grittier Imperium Maledictum.
For our primer today I’ll be focusing on the following three areas:
- The setting and lore experience needed to play
- How characters are built
- Basic (but defining) game mechanics
(Please note that as a primer this is not a review, but if that’s more your cup of tea we’ve got you covered there, too)
Playing in a Sandbox
I don’t need to tell you that the world of Warhammer 40,000 is almost intimidatingly massive, spanning multiple decades, hundreds of novels and short story anthologies, ten editions of the tabletop wargame, and so much more besides.
You can get away with some looseness as a player, but the last thing you’d probably want to do as a GM is welcome your players to “the planet Armageddon, which has known countless generations of the Emperor’s peace and tranquility.”1
Fortunately, there’s a remedy for that in Wrath & Glory’s ‘sandbox’ approach. The game’s default setting is the Gilead System, which was created for the game. No worries about getting lore-lawyered by a player on some obscure but relevant factoid tucked away in a decade-old Codex somewhere, everything you need to know about the world is in the box.
Not only that, but the planetary system itself is ring-fenced by a colossal warp-storm. No way in, no way out (that we know of), so it’s a much more manageable microcosm of the vast Warhammer universe. Even the resident Space Marines (the Absolvers) were virtually a chapter-in-name-only until their inclusion here significantly fleshed them out, so you don’t need to be able to recite the list of Primarchs in reverse alphabetical order to be able to keep track of everything you need to know to run the setting.
Who Am I?
When it comes to the mechanics of role-playing games, ultimately everything boils down to two essential questions: who are you, and how do you interact with the world around you? I might suggest that the latter question has two parts depending on whether or not what you’re wanting to do is opposed by someone else (for instance, shooting at a stationary target versus shooting at something actively trying not to get hit).
When it comes to player characters, Wrath & Glory doesn’t stray too far from the tried-and-true formula of stats-n’-class- though the latter has a slight twist.
The stats are the usual and customary for a standard role-playing game. Your physical stats are comprised of scores for Strength, Toughness, and Agility. Upstairs you’ll have Willpower, Intellect, and Fellowship (think charisma). Finally, you’ll also have an Initiative stat.
A score of 2 in any of these is considered “average,” while a 7 is about as high as is humanly possible (without some genetic or biomechanical assistance). When you are called upon to perform a test against one of your attributes (forcing open a locked door using Strength, for instance), you simply roll a number of dice equal to that attribute and compare the results to the difficulty rating the GM has assigned to the task. Voila!
Next we’ve got character classes (archetypes), of which there are about thirty. Most are human, though there’s a smattering or aeldari and ork options as well to give some variety (unlike, say, modern Dungeons & Dragons, race and class pairings are rather less fungible in the Imperium. The world just isn’t ready for Ork Tech-Priests or Aeldari Sisters of Battle.)
Now thirty classes may seem like overkill (this isn’t Rifts), but fortunately the archetypes are laid out in what’s called a tier system. Here’s how that works, and what it brings to the game.
Smiling Through the Tiers
Back in 2003, Star Wars Galaxies released to much anticipation. A massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game in the vein of titan World of Warcraft, Galaxies had a problem the developers of WoW didn’t have to worry about: the “Jedi problem.”
In short, how do you craft a balanced game when you’ve got one type of character whose power level is exceeded only by their popularity? The last thing the developers wanted was to simply have a world where upwards of 90% of the players chose Jedi, but on the other hand a Jedi-less game would lose a great deal of its appeal.
Warhammer 40,000 role-playing games must by necessity grapple with similar questions given the disparities in power levels between, say, an Imperial Guardsman and a Space Marine. Fantasy Flight Games- the popular gamemaker who held the license until 2017- addressed this by having completely different product lines.2 Want an Astra Militarum-scale campaign? Only War. A voidship crew? Rogue Trader. Dark Heresy let you play as Inquisitors, with Deathwatch being the option for Astartes (or Black Crusade, if you preferred the Heretic version).
Wrath & Glory takes a simpler approach, one which ultimately allows for all the different levels of gameplay mentioned above in a single system. Here there are four tiers of play, all with a different level of power and focus of play. Players and the game master will determine before the start of the campaign what level they’ll be set at, and that informs subsequent character choices.
Let’s say you like the idea of playing a normal, human soldier in the Emperor’s service. A Tier 1 campaign would see you as a member of the Imperial Guard taking on threats to the local area, perhaps a nearby Chaos cult. A Tier 2 threat would be a continental event like an Ork warband, but you’ll get to play as a harder-hitting Tempestus Scion. Want greater stakes? Tier 3 puts you up against planetary-level threats like a Genestealer Cult, but you’ll have the expanded authority and resources of an Imperial Commissar at your disposal.
It’s an elegant solution to a difficult problem, and there are rules for “up-scaling” lower-tier archetypes if you’d rather play, say, a Scion instead of a Commissar in a Tier 3 campaign. You can even scale up to Tier 4, normally the playground of Inquisitors and Primaris Astartes, and help tackle threats to the Gilead System itself.
Getting Things Done
As part of the character creation process you’ll also have the opportunity to select additional skills and talents (some already come “pre-loaded” with your archetype). Then as you progress in the campaign and earn experience, you can then ‘spend’ that on upgrading your character.
Personally I’ve always loved the “XP as growth currency” approach versus the more traditional “growth thresholds” one, because it can give you a lot more feeling of customization in your character without adding a ton of complexity. Delighted to see it here!
All of these options for your character should give you plenty to do, in and out of combat. As mentioned above, you rely on your character’s stats to determine how many dice to roll for an attribute check, and a skill check is no different.
When you’re attempting to use a skill, simply add together your skill level and the relevant attribute to find out how many dice you’ll get to roll. Let’s say you wanted to sneak past some guards using your Stealth skill. Stealth, unsurprisingly, is an Agility-based skill. If your Stealth skill level is 3 and your Agility is 4, you’ll get to roll seven dice to see whether or not you succeed.
What the Dice Mean
So now you’ve got seven dice in front of you, ready to see if you manage to sneak past those guards. Before you roll, you need to designate one of the dice as the Wrath die, (the game recommends swapping in a different-colored die, simple). Then you take all of them (including the Wrath die) and give ’em a roll.
Any 1’s, 2’s, or 3’s you ignore. 4’s and 5’s count as once success (an ‘icon’ in the game’s parlance), and 6’s count as two successes. Tally up your successes and compare that to the Difficulty Number (DN) of the challenge, which is the level of difficulty the GM has set for the task. If you’ve rolled successes equal to or greater than the DN, voila! You’ve pulled it off, well done!
Before we pop the cork on that champagne, though, there’s one more thing we need to look at. Remember that Wrath die? That die represents a kind of narrative uncertainty that could add a bit of drama and tension to your story, and it only triggers an extra effect on either a 1 (for a Complication) or a 6 (a Wrath Critical).
Here’s an example of how that might play out narratively. Let’s go back to the example of sneaking past the guard post. Your GM has told you that going to be a bit of a challenge because the guards seem competent and alert, so instead of the ‘standard’ DN of 3 this one will have a DN of 5. That means you’ll need to roll five or more successes with your seven dice.
You roll all your dice, then count up your successes. Five successes, huzzah, you’ve succeeded! But what’s that? The red die you rolled as your Wrath die rolled a 1 – a Complication! Perhaps you sneak past the guards, but when you look back you notice you accidentally dropped something halfway across. The guards haven’t noticed it yet- but they will soon. You’d better get a move on- or do you dare try to sneak back and retrieve it?
Now let’s try the opposite. Let’s say you only rolled four successes- you’ve failed to sneak past unnoticed- but you rolled a 6 on that Wrath die. A Wrath critical! Perhaps the GM informs you that you almost managed to sneak to the other side of the guard post, but- oops!– you’ve managed to step on a twig just as you got across. Think fast!
Wrath, Glory… and Ruin
As evidenced by the Wrath die on skill tests, Wrath & Glory is built to make the most of emerging narratives, things that just arise spontaneously out of the gameplay and add unpredictable and unexpected moments of fun (or groans of despair, which can be a different kind of fun).
There’s one other way the game is set up to do that, and that’s through the use of a trio of metacurrencies. A ‘metacurrency’ is something the players can spend at the table that doesn’t represent in-game objects. Gold pieces, for example, are an ingame currency, while things like ‘luck points’ and ‘fate points’ are metacurrencies.
The first of these are Wrath Points, which are not to be confused with the similarly-named Wrath die. Every player starts each game session with two of these, and they can be used to reroll failed Tests, restore Shock (your mental fortitude in the face of combat and/or death), or influence the narrative in some minor way. Remember when you snuck past that guard post but managed to drop something in the process? Maybe you decide to go back for it. You tell the GM you’d like to spend a Wrath point to have a large cloud bank pass in front of the moon at that moment, giving you a much easier time of going back and picking up whatever it was you dropped.
Then there’s Glory. These points can be used to increase your effectiveness in Tests and combat, letting you increase the dice pool for a roll, increase the damage in an attack, make Critical Hits more severe, or to make one of the player characters act next in combat regardless of where they were in the initiative order. Glory is accrued every time you roll a 6 on the Wrath Die, as well as when you roll extra 6’s in a Test. Unlike Wrath Points, Glory is a shared pool for the party allowing the heroes to help lift up one another.
The third metacurrency, Ruin, is reserved for the GM. These are points that the GM can use and essentially function like ‘Wrath Points, but for the bad guys.’ In addition to being able to swing Tests or combat in the enemy’s favor, these can also be spent to activate Ruin Actions that some of the big bads might have at their disposal. A Genestealer Patriarch, for example, can activate some of its psyker powers through the spending of Ruin, making it an even more formidable threat for the players.
Conclusion
So there you have it, the core gameplay elements of Cubicle 7’s Wrath & Glory RPG. There plenty I didn’t cover here that adds to the mechanical depth of the game (for example, the action economy of combat) but ultimately this is a system that goes lighter on the crunch and instead leans in to collaborative gameplay and emergent narratives.
If this sounds like something you might want to try, there are two points of entry. The first is the Wrath & Glory Starter Set, which has dice, tokens, six pregenerated characters and an introductory adventure that serves as the ‘training wheels’ for the game system for forty bucks (half that if you want the PDF version only).
You can also jump in with the Core Rulebook if you’re ready to get under the hood and start your own adventures in the Gilead System.
Finally, here at Goonhammer we have also introduced an occasional series called Lore & More, where we approach existing Warhammer lore with an eye towards laying it out as a system-agnostic campaign sourcebook. If you’d like to try an adventure in the Nachmund Gauntlet or with the Shield of Baal storyline, make sure to check them out!
Footnotes
- Quite the opposite, in fact. Armageddon has been the setting for a great many battles, serving as the setting for (amongst other things) the classic novella Helsreach by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, the Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon video game, and the recently-released Crusade: Armageddon wargame supplement.
- After Fantasy Flight lost the license to develop Warhammer games in 2017, Ulisses Spiele picked it up and developed the first version of Wrath & Glory. Two years later Games Workshop awarded it to Cubicle 7, who took the core concept of Wrath & Glory and streamlined/redeveloped it.
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