Hello All,
I just bought the RPG Wanderer set, been reading through the PDFs.
I see that there are a lot of extra downloads, but honestly I have no clue which ones I need for RPG only. I play with friends that are all over the place, so we chat through Discord and play that way. So no tabletop, other than virtual.
Can anyone tell me what extra downloads I need and which I can ignore?
Also, I don’t see a way to create a character from scratch, only via Archetypes. Am I missing something?
Thanks!
The rpg, while it does not technically need the miniatures, does require a lot of the components of the game such as Dice, Item cards, Perk Cards and Unit Cards for the Overseer to use against the players everything else can be ignored or not as the Overseer see’s fit including the measuring sticks if you are not using a board at all.
The Archetypes are starter characters and then you add scars etc to customise them, I’m hoping there are more in the works and I know there is a Full stand alone RPG in the works (Hopefully for summer next year) using Modiphius quite lovely 2D20 rules set which I’d wager would run very similarly to their Conan and Infinity systems
You will need the various sets of item cards (Chems, Equipment, Mods, Power Armor and Weapons) from wave 1 & 2 for both GM and players. I know you’re playing online, but for those playing in person you will ideally want a couple of copies of these cards - more for some of the consumable items like Chems, food & drink, grenades, etc.
The perk cards are not really necessary, as all the perks (and more) are listed out in the RPG rulebook - and a couple of them are changed slightly to mesh with the RPG rules. Either way, the RPG introduces a lot of perks for which there are no skirmish game cards.
The unit cards are useful to the GM (aka Overseer) to use as adversaries. In most cases you can just use them as-is with no modification, other than choosing appropriate gear and/or perks. Again, I know you’re playing online, but for face-to-face play I’d recommend printing them 9 to a page (3x3) to use as a sort of “monster manual”.
You’ll also need the playmats (basically the character sheet), and errata, and that should be about it. I found it handy to have copies of the reference sheets from the back of the skirmish game rulebook handy as well (the rules for the RPG are basically just a superset of the skirmish game rules, so these reference sheets work for the RPG too). It is free to download from the Modiphius F:WW downloads page.
There are currently no official rules for creating your own characters from scratch. I did some math a while ago and came up with some guidelines, but they haven’t been playtested and almost certainly don’t use the same process Modiphius used to create and balance the Archetypes - so use with care:
Enjoy the game - I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.
One more tip I thought of:
When I ran the RPG, I actually put together a quick word document which contained a table laying out 1x large card (portrait) and 2x small cards (landscape), and copied/pasted the relevant cards and equipment from the PDFs into that. I could normally four fit sets of unit+item cards per page, which gave me one A4 page per encounter with all the opponent stats (including item cards) in one handy place. I printed them, but you could equally use it for online play.
Much less fiddly than trying to deal with multiple cards at the table.
Unfortunately I just printed them and didn’t keep them, so I can’t share, but it should be pretty easy to put something similar together yourself.
Interesting. Had I known that I probably would not have bought the “Standalone Expansion”, which is kind of a contradiction.
Thanks for all the tips, Gribble. I’m really struggling with all the cards, and having to look in 6 different PDFs for the things I need, then trying to figure out what the icons mean on each card, which means flipping to the icons index repeatedly, and wondering what to do when an icon isn’t in there. sigh
If you cannot find an icon post it in the forums and someone will probably know what it means
Yeah, there is a steep learning curve for sure. When I first sat down with it, my head was definitely swimming. There is a great game behind all the complexity though, so persevere if you can.
Fortunately, I found it quickly becomes intuitive, so hopefully it does for you as well. And as TheOldBadger said - feel free to ask here and people who are more experienced will be happy to help. 