Back when, I started running a game set during the Thirty Years War using WFRP 2E. I love WFRP 2E: it’s such a straightforward system, and I figured it’d be negligible to pull stuff in from any of the 40K RPG books to help make things Weird without any real effort.

The one place where it’s emphatically not held up is the career system. I mean, clearly it works great for what it’s supposed to do, but for a band of misfits on the run, it doesn’t offer much past “Okay, you can transition into the Vagabond career; don’t expect many opportunities to get out of it.”

I took a run at removing it without breaking the system too much a while back, messing around with Aptitudes, a la Only War (and now Dark Heresy), but it felt like a whole lot of mess for not enough payoff.  A couple of weeks ago, I took another stab at it: working off of Black Crusade this time.

Black Crusade (if’n you don’t know), is a precursor to the OW/DH Aptitude-based system: each advance is associated with one of the Chaos Gods: load up on too many in one category and similar advances get cheaper and dissimilar advances get more expensive.  So: a Veteran of the Long War who’s loaded up on talents related to stabbing will end up dedicated to Khorne… and will have a hard time buying talents favored by Slaanesh.

I’m doing a similar thing here, with the four temperaments.

Before I go further, all of this is (hopefully more legibly: futzing with the tables here is probably more trouble than it’s worth) in PDF, Word, and Excel.

 Temperamental Experience

Each advance is associated with a temperament (see below). Characters with advances spread evenly across the four temperaments have balanced humors. Characters with advances concentrated on one temperament possess an imbalance of humors.

Total up the temperament of each of your character’s advances. (The free Common Knowledge and Speak Language do not count.)

If a character has 5 more advances of one temperament than any other temperament, his humors are out of balance and he is subject to that temperament until either A) additional advances are purchased that reduce the gap to less than 5 or B) the number of advances of a different temperament exceeds any other temperament by 5 or more and exceeds the number of advances of the previous temperament.

Balanced humors mean that all advances cost the same amount of XP.  Imbalanced humors make the advances associated with a characters temperament significantly cheaper, but advances associated with other temperaments are more expensive.  Advances listed as ‘None’ (and there are a few) always cost the Balanced amount.

For example: Aladár Árpád has 7 Choleric advances, 7 Melancholic Advances, 4 Phlegmatic advances, and 3 Sanguine advances.

• Aladár buys a WS (Choleric) advance. He now has 8 Choleric advances, which is 5 more than he has Sanguine advances. He is now Choleric.
• Aladár buys an Int (Melancholic) advance. He now has 8 Melancholic advances, which is 5 more than he has Sanguine advances… but he’s already Choleric, and his Melancholic advances do not outnumber his Choleric advances.
• Aladár buys another Int (Melancholic) advance. He now has 9 Melancholic advances, which is both 5 more than he has Sanguine advances and more than he has Choleric advances. He is now Melancholic.
• Aladár buys two Ag (Sanguine) advances. He now has 9 Melancholic advances and 5 Sanguine advances; the difference is no longer 5 or more, so he is no longer Melancholic (or Choleric) and has balanced humors.

Talents are a little more involved: they’re grouped by tiers (as in OW & DH).  Almost all of the WFRP talents are Tier 1; I’ve left the 1/2/3 in there just as a small nod towards future-proofing.  Also, I’ve added/changed three more talents, to cover the Wound/Movement/Attacks advances:

• Belligerent is a new Talent that confers +1 Attack. It may be taken more than once: up to a number of times equal to half the character’s WS bonus (rounded down).
• Fleet Footed may be taken more than once: up to a number of times equal to half the character’s Ag bonus (rounded down).
• Hardy may be taken more than once: up to a number of times equal to the character’s T bonus.