Age of Sigmar Roleplay
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Age of Sigmar Roleplay (or, to give it is full title: Warhammer: Age of Sigmar Roleplay: Soulbound) is a roleplaying game set in the universe of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, and is basically its equivalent to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with rules more in line with Wrath & Glory. Much like how Age of Sigmar is more overtly High Fantasy than Warhammer Fantasy, so to is the RPG; whereas Warhammer Roleplay presumed that players started off as a bunch of randomly generated Low Fantasy schlubs who had virtually nothing and would probably die on their first adventure, with starting careers like Dung Collector, Rat Catcher and Beggar, Soulbound goes a different route. Adventurers in Soulbound are literally divinely touched; each has been selected by one of the non-Chaos gods to act as a champion, and subjected to a magical ritual that transformed them into something more than human - assuming they survived the ritual that magically linked their spirits with those in their adventuring party, which is the source of their power and their potential to grow into badasses almost on par with Gotrek & Felix. Not that all Soulbound are good guys; many join a Binding (as Soulbound adventuring parties are called) for power, fame or wealth, or simply out of desperation.
Rules
The rules are pretty much like Wrath and Glory, except considerably more simplified. Each character only has three stats (Body, Mind, and Soul) to derive everything from. Tiers and Levels have also been done away with, considering how vast the gulfs between racial power levels are, with XP now only being used to buy your skills and talents.
Like W&G, you roll on dice pools combining stats and skills to make your testing. However, rather than the static value for success, the target number for a roll to be considered a success is determined by the test's difficulty, as is the number of successes you need. In combat, you have a particular resource called Mettle, which you can spend to on your rolls to influence how many rolls or successes you got.
Combat also takes a decidedly FATE-like approach, where movement is highly-abstracted into Zones and ranges are similarly generalized. However, here Initiative is a legitimate stat and thus it takes a linear order of progression.
Glory and Doom exist here as well, though in different ways. Glory would be renamed "Soulfire" to emphasize it's nature as an inter-party resource (and to which the Sigmarines cannot contribute considering that their souls are already property of Sigmar himself). Soulfire acts like WFRP's Luck, letting you re-roll tests, turn a test into a sweeping success, restoring health, and even cheating death - something that was usually reserved for a very limited resource like Fate. This is offset by two factors: One is how any actions you take with Soulfire requires the entire party to consent to it or else risk giving the GM a die of Doom. The second is that the quantity doesn't necessarily restore per session, but only on accomplishing character goals, expending downtime, and a few very rare exceptions. Doom, meanwhile, no longer acts as a GM resource for dickery and instead a vague tracker to determine the threat level of the enemies.
Races
Soulbound allows players to play five different species by default; Human, Stormcast Eternal, Aelf, Duradin or Sylvaneth. A sidebar promises more racial options in a future product, though it's likely even then it'll probably only extend to other Order races (Seraphon being a standout here), with a maybe for Destruction races and an even bigger maybe for Death races.
Archetypes
The analogue to WFRPG's Careers, Archetypes are the class structures, though they also serve as a way to establish membership in specific subraces - if you want to specifically play a Fyreslayer Duradin or an Idoneth Deepkin Aelf, you pick the appropriate Archetype. That said, there are rules for custom archetypes if you wanna build more generic or unseen concepts (Such as the Lumineth Realm Lords or maybe just more Freeguild equivalents), like you could in W&G.
The Soulbound corebook contains the following Archetypes:
- Battlemage - Human
- Black Arc Corsair - Aelf
- Darkling Sorceress - Aelf
- Excelsior Warpriest - Human
- Trade Pioneer - Any
- Hag Priestess - Aelf
- Witch Aelf
- Auric Runesmiter - Duradin
- Battlesmith - Duradin
- Doomseeker - Duradin
- Akhelian Emissary - Aelf
- Isharann Soulscryer - Aelf
- Isharann Tidecaster - Aelf
- Aether-Khemist - Duradin
- Endrinmaster - Duradin
- Skyrigger - Duradin
- Knight-Azyros - Stormcast Eternal
- Knight-Incantor - Stormcast Eternal
- Knight-Questor - Stormcast Eternal
- Knight-Venator - Stormcast Eternal
- Branchwych - Sylvaneth
- Kurnoth Hunter - Sylvaneth
- Tree-Revenant Waypiper - Sylvaneth
The Mortal Realms
Whilst an overview of the realms and history of the Age of Sigmar world are presented in the Soulbound corebook, the corebook focuses on adventuring in the Great Parch region of Aqshy.