World Famous Comics: Warhammer RPG: Renegade Crowns (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Renegade Crowns)
Warhammer RPG: Renegade Crowns (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Renegade Crowns)
By: David Chart Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Fantasy Flight Games Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 128 Publication Date: January 10, 2007
Product Description: Renegade Crowns is a toolbox for designing and developing principalities in the tempestuous land of the Border Princes. Inside this sourcebook, you'll find extensive guidlines for creating the lands and the secrets they hold, mechanics for creating princes, and a complete system for populating your region with Greenskins, Chaos, Undead, and other monstrous horrors. A fully detailed region to kick-off your own Renegade Crowns adventures is also provided.
campaign sourcebook This book is well written and full of great ideas for running a campaign in a difficult and politically unstable area. It's not like the other regional sourcebooks because it really only gives you the nuts and bolts to create your own region. If you're looking for a setting to run a campaign in without too much work look elsewhere, if you're looking to make a region your own and create pretty much the setting you want to play then pick it up. Would have been nice to have a slightly bigger map showing this area in relation to Brettonia and the Empire etc. but that's a small point really.
A book for Warhammer that can also be useful for other RPG setting Unlike the other books of Warhammer Fantasy rpg, this one is set more like a tool book that allow you to create randomly a whole region. To achieve this, this book contain a system to generate randomly the geography of your region. Then it provide numerous random tables to determine ancient ruins, types of menaces, regional history, individual Princes, the personality of those Princes, their relations, the communities set in the region and the hazards that can be found on your random map.
Because this book is not oriented on the definition of a Warhammer specific background, in other words, because it takes the form of a tool book offering a system to create and populate randomly a whole region with geography, history, encounters and politics this book have also for advantage to be useful for other RPG setting such as D&D. The conversion needed to do so is minimal to none.
Great World Builder With a wealth of helpful charts and ideas, and extensive background for running a Border Princes game, this supplement is a must for anyone who wants to create their own Warhammer experience. New careers, insights, and game aids make this book very excellent.
Stake Out Your Own Corner of the Borderlands The Renegade Crows: A Guide to the Border Princes hardbound supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is one of the better supplements available for the roleplaying system - and has a great deal of information useful for any campaign or fantasy setting.
That said, this is not your typical game supplement. While it does focus on a specific region - the Borderlands to the southeast of the Empire - from the begining the book sets the scene that this is a fractious, uncontrolled region, comprised of myriad smaller regions vying for power or looking to secure their niche. As such, the topography, geography and borders are largely irrelevant.
Other than some cursory information about a few standards in the Border Pinces, the bulk of the book focuses on how to create your own region within the tapestry of the Border Princes overall -- using an incredibly robust, detailed step-by-step process to breath life into your very own corder of the Borderlands.
The region creation system helps an enterprising GM create their own vibrant area -- geographical features, towns, villages, riverways, and scores of interesting oddities... an abandoned shrine, a mystic temple, a ruined city from a long lost age. There are rules to further elaborate on and detail each of these features... How was this region ruined? What monsters or threat lurk in the area? Who rules the area?
There is an excellent walkthrough of the creation process, and a fully-developed region ready for use, but it's quite fun to grab some dice and a sheet of graph paper and start plotting your own map. As the region takes shape, ideas for adventures spring to mind. The charts and tables for creating intrigue, rulers, conflicts and the other details are incredibly useful and easily applied to other regions in the Warhammer setting.
My only disappointment is that it is a relatively short book - for the price point, I would have welcomed another 10-16 pages of content detailing existing material I could immediately access rather than generate on my own. Still, a relatively minor quibble given the excellent resources contained inside this tome.
SETTING UP YOUR OWN BORDERLAND The game designers of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay continue to amaze me with their lush detail and beautifully produced supplement books. Renegade Crowns is another gorgeous book featuring outstanding artwork. Renegade Crowns is a campaign supplement that covers the Border Princes or Borderlands as it is also referred to, giving players a richly detailed, yet open-ended region to set-up their own campaigns and adventures. Note that it is not a guide to the Border Lands themselves, but rather a way for the GM to carve out their own region. Within the first few chapters, the GM will find all the information to quickly create their own unique region in the Borderlands through the use of various random tables.
These tables include things such as geography and landscapes, types of border princes, inhabitants and communities of the region, characters, encounters, and more. These allow the GM to get their campaign set-up very quickly yet there's so many options and choices provided that you never get the feeling that it comes off as bland and cookie-cutter. You could set-up a campaign a hundred times and never duplicate the exact region because the tables are so diverse. There are also tables for generating all types of random Border princes from Knights to bandits, to priests and merchants, all with their own unique characteristics.
Chapter six covers the hazards of the Borderlands including numerous different types of monster encounter tables and notes on designing monster lairs. A fantastic example of a region called Masserschloss is included and takes the GM on a step-by-step tutorial on creating a region. I highly recommend that every GM read this tutorial as it is extremely well-written and fully explains the entire process from start to finish. This really may be the most important section in the entire book.
The final few chapters deal with becoming a border prince, first by seizing power and then by holding it. This covers everything from internal court intrigue to protecting your region from external attack from rival lands. There are many adventure hooks provided throughout Renegade Crowns to get the campaign off and running.
If your desire is for power, then becoming a border Prince is a great way to go!
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
