Warhmamer 40K Wrath & Glory (Cubicle 7 Re-Release) Review
That may not sound too impressive to folks unfamiliar with the sheer madness that is the grim, dark future of 40K. However, once you get a foothold in the lore you should soon appreciate how tricky it must be to make a game that can handle the adventures of a squad of Imperial Guardsmen—essentially normal humans armed with lasguns, numbers and little else—and horrifyingly powerful psychic alien ninjas all at the same time.
Much of this is down to a rather clever tier system that allows you to pick a power-level for your campaign, dictating what kinds of characters the players can choose and what kinds of threats they might face. At tier one you might play common soldiers or low-ranking ork boyz just looking to survive until your next meal, while all the way up at tier four you get inquisitors debating the fates of entire planets and towering primaris marines wading through battlefields without a scrap of fear. On a superficial level this isn't too dissimilar to the pitch of many more conventional RPGs, where you might watch heroes grow from low-level nobodies to world-shattering gods over the course of a campaign, but in Wrath & Glory characters tend to stick in the tier where they're created. Instead, you experience the different levels and modes of play by creating new games and hopping into fresh campaigns, rather than slowly climbing up the tier ladder.
This feeling of scope and scale isn’t just supported by the campaign formats, either, but also by the rules. The core of these are handled by a fairly standard d6-based dice pool system that feels superficially similar to that found in Alien RPG and other Free League titles, with the amount of dice you're throwing depending on a combination of raw stats and skill training. Any roll above a four counts as a success, but the GM gets to decide exactly how many of those you might need to pass, which can mean that some truly challenging tasks might require a number of successes that are virtually impossible for low-tier characters to roll. It's a functional enough system, but things beging to get really interesting when you enter combat and start trying to resolve damage.
Like many other systems Wrath & Glory makes use of soak rules—essentially, your attacks need to deal a certain amount of damage before you actually cause any injuries—but where it stands out is in the sheer resilience of many iconic foes and the incredibly limited emphasis placed on damage rolls. A conventional lasgun, for example, deals just seven damage on a hit, with the potential to go up to nine on a really good roll. A chaos space marine, meanwhile, has a resiliance of ten.
This means that if you choose to drop even a single one of them onto a tier-one party of guardsmen packing standard-issue gear, the only way their weapons can ever cause so much as a scratch is by using special abilities or aiming for the eye-slits on their helmet. Finding the right gear or engineering a situation where they can take it down without being blown to shreds might be the focus of an entire mission, or maybe even a short campaign if the GM keeps resources scarce. At the same time, though, you can throw the same enemy at a band of heroes in the third or fourth tier, and the addition of only a few numbers to their kit and their abilities reduces it to a tough but entirely reasonable challenge, all without having to inflate or shrink numbers to an absurd degree
It’s an interesting design decision, and one that tends to provoke instant hatred among those who don’t like it. However, it certainly does a great job of making adventures feel grounded in the 40K universe, where invulnerable god-monsters are all in a day’s work.
Beyond this, the ruleset is a solid example of action-heavy roleplaying, with the heaviest and crunchiest elements revolving around combat. The list of ranged weapons alone runs to more than 60 entries, for example, all of which have their own stats and special abilities. Combined with a wealth of combat options and a trio of different meta-currencies that players and GMs alike can spend on everything from re-rolls to speed boosts, it can be a game that demands a fair amount of attention and system skill from its players. Knowing the right weapons and armour to pick, and what choices give you access to them, feels even more important than in most combat-heavy RPGs, and if you aren't clued up on what's useful in a firefight it’s pretty easy to accidentally build a character that feels weak.
Honestly, Wrath & Glory feels like a system designed to appeal to the wargamers that are 40K’s main player base, where the aim is to get as much fun from rolling dice and planning attacks as playing your characters. Whether this is a good thing or not is going to depend heavily on your table.
One final thing to note is that this review has been written for the latest release of Wrath & Glory, published by Cubicle 7 in Spring 2020. This is less of a second edition of the game, and more of a 1.1 release; one with a much more user-friendly layout and where most of the major mistakes that made reading the initial version of the game an absolute slog have been excised. The changes that have been made are mostly small edits and rules clarifications rather than sweeping re-writes, and generally the quality has shot right up. The book is entirely playable, which feels like a strange kind of compliment but is something worth flagging up to those put off by the first release. Still, despite the massive increase in readability the latest version of the book (at time of writing) is still riddled with a fair few typos. It’s nowhere near as bad as the first release—they’re annoying, not game-breaking—and Cubicle 7 have promised updates somewhere down the line, but it’s still worse than you’d like to see in a PDF currently selling for $30 a pop.
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