Dim & Perilish Adventures

WFRP 1E was published in 1987. At the time, Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 were extreme satires of fantasy, scifi, British popculture, and British political philosophies. The Orks of Warhammer 40K were distinctly designed with cockney accents and rude sociopathic behavior because GW’s writing staff hated football fans and slipped all their worst qualities in one scifi race. The history of Warhammer begins with lighthearted dark comedy.

In the early 2000s, the artstyle and influx of new fans, and a general entertainment shift to darker storylines removed a lot of the funny from both settings. 40,000 embraced the grimdark, lost the comedy that can only still really be found in the Caiphas Cain books, and the overly serious Horus Heresy series delved into the psychology between fathers and sons and growth and transhumanist meanings in space along with a whole… blahblahblah. Fantasy underwent a similar transformation, with Games Workshop rebranding WFRP 2E under the phrase “Grim and Perilous,” using the phrase every four or five paragraphs.

When FFG purchased the rights to make rpgs with the Warhammer IP, they kept up the grim trend, but WFRP 3E panned, resulting in the creation of Zweihander, an rpg about a world worse than standard Warhammer, upping the Grim and Perilous count to once every other sentence. WFRP 4E at its core tries to return to form with the lightheartedness, but not enough.

Dim & Perilish is my attempt to return Warhammer closer to its roots as stupid, but artistic, parody. When you play a Dim & Perilish adventure, yeah sure, you’re probably going to die, but you’ll die to an Orc striving to live up to the Bretonnian chivalric code. You’ll walk into a town in the Border Princes run by an Orc Sheriff with an Elf deputy. Norsemen will walk around with painted faces and guitars and outminstrel bards with harps. You’ll hopefully laugh. And if you don’t, please feel free to email me at SirWillTheOkay@protonmail.com and tell me why. And finally, if you are into Warhammer because of the overly oppressive atmosphere, that’s what got me into it too. It just doesn’t have to be run like it all the time.

Please Drive Better,

Sir Will The World’s Okayest GM