The Old World: Grim and Perilous

be the discovery of some important information,
the defeat of a less important follower
of the main adversary, the closing of a minor
subplot, etc. Achieving these goals should happen
quite often and will therefore be the main
source of XP for player characters.
Major goals are the turning points of a story
and achieving them closes a chapter of a campaign.
It can also be the closing of a character's
personal storyline or a large side storyline.
We suggest granting - XP for achieving
a minor goal and -XP for major goals.
At your discretion, you may also grant an occasional
XP for brilliant ideas or playing to
a character’s motivations. Altogether, it should
be sufficient for Players to feel their characters
are developing but won't result in runaway
power creep.
But how many goals should be achieved in
a single game session? Usually, it will be - minor
goals in a regular game session with an additional
major goal if it's a chapter's finale, but
the true answer is - it doesn't really matter! You
will have sessions where not a single goal has
been achieved and sessions with multiple goals
completed. We want to untie XP gained from
a number or length of the game sessions and tie
it to what actually happens during them. If your
Players are active and focused on the game, they
will surely achieve something. But if it's one of
those slacky sessions where you mostly chat
and joke (there's nothing wrong with that!), we
believe players will understand if their characters
get little or no XP.
Magic Items
When it comes to magic items, if you are using
the default adventurous tone in your campaign,
one or two moderately powerful magic
items (e.g a sword with additional + damage
or a bow with Guided item quality) per chapter
should be enough to reward the PCs. The exact
number of magic items available to PCs is
at your discretion, although at the end of a long
campaign, each of the characters should have at
least one.
Characters Background
Our experience shows that Players whose characters
have an interesting background with
personal threads that appear during the game
sessions have much more fun and less often
abandon the ongoing campaigns. Note that we
do not encourage you to persuade players to
write long stories describing the history of their
characters, but rather to make players think
about how the characters are part of the game
world. They certainly have families (forget lone
wolves and vengeful orphans! This is an awful
cliche…), acquaintances, possibly close friends
and former enemies, and maybe unfinished
business that could culminate during the campaign.
Genesys gives you Motivations - a powerful
tool that allows you and your Players to
easily create new personal threads for the characters.
Why do characters fear what they Fear?
How did they find their Strength or what drives
their Desire? These questions can be answered
during your sessions to add additional depth to
the story or build a character arc, but they can
also become a subplot or even the main plot of
an entire campaign.
Weaving the personal threads of characters
into the plot of a campaign will result in greater
Player involvement, which will translate
into the overall quality of the campaign. It also
perfectly harmonizes with the previously proposed
dependence of the experience gained on
achieving personal goals.
You may notice our strong emphasis on giving
a family to a character. We are aware that having
family may be seen as a handicap for some of
Players. Especially when in previous games family
members were used only to torment the PCs
or serve as low effort adventure hooks. To counteract
this, our advice is to make some members
of the PC's family important characters, or at
least a way to sometimes offer some help to PCs.
Speaking in the context of the game mechanics,
family members may provide numerous small
favors but rarely big favors as well.
Changing specializations
and professions
Classic Warhammer campaigns share the common
issue that the makes traditional career
system impractical as they do not provide time
for the professional development of the PCs.
Fortunately, this problem is greatly reduced
in The Old World as characters cannot change
their starting careers and it's unlikely for them
to have enough XP to spend on more than two
specializations, especially if they want to purchase
a specialization outside their career. In
200 The Old World: Grim and Perilous