Wrath and Glory: Anyone Tried It?

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Now that Wrath and Glory has been out for a little while (and Cubicle7 has taken over publishing it at least here in the States), I was wondering what people thought of it and how it feels to play compared to its Fantasy Flight predecessors (Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, etc.).

I haven't had an opportunity to directly play it myself, but on the whole it DOES look more streamlined than the older games, but I can't help bit feel like it's much more "generic" than they were, having to cram a bunch of different 40k archetypes in that don't necessarily cohere as a group/theme. In the older games you had a lot more granularity, and a stronger focus on different KINDS of stories depending on which game you were playing: Dark Heresy for horror and mystery, Rogue Trader for exploration and crazy shenanigans, Deathwatch and Only War for the experience of being a Space Marine or an Imperial Guard. In Wrath and Glory, on the other hand, you can have a Rogue Trader, a Commissar, a Space Marine and different xenos as part of the same party, and while there IS in-story justification for this, the Imperium being desperate and reorganizing after the Indomitus Crusade, it feels a tad flimsy and as a result makes it unclear what KINDS of stories Wrath and Glory is trying to tell.

Am I reading this right? Is it just because we really only have the Corebook to go off of and supplemental books will put some storytelling-meat on the game's proverbial bones? If you've actually played it, what were your impressions of it? Is it fun?

[Tarik Blackhands]

I don't have any play experience with it, but at least from a read, the system seems well put together, turn order being one of the things that looks especially nice on paper. The older games honestly got a little too granular and fiddly for their own good even if there's parts to them I'll defend to my dying day (Dark Heresy 1e had the best psychic system and I will not hear otherwise).

As for the story angle, I imagine it's easier to differentiate everything by tier rather than looking at it as a whole. For instance going for the super heroic Deathwatch style of play you'd want to look at Tier 4 play where your party consists of the local veteran Inquisitor, an Intercessor, and Guardsman Marbo under a different name. Meanwhile grim (dark) and gritty Dark Heresy style play would hover around Tier 1-2. The fact the party is ""mixed"" is secondary to the fact that the tier determines the rough level of larger than lifeness your squad is expected to have (see the previous example of not thinking of a T4 guardsman as even a veteran but an essentially legendary trooper considering his badassitude is placed as equivalent to space marines)