By Chris Acuff

Behold: Wrath and Glory. 

If you’ve been around internet nerd culture for more than a 30 minutes you’ve probably come across Warhammer: 40,000. The universe created by the British company Games Workshop, which combined with its fantasy worlds has built a company valued at 8 billion USD. That’s quite the dragon’s hoard to gather off of the backs of plastic miniatures. 

I, like many other idiots, have been convinced to shell over a large amount of money to buy those miniatures. Games Workshop has even been successful in convincing us that it’s actually a good thing that you have to put them together yourself AND spend a ton of time learning how to paint them all in the name of personal customization. Honestly, good on them, I’m a bit jealous. 

That being said, despite their domination of the wargame environment, and the breadth of their built up universe created with tons of novels and supplemental board and video games, they haven’t had any big breakthrough into RPGs. The Rogue Trader video game that came out relatively recently is an exception. 

There is, however, tucked away in the dark depths of your local game store, staring out at you with red, lidded eyes and crackling with warp-born potential, a TTRPG rule system published by Cubicle7 games that I think is an absolute blast. 

Wrath and Glory is a TTRPG with a wide open rule set in which to explore the setting. You can run a game as pretty much any of the numerous factions- and better yet, since they are quite literally all bad guys- you can finally run that evil campaign that never really felt right in DND. 

Why I actually want to talk about this game though, is because I am a bit tired of D&D. I have played the system basically every week since before fifth edition came out, and I have been desperately trying to get people to try something- anything- else. Maybe you’re like me, and also happen to like 40k, if so, I recommend this system, and this is why.

(Get away from me with your offers of pathfinder, it’s too similar, and I want something built for a sci-fi/sci-fantasy setting. It was between this or Lancer, and unfortunately for Lancer, I have already run a few one-shots in this system.) (Don’t go away Lancer, I still am interested. Giant robots will never not be cool) 

There are a lot of things I really like about this system, but I am going to focus on the 3 aspects to make my sales pitch: 

1. The game uses a D6 system for dice. You get a pool of dice equal to your skill, only certain numbers count as a success, and there’s rarely just a flat number you add on. Plus, a “critical” success or failure happens 2/6 of the rolls! This system makes the game incredibly dynamic and swingy, matching the.. Ahem.. chaos… of the setting. ALSO, rolling a critical does not guarantee success or failure. You can fail a roll and still get a crit success, or succeed and still get a complication- these results do not overrule the regular roll, but instead act as “yes- ands” or “ no- buts” or “no-buts” to the result. As a very Improv-forward DM, I love this. It gives me so much to work with, and it makes the dice feel more a part of the narrative than they do normally. 
2. Meta-Currencies: I’m not going to go into too much detail, because it is complicated, but suffice it to say there are 3 different meta currencies. 1 that is unique to each player, 1 shared by all the players, and 1 that the DM can use. These all allow for some incredible moments, and satisfies that urge that so many players have for their character to “dig deep” and find something that they can use in a desperate moment that isn’t otherwise available. They are incredibly cinematic, and my absolute favorite use, and a mechanic that I may port over to other games, is the idea of a “narrative declaration.” For spending 1 of the personal meta currencies, a player can ask the GM to add something specific into the game story, to alter reality and give them options in whatever scenario they find themselves in, but also to be a part of the narrative in a way that is normally closed off to players. (Example: Add fuel barrels to an airfield’s surface. The players shoot them, and use the thick black smoke to signal their starship to pick them up.) 
3. THE LORE – This game systems invites you into the vastness of the 41st millennium. 40k has a metric shitton (technical term) of novels and lore books all written at the behest of selling more models. Many of these books are bad, or at best mediocre. But there are a few gems out there that make you ponder what the nature of life and time means to a being like a million years old, who has watched a planet evolve through its life cycle. Or the grasping, clawing fight for survival against the nihilism of a hateful universe, Or trying to maintain a sense of humanity in “the most terrible regime imaginable.” All with gratuitous levels of violence thrown in of course. Maybe it is because I have bought in and drunk the kool-aid, but running games in this universe gives me a feeling of telling a story in a world that is much larger, in a world where the universe does not revolve totally around my characters, and yet is still wonderfully engaging. It is a feeling the wargame also seems to get, and something I just do not feel when playing many other systems. No small part of that is because of the massive amount of worldbuilding and lore and art that many, many people have put out over the years. Even if, cynically, it was all for the goal of selling more minis. 

If you, somehow, are able to convince your table to try something OTHER than D&D, and if, somehow, that table also has a few 40k nerds at it, I cannot recommend this system enough. 

I am running an all- space marines game right now, doing some slight tweaks to the specifics of character creation to make it work for a party of all the same archetype, and depending on how it goes, I may do a write up. It has been a lot of fun to plan.