Original Warhammer FRP: Alignment and XP

The original Warhammer roleplaying rules (WMCFRP), which pre-date the first edition of WFRP by 3 years, have a very interesting take on alignment. You can be Good, Neutral or Evil... but you can also have the alignments Avarice and Hunger. Lets have a closer look!

(Note: This is the second post in my series on Warhammer: The Mass Combat Fantasy Role-playing Game. You can read the first one here: https://gloriousportents.blogspot.com/2026/10/warhammer-roleplaying-in-1983.html )

So, WMCFRP has five alignments - in itself, that is not really different from WFRP 1st edition (which used Lawful, Good, Neutral, Evil and Chaotic on a sort of linear scale). But the actual alignment choices are different from other alignment-using games I know of. Also, alignment is slightly more game-mechanically significant than I'm used to. Overall, your alignment:

• Alters how your character earns experience
• Gives a guideline for how you should roleplay your character. 

The GM is encouraged to "exert their influence" to avoid characters acting against their alignment (such as Good characters knifing their friends in the back), though no advice is given as to how. There is also very little description on what is important to someone of a given alignment - apart from the rules for modifying experience awards, which - to be fair - gives some very clear hints.

So before we move on with alignments, lets look at how XP is awarded in WMCFRP.

Experience awards

As in most role-playing games, the GM is supposed to hand out Experience Points to players during games of WMCFRP. The basic rules are as follows:

• You gain XP for each enemy you Kill equal to their Strength score - multiplied by a factor determined by their Toughness score. A creature with class F toughness, which is similar to that of a dragon, is worth 5 times their Strength score in XP. The GM may increase this further for special abilities. (Note: The wording is slightly unclear if both Wizards and Fighters get this, or if it is just available for Fighters. My interpretation is that its for everyone.) - Note the capital K in kill - a Kill in WMCFRP might in some cases mean you just knocked them out, injured them, etc. Its really a term used for knocking someone out of combat.
• If you capture an opponent, you earn twice as much as if you had Killed them. (This is clearly possible to earn by anyone.)
• If you are a wizard and kill an opponent in fair combat using magic, you earn twice as much as for a normal kill. (This is described as extra XP, which leads me to think that normal Kill XP is available for Wizards and not only Fighters - despite the wording for Kill XP saying "Fighters".)
• You gain 1d3x10 XP for surviving a mission or adventure.
• You gain 1d6 XP for Killing an enemy hero or leader
• You gain 2d6x10 XP for defeating a Wizard of Mastery level 1 or 2
• You gain 4d6x10 XP for defeating a Wizard of Mastery level 3 or 4
• You get 1 XP for each gold piece you aquire.
• The GM should award Wizards XP as they see fit for "clever and successful" use of magic.
• The GM should award characters between 1 and 20 XP per encounter if their players "acts particularily in character", roleplaying their Alignment and Skills.
• You lose 1d6x10 XP each time you "cast a spell wrongly" as a wizard. Presumably this means triggering a fumble - which should be fairly rare with the rules as they are written.

The effects of the alignments on XP gain

While Alignment is already considered for the roleplaying awards as we see above, each alignment can further tweak the XP gains for a given character.

Neutral characters receive no special penalties or bonuses and work exactly as described above.

Good characters receive double XP for slaying Evil characters and monsters, but lose XP instead of gaining it if they slay other Good characters. (Note: the word says slaying - not Killing - so presumably these rules require actual death to trigger. So knocking another Good character out or capturing them is fine.)  

Evil characters receive double XP for slaying Good characters and monsters. They receive triple XP for killing or harming their own friends and relations. Note that there is no penalty (or bonus) from killing Neutral or other Evil characters. The GM will have to decide what "harming" means, but presumabily it means Killing someone without killing them.

Avarice characters receive no XP for acts of courage, bravery or self-sacrifice. They get double points for aquiering money. While the intention is fairly clear here, I think GMs will have to adapt it a bit - as there is no rules that give you XP for courage, bravery or self-sacrifice except maybe the roleplaying-award, but presumably other non-good characters wouldn't get roleplay XP for that either. Personally, I would consider dropping any non-monetary XP awards where the character put themselves at significant risk for an Avarice character. So still granting kill-xp for stabbing someone in the back, and even for open combat, but not if they took unnecessary risk.

Hunger characters are stated to be rare - the alignment is mostly meant for animals, though 1% of humans also have this alignment. These characters are stated to often be very obese, and they receive quadruple XP for opponents that they slay and then eat.

My thoughts

I like that alignments have an effect on XP gain, as it gives a very good guideline for roleplaying that is tied to the reward system. I also like these alignments better than the Chaotic-through-Lawful line of WFRP 1e or the Nine Alignment System of modern D&D, because these five alignments are much clearer to me with regards to what they're meant to represent: Neutral characters are just that - average. Good characters aren't just nice, they actively hunt evil. Evil characters are all about killing others - preferably with an emotional connection of some sort. Avarice characters want wealth, and Hunger characters want to eat.

They seem somewhat balanced, assuming players that are actively trying to be a functional party in a typical rpg scenario and not just murder-hobos: There will generally be less reason to kill Good characters than Evil ones, so it makes sense that Evil characters don't have a downside. Hunger characters rarely get to trigger their alignment bonus, but when they do get a chance to eat a dragon they slayed, its going to even the score very quickly. Avarice characters have a very different priority than everyone else, assuming the GM can balance their downside.

Neutral characters are the problem - they get no bonuses, while those others who have penalties can generally manage them just fine. Its also harder to actually roleplay being neutral, so its harder to trigger the roleplaying bonus for these characters. For a serious campaign, this might bear looking into.

But on the other hand, these rules do not encourage balance in other ways (as is tradition for Warhammer, Elves and Dwarves are much stronger than Humans). So perhaps the fact that some alignments are just stronger than others is intentional. And players do get to choose their alignment, so maybe this is meant to encourage players to choose something else than Neutral. If so, I applaud it, as neutral characters are generally the most boring ones.

In general then, this is a part of WMCFRP I like a lot - its sad that this got lost when WFRP was published 3 years later in 1986, and in practice replaced these rules for Warhammer-roleplaying.