If you have not seen the news, Black Industries has decided to cease production of all game products to focus on producing and selling novels. Black Industries (BI) is a division of Games Workshop and has produced the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, 4th Edition of Talisman, and the new 40K RPG Dark Heresy.
I have purchased quite a few of the WFRP products and I really like what they did with the game. I played my first game of WFRP in 1988 and have been playing on and off since. I can safely say that it is my favorite RPG ever. I do think that BI has done a great job of supporting the game with products and on their website (they do state that they will continue to for a while). I am in much better shape relating to WFRP now than I ever have been and that is due to the hard work of the guys at BI. I just think it is sad that Games Workshop has once again decided to kill off some of it’s brands, seemingly at the height of their popularity. Perhaps if GW had pushed the game in it’s retail stores a bit more sales would have been better.
The announcement from BI states that this is being done for financial reasons, and I can certainly understand that, but I don’t understand why they feel the need to basically kill of the product line with an announcement like this. It’s worse for Dark Heresy which was just released (and is already sold out). Fan support will always be there for WFRP, assuming that GW continues to allow it.
What kills me is that GW has a ridiculously strict IP policy, and a terrible track record of allowing third parties to work with their IP. I hope that if they do allow the license to be used, they do so in a way that is not restrictive to the point of death for the licensee. Trying to run the RPG against the back drop of the world created by the miniatures game has got to be hard enough for a GW subsidiary, it would be awful for a 3rd party.
I wish the BI guys all the best in the work that they do, I imagine that this is as much a pain for them as it is for me and other Warhammer RPG fans.