The Border Princes book for WFRP, written by David Chart. I did the maps for this.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #459279 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Synopsis
Not only does this book provide full details of the ever changing lands of the Border Princes - with its petty kingdoms, warring princes and knife edge politics, it also provides the GM with all the resource they need to create an intriguing kingdom of their own. With full guidelines on detailing all aspects of a campaign setting, this book is ideal for groups who want to carve out their own principality from the treacherous sands of the Border Princes. Packed with background, history, new careers, extra rules and a pre-generated setting to get you started, this book provides hours of gaming and tons of inspiration for Games Masters keen to create their own corner of the Warhammer world.

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Customer Reviews

The Map is not the territory
Renegade Crowns has been written in order to encourage Games Masters to create coherent Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaigns, but it backfires by being an unbelievably dull read.
For those WFRP fans who enjoy GMing believable "home-made" geographies and political factions, and who are good at seeing the bigger picture, this book should prove very useful.
The problem with Renegade Crowns is it suffers from being too technical, too clinical and too far removed from the subject matter, namely amusing roleplay.

After an initially intriguing opening chapter or two on building your own campaign from scratch, the tone of RC deteriorates into rolling dice for everything, so although this book certainly has it's uses, it really doesn't present anything particularly new or valuable to experienced GMs, who by very virtue of their interest should have already built one or two scenarios or campaigns anyway!

In any case, Renegade Crowns is aimed at GMs who want to design entire regions of the Old World from nothing, focused in the area South of the Black Mountains, and North of the Badlands, in a kind of deliberately undefined Sand-box, as it were.
It is in these regions that geographic, political and multi-racial structures can be shaped as frameworks for large campaigns for players who want their characters to become really influential in their adventures without the risk for the GM of changing the historical/political tone of the Old World itself. It only succeeds in this goal to a lesser extent.

Importantly there's a great deal less of the sort of substantial content I'd come to expect in other WFRP expansion books - less stylish detail, few individual characters besides a handful of prince "types", no specific adventure/s, no new advance schemes, no new races or monsters or spells or equipment, and sadly little humour. You name it, you're hard pressed to find it in here!!
The only subject with any kind of ready-made feel to it is the broad outline of a region called Masserschloss - the history, NPCs and adventure seeds of this region are detailed over a paltry 8 pages. This is not a book for GMs used to extrapolating amusement from the various writers' other publications. If you are new to roleplay in general and this would represent your second purchase after the core Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay rulebook then this is likely to be a valuable buy, but I was disillusioned by it.

I found the book as a whole pretty dry and uninteresting, chiefly because of its clinical style, but also as it tends to assume that all PCs and NPCs are out for their own gain, and that that need tends to be expressed in underhand, violent and untrustworthy ways. Renegade Crowns presupposes a lack faith in the characters as heroes with really inspiring narratives, preferring to assume that most players are by default: violent and brutish, if not downright orkish in their playing style, albeit deeply Machiavellian.
I believe this assumption traps the GM into creating adventures that are dangerously narrow-spirited.
Those of you who believe that the Warhammer World as a whole should provide a framework for players to experience a wide range of sympathies for their characters are likely to be disappointed.

If on the other hand it is the case that your players want and enjoy unsubtle manipulations of power then I highly recommend this book as a tool for designing kingdoms, princely relations, domains, and hunting grounds that persist beyond a half dozen adventures.

There is little In its favour, save Renegade Crowns' succinct set of tables for generating Geography (features & size) + Place names, Ancient Ruins (usually of historical or magical interest and relevant to races in the area), generating Princes and their various relationships, settlement tables (incl. number settlements / special features / resources) and lastly tables for generating monster clans + numbers that threaten the fragile peace in the region.
Renegade Crowns does include some vital notes on how to manage the processes involved in characters maintaining their realms, and it does an effective job of exploring ways you as GM can flesh out your NPC's motives and goals, but always in a manner which made me think "why bother?!"

In summary it asks A LOT of the GM's imagination with a handy set of tools for making the process as smooth as possible, which will doubtless please GMs with lots of spare time, energy and only a modest ability to visualize for themselves. Think carefully before investing!
Check out my other reviews for examples of better WFRP expansion books!

It's good, but contradicts itself.
Right, First off, I bought this book hoping for everything I'd want to know about the Border princes. I was dissapointed yet satisfied. I realise, you cannot map out and have a history of the Border princes since, this area is pretty much a sandbox area in the Old World. You want a power crazed, wierdroot addicted noble, you make it, you want him or ehr ruling a kingdom with the peasents about to revolt, make that as well.
But the book explains all this within the first few paragraphs.

We then have a rather useful (to me at least) chapter on the landscape of the border princes, here you have your chart and you can roll percentile dice to determine what the landscape is and where, it cna get really varied, volcanoes and mountains may dominate one corner while plains and bogs take up the others. However, as the book says, these are random tables which you may choose to use or not, assuming you don't want to sue them, that's four wasted chapters. Chapter one, the landscapea s I said.
Chapter 2: Random tables for making barons and princes, some nice ideas there, but I find it more fun to make my own.
Chapter three: Inhabitants of the border princes, basically tables for creating towns, some nice careers. Not much else.
Chapter 4: Hazards of teh borderlands. How to place lairs on your map you may or may not have made in chapter two, making hordes, determining sizes etc. Not much else.
Chapter 5: General aims. How to include princes in your groups and stuff, not very sueful.
Chapter 6: Becoming a prince. Not really that useful, it has some ideas for becoming a prince, but with each idea, it hss some campaign seeds. Useful in a small way, but sometiems obvious.
Chapter 7: Internal problems: This chapter starts with an awful joke, and that joke really stretches across the chapter, teh peasents are revolting!
Chapter 8: External problems. This is basically a big how-to guide to defeating raids adn sucha dn raiding your neighbours.
Chapter 10: Making trouble: Countinuing the previous chapter basically.

Bearing all this in mind, adn seeing as I've said little that's good about the book, I myself am confsued as to why I give it 4/5. I think it gets there simply because this book is good because....it is. It does what it says at the start, it's not going to give you information and maps and stuff. It really gives you teh bones for yout Border princes campaign and it's up to you to flesh it out.

To conclude, it's a good book but make no mistake, this is not a source book.