Randomly Generating Magic Items in Warhammer Fantasy 5th Edition

I've been getting back into retro Warhammer lately, especially the infamous Herohammer games (4th and 5th editions). These editions are well known for their Fun Is Mandatory, Game Balance Is Optional attitude and that's why we love them. Powerful heroes flying around the battlefield on terrifying monsters, wielding artefacts of obscene power is just the kind of bonkers 90s nonsense that makes us 30-and-40-something gamers misty-eyed.

However sometimes things get a bit excessive and there's only so much Black Gem of Gnar or Heart of Woe spam you can handle before you have to put your foot down. Now, finding inventive ways to limit the power of magic items has always been a thing and pretty much everyone had their own house rules on the subject, and some of them are included in the article Magic Revisited in White Dwarf 222:

A fine article

Of all the potential options listed, what most grabbed my imagination was the Dangerous Free-Thinking Radical Rule, which advocated randomly assigning magic items to players. This put me in mind of character generation processes from Rogue Trader, where instead of outfitting your Sergeants and Captains etc. with bought items from the equipment list, you could instead pay a nominal points cost for a roll on a special equipment table, allowing you to randomly generate your character! Depending how the dice fell, you might come out of it with a stub gun and a knife or a heavy bolter and a vortex grenade!

A small, maddening glimpse into the bananas world of Rogue Trader

So I thought to myself, how can I translate such over the top wackiness into 5th Edition WFB? Well the unfortunate answer is with maths. So let's crunch a few numbers:

In the Warhammer Magic supplement there are 224 magic items listed with a total cost of 11,100 points, giving an average of about 49.5 pts. Now, you could just leave it at that and say that every magic item costs 50 pts and is randomly generated. Boom. Done. Madness ensues, everybody cheers.

However, we can pay at least a little lip service to fairness and game balance. Magic items are divided into seven categories, each with their own average costs. As such paying 50 points for a magic weapon or a bound spell will be a good deal on average (56pts/62pts) while a piece of magic armour will be a bad deal on average (31pts). So I came up with the following costs per category:

• Magic Weapons: 50pt
• Magic Armour: 25pts
• Magic Standards: 50 pts
• Enchanted Items: 35 pts
• Wards: 35 pts
• Wizards Arcana: 50 pts
• Bound Spells: 65 pts

So there you have it, you pay the cost to shuffle the deck and cross your fingers. Obviously you should maybe let players mulligan cards that they can't use (race-specific items, lances for characters on foot etc.) unless you truly enjoy chaos and brutality in which case players could be forced to discard unsuitable items with no refund. Ouch! As for the points costs I came up with, I have generally erred towards generosity and there is generally at least a 50% chance that players will get their money's worth, however if you want to make magic items more expensive then feel free to tweak the numbers to your liking!

Let me know what you think! Whether you're a Dangerous Free-Thinking Radical or a Hard-Nosed Competitive Type I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time!