When it comes to overpowered heroes taking on legions of disposable minions, Wrath & Glory allows the GM to bunch of several enemy troops into mobs that effectively act as one buffed-up foe, giving players the chance to be suitably awesome while still presenting them with a threat. This is another area that 40,000 RPGs have often struggled with, as the fiction of the universe often has huge gaps in the strength between different species and factions. Once you hit the table the game is chunky without being too fiddly, with a major focus on combat. This not only allows you to jump between tiers of play, but also gives scope for playing around with factions that don’t see eye-to-eye, which range from Aeldari Corsairs – think space-elves with their traditional arrogance dialled up to 11 – to gloriously silly Ork Kommandos. While it’s possible to run long-form epic campaigns in Wrath & Glory, the system seems best-suited for comparatively short adventures. At first tier the party could be made up of a few soldiers or thieves dealing with problems that impact a town or city, while fourth and fifth tier campaigns see famous heroes in millennia-old powered armour set out to save entire star systems. It avoids the issue of pairing up nigh-on invulnerable Space Marines with the famously fragile human grunts of the Imperial Guard by breaking out the game into five separate tiers of play that will last an entire campaign. Earlier 40,000 games have aimed to capture the blood-soaked world of Games Workshop’s flagship wargame a piece at a time, but Wrath & Glory instead goes for an all-encompassing route. It’s a setting that blends the aesthetics of Soviet tenements with death metal album covers, where regular humans fight alongside gene-spliced demigods, the nominal good guys are xenophobic fascists and mystic powers have a decent chance of melting your brain.Īs you might expect, this can throw up a few challenges when it comes to creating an RPG – if you tried to slot in a traditional D&D party the elf would be instantly murdered while the paladin could conquer a small city single-handed. The 40,000 universe is a mish-mash of a thousand different sci-fi and fantasy tropes that flips between outrageous power fantasies and unrelenting horror. However, this comes packaged alongside a rulebook stuffed with confusing design decisions and a worrying amount of outright errors. Of all the RPGs based in the grim darkness of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Wrath & Glory probably comes the closest to pinning down its chaotic, customisable and often contradictory tone.