Palladium Fantasy RPG: Wolfen Empire

 

They have never reprinted Palladium RPG Book IV: Adventures in the Northern Wilderness, so if you are looking for a "book 4" for your Palladium FRPG collection, you will find some of the same material in the Wolfen Empire book. You can also throw the old "book 5," Further Adventures in the Northern Wilderness, into the Wolfen Empire compilation, so the second edition books have a numbering gap, jumping from 03 to 07. They are leaving those open for a reason, but as far as I know, all 2nd-edition books are still in print. If you want the 1st-edition books to fill the gap, get them in PDF format.

It looks like the older 1st edition books were more pure adventure books, while the 2nd Edition books switched to a mixed "rules expansion plus adventure" format. This is a good format change since you are expanding your game with each new 2nd edition book that you add.

There is some content found only in first-edition books, as I read, so it is worth having these if you are willing to convert the stats to the second edition.

This book has fewer rules, more background, and lots of adventures; so if you are looking for expansion classes and other core material, you may feel underwhelmed. The information is incredible, though, and the Wolfen is one of the races at the heart of the Palladium FRPG experience, so it is not to be missed. This truly captures the feeling of the northern Michigan wilderness during the winter, where the soul of this game started, so skip this one, since to understand the world, you need to start here.

The Wolfen are Cool

This is a Roman Empire-like collection of wolf-person tribes that are just cool in the way gritty TNMT is cool. They are not furries, since those tend to be over-sexualized and cute in an anime way. The humanoid animals in all the Palladium games (especially After the Bomb) are these gritty, mean-looking, brutal, angry beasts, and almost an anti-furry in a way, since they have that snarling, narrow-eyed look that makes the classic "dark" ninja turtle style-art work so well. They look bad-ass and cool, even the more regal pictures have this look, they could turn savage and start tearing throats out quick.

They are very much the noble-savage sort of collection of tribes and clans, and they have taken an inhospitable, frozen wasteland and turned it into their home and into a mighty empire of commerce and civilization. The Wolfen are unique and help make the Palladium world what it is, so they are a signature element of the world and the game as a whole.

The worldbuilding in this book takes center stage, and the mix of savage plus civilized just works so well for them. There are no specialized classes or special rules in this book for them; just an exhaustive gazetteer of their lands, with notes on their religion, military, government, currency, trade, and much more.

Monsters of the North

We do get new stuff, which is cool, and we get a monster section with some hefty encounter charts and a random-adventure table. The monsters are all cold-climate beasts, and they add a lot to the lands.

I would like to see more monsters here and a few NPC classes. As it is, the section works as supporting material, and I recommend the Monsters & Animals book for more creatures that live in this area.

I would also have liked to see more gear, like sleds, snowshoes, different parkas, climbing and survival gear, and maybe rules for ice fishing. I lived in the far north once and know what it is like, and having that specialized cold-weather gear would have felt right to me. We may have it elsewhere, but I missed it here. Winter weather charts and specialized rules for sleet, lake ice, hoarfrost, ice fogs, wet snow, dry snow, snowbanks, avalanches, and other weather types would have been fun too.

That cold weather has certain moods and swings, tempers, and calm moments, and it is more than just ice and snow. It is really another character in a scene and an adventure you need to deal with.

Adventures

The book closes with adventures like many of the other books do. They run about half the book, 80 pages, and provide a good mix of travel, social, combat, town, and other non-dungeon adventures. There is only one small cave map, so the adventures are more story-focused than dungeon crawlers.

It's Cold, Really Cold

To sum up, a book that is more focused on setting than rules, and this is a good change of pace from the previous books that felt like more rules and less setting. The sea adventures book felt almost entirely rules, so this being the next book after that gives us a little balance back to the series.

Compared to my other "ice kingdom" books I have read for settings, such as Icewinddale for the Forgotten Realms, this one stands up there with one of the best. The atmosphere, Wolfen, and flavor of these savage lands just work so well together, and it has this "winter of death" feeling to everything here. The civilized turn to the Wolfen is an excellent choice, and it shows a different, non-stereotypical take on something a lot of games would just leave at bloodthirsty werewolf tropes and call it a day.

And the Palladium FRPG is hitting its stride by this point, but it's not making up for the missing content. We have gods, dragons, old ones, pirates, bards, travel, ships, demons, and elementals out of the way - now it is time for more world-building.

Would I have liked Wolfen classes, magics, and professions? I would. I did feel the book was a little light on the new stuff to play with, but given the amount we just digested with the previous books, laying off the avalanche of rules and classes would be a good thing.

But having grown up in a small town on the Canadian border, this book was for me, and it is one of those that lies at the heart of this game. Those long, cold, endless days of winter, where the darkness never seems to end, the bitter, dry cold, and the sudden storms and weather shifts create a hearty breed of settlers in an equally harsh land.

This game came from those long winters with nothing to do outside; so when you look at this book, you realize that the spirit of the creators of this game is in this volume, howling like a distant wolf in the wind.

Originally published 3/26/22 on the SBRPG blog.