What is the Warcraft RPG? Hruon Firesinger, shaman of his tauren tribe, stood atop a hill and looked east: out upon the sweeping lands of Mulgore as a southerly breeze played over his fur and whispered through the grass. A sense of rightness and stability touched the edge of his thoughts, felt through his feet planted firmly upon the ground. Yes, here the tauren people could make a true home… here they could stand against the centaur, here they could explore their traditions freely. As the sun bled over the horizon, Hruon Firesinger smiled. It was a smile of grim determination, which his people would need to keep forging their new homeland — but it was also the smile of hope. Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game! You've clicked those units and completed those quests online. Now is your chance to make Azeroth and the stories of its heroes and epic battles truly come alive. With World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game (the WoW RPG), you can explore the world of Warcraft at your tabletop, in sagas of your own making. The WoW RPG is a tabletop roleplaying, also called a pen-and-paper roleplaying game. Imagine you and a bunch of your friends, sitting around a table, eating pizza, drinking sodas, and inventing stories set in the Warcraft world. That's what the WoW RPG is all about. Each player creates a character that represents his alter ego on Azeroth, much like in the World of Warcraft computer game, except for one player: the Game Master. The Game Master controls everything except the other players' characters. The Open Gaming License World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game uses the Open Gaming License (OGL), created by Wizards of the Coast. The WoW RPG, therefore, is fully compatible with the world's most popular tabletop roleplaying game—and with just about any other game that makes heavy use of a funny-sided die called a d20. Unlike the World of Warcraft computer game, in the WoW RPG there are no limits to the feats you can accomplish, the maneuvers you can attempt, and the lands you can explore. That is the power of tabletop roleplaying games: if you can imagine it, you can create it. And the imagination is a more powerful video card than anything nVidia can create. To play World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game, one player in your group needs the WoW RPG core book. That's it. The WoW RPG book is a complete game, containing everything you need to create epic characters and forge your own legends in the Warcraft world. The other books provide additional options: more character types to play, more loot to discover, more foes to overcome, and more lands to explore. Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game! Azeroth will never be the same. A New Edition The WoW RPG core book updates the rules from the previous Warcraft RPG game. Why, you might ask, did we make a change? Quite simply, we could not miss the opportunity to update, improve, and evolve the game in conjunction with the release of Blizzard's World of Warcraft MMORPG. More importantly, we took the significant step this time of going the OGL route so that we could freely explore and express all the facets of the Warcraft computer games in the pen-and-paper version. The end result is a game that faithfully honors the core concepts presented in the original Warcraft RPG and comes closer to the vision of the Warcraft universe as developed by Blizzard. The WoW RPG book uses the same basic rules system as the previous edition, so the older books—the Warcraft RPG book, the Alliance & Horde Compendium, Magic & Mayhem, Lands of Conflict, and Shadows & Light — are compatible with the new edition and are valuable resources for your adventures on Azeroth. You will see some important differences between the revised and original Warcraft RPG games, and we wrestled mightily with each change that we incorporated (the bruises are still clearing up, trust us). Therefore, we offer a free conversion document [download] to help you make the transition to World of Warcraft the RPG.