The Mass Combat Fantasy Role-Playing Game

Though I was (eventually) an avid reader of White Dwarf, my direct experience with most of Games Workshop's other products was quite limited. I largely missed out on games like Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play until many years after the fact and even then my experience of it was cursory. That said, I do remember quite vividly the original marketing campaign for the very first edition of Warhammer, featuring the advertisement below.

Though I never bought the game – primarily because I never saw it in any of the hobby shops I frequented – I was nevertheless greatly intrigued by it. Warhammer's subtitle of "the mass combat fantasy role-playing game" intrigued me greatly. Around the time this was released (1983), I had begun to see a need for a stronger integration between personal and mass combat in roleplaying games. Consequently, Warhammer caught my attention. Had I been able to find a copy locally sooner, I likely would bought a copy. By the time I could, I had already read the lukewarm reviews of it in Dragon and so decided to pass on it. I now rather regret that, since that original edition is probably the only one whose complexity is within the range my feeble brain can handle. Ah, well!