The Enemy Within Session 6 Report (WFRP)

After an unexpected delay of a week, the group was able to get together to play out session 6.

Action picked up immediately where session 5 left off. Having discovered a secret door behind a book shelf, the characters - plus Rudolf the Protagonist - entered the secret door and followed a trail of blood they presumed was left by the head of Emilo Valantina, the now headless former leader of the Valantina Gang.

A short off topic bit here, one of the things I like about the Old World setting of WFRP is that there is no "Thieves Guild" like that found in most D&D settings; instead, a community will have one or more gangs, how many depends upon the size of the community. These gangs sometimes work in unison, dividing the vices so to speak, in an attempt not to step on each others' toes. Some are not so civil and are often at odds with each other. Many of these "gangs" are guilds in disguise. One common "guild" that is in reality a "gang" are stevedores and teamsters. Often both guilds are legally recognized by the community they operate in, but in reality, they are strong armed gangs making just as much, often more, from smuggling and racketeering operations. My last campaign was based in Marienburg, and I made heavy use of this theme, as all of the characters worked for the Stevedore "Guild".

Back on topic, the secret passage opened onto a roughly cut set of stairs which, as could be told from smell before sight, led into a sewer passage. They were not long in the sewers before a vague humanoid shape was seen bearing a whip. This vague shape was hunched and from its silhouette a snout and tail could be made out. The thing seemed to be driving a swarm of rats towards the party.

Another aside here. The players immediately thought "Skaven" when they saw the rat-like silhouette. In the Old World, there are rumors that a race of rat-men called Skaven live beneath the cities and towns. Some even believe that their lairs connect into a giant underworld. In this underworld, the Skaven worship their dark god - the Horned Rat - and plot to enslave mankind and rise up as the dominate race. Of course many do not believe that the Skaven exist; even though it is written in history that they once nearly overthrew the Empire. Many believe the tales of a secret race of rat-men are exaggerations. While it is believed that a horde of chaos nearly once destroyed the Empire, many scholars are now of the opinion that it was a horde of Beastmen that just happened to appear "rattish".

Back on topic, the swarm of rats soon overtook them and it was obvious that they had to escape quickly or die a slow death of numerous rat bites. A handy abandoned, but operational, mine cart served as an expedient escape. After making their escape, they discovered that they were not alone in the mine cart. There was a rat chewed body, covered in plague like boils. Also in the cart was an equally disfigured head. Upon the body, they discovered the item that Alphonse Oldenhaller had dispatched them to find.

The mine cart landed them in the Huyderman Gangs' base within the Asylum. They Huydermans' were also under attack, but not from the Valantina Gang. The Huydermans were under attack from some strange cultists and some sort of hideous beast. One of the cultists was a Warlock in league with the Ruinous Powers. The remaining four Huydermans joined forces with them.

The players were nervous about this combat, but in the end, they made some lucky rolls and escaped with a pretty easy win.

Suspecting that they would not get paid, they sent Rudolf - who seemed as baffled by the evenings' events as the player characters - to arrange things with Three Fingered Willy and Alphonse Oldenhaller. A meeting was set up at a ware house belonging to the Oldenhaller Mercantile Family.

At the ware house, they were greeted by Three Fingered Willy and four thugs in either his employ or Alphonse's. When Alphonse entered the room, he looked quizzically at Bartolf and uttered in the form of a question a single world: "Kastor?" Immediately after he did this, he was stabbed from behind by one of the thugs wielding a wicked looking dagger shaped as a tooth. Three Fingered Willy and the other thugs, but not Rudolf, raised similar daggers as Willy shouted "FOR THE YELLOW FANGS!"

Before Willy and his thugs could attack the characters, if they ever were going to, they in turn were attacked from a hidden enemy concealed in the rafters. The "assassin" was never revealed; however, he attacked with weapons of a strange nature. The PCs escaped the ware house as it burned, but aside from recovering a lock box containing 30 GC's, they were never paid.

The PC's spent a few more days in Nuln. They were eventually approached by Rudolf. He told them that things were getting hot in Nuln as the Schatzenheimer Gang were busily trying to find anyone involved in the events of their night at the Asylum, plus Albrecht Oldenhaller was seeking out those responsible for his brother's death. He strongly suggested that they all get out of Nuln.

He has a plan. He has a cousin in Mittlesdorf that is running a gang of outlaws and he is sure he can get the characters on, if they wish.

This adventure is not my own. It is "The Oldenhaller Contract", an adventure that originally appeared in the first edition WFRP rule book. Having never run it before, I decided to give it a go. It was fun, lots of twists and turns. It was later updated for 2nd edition and is available here as a free download.

We will be playing next Tuesday the 15th of March, but work will force me to take a two week break after that.

The Enemy Within Sessions 3, 4 and 5 Report (WFRP)

I did a quasi report of sessions 3 and 4 previously, but am reposting them here. Also, One of my players posted a report of session three

Session Three:

Session 3 was our first evening with no combat. There was actually minimal rolling of the dice. After the action heavy session 2, this was a nice change of pace. The players dug into the meat of the investigation itself and moved things along nicely. There were only three players for this session. Our new player was once again a no-show, and was for session 4 as well. We have not heard from him and at this point, I've ruled his character on official "Red-Shirt" status. Our out of town player was having technical difficulties and was thus unable to Skype in.

Session Four:

Session 4 was a different beast. We were up to what I now consider full-force, our out of town player was able to Skype in.

Having followed many clues to their conclusion, the bulk of session 4 was spent at a quickened pace. Their investigations from session 3 and a few more leads that the players followed up on in the beginning of session 4 brought them to the conclusion that a butcher by the name of Emil Stark was holding Hannah hostage. Moving at a break neck pace, they arrived at the final confrontation with Emil, whom they killed, and two beasts of chaos, one of which was Hannah the poor missing daughter of the butcher Herr Fleischer - Emil had been feeding her chaos infected sausages and the second was a missing noble rake named Rudi who had also been horribly mutated by Stark.

During the final battle, Gottfried received a critical wound to his left hand, courtesy of a crossbow bolt fired at him by a niggling little street thug named Dirty Dan (truth be told, I don't know if I ever revealed his name to the players - BAD GM! BAD!).

The group first encountered Dan in session one. He offered to take them to an inn that was sure to have open rooms for a mere two pence and instead led them into an ambush of thugs. They encountered him by chance in a tavern during session three. They were hoping for some payback, but Dan eluded them yet again. I had decided that I would give them one more chance at revenge.

It was called out in the adventure, "Sing for Your Supper" that their main antagonist, Emil Stark, was to have a lackey on hand awaiting to ambush them. I arraigned for this lackey to be good-old "I'll do anything for two-bits" Dan. When they arrived at the ambush sight, I rolled a secret Perception test for each player. None of them passed. Dan fired his loaded crossbow at Gottfried. I rolled a "10" for damage, re-rolled Dan's Ballistic Skill and confirmed the critical hit. A total of 15 points of damage was dealt to Gottfried's left hand. Gottfried passed his test to remain conscious and delivered the groups' final vengeance upon Dirty Dan.

They did not deal with the chaos mutations. Instead, they turned Hannah over to her father and the mutated Rudi, Gottfried reported his circumstance to the Cult of Sigmar who dealt with him. This occurred only after they considered burning half of the city down to take out one mutant. Our group has a history of burning cities down.

All of the above happened in session four. I ended the session leaving Gottfried's player in suspense. I didn't do this just to be cruel, that was only a small part of the reason, the main reason was I had just re-read some interesting optional rules on Barber-Surgeons and wanted to make use of those rules.

In the end, despite the fact that the girl and her father were given the final mercy by Shallyan Priests, they received their promised reward of 25 gold crowns, quite a small fortune.

Session Five:

Play action was picked up the morning following the events of session four. My first order of business was determining the fate of Brother Gottfried, Initiate of Sigmar.

I ended session 4 leaving Gottfried's player in suspense. I didn't do this just to be cruel, that was only a small part of the reason, the main reason was I had just re-read some interesting optional rules on Barber-Surgeons and wanted to make use of those rules. I did so in the beginning of session five, and they were entertaining. I was merciful by ruling that Gottfried had spent a pain filled evening at the Cult of Sigmar where they had made it a point to clean and dress the wound. This ensured that he wouldn't have to deal with the nastiness of infection. It also allowed his Fortune Point Pool to replenish.

For those that don't know Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay that well, each character has a number of Fortune Points that he can use each game day. One of these can be spent to re-roll a bad dice roll, and for a few other things as well. The number of a character's fortune points is determined by his Fate Points. Fate Points are spent to avoid death. They are not a "get out of jail free card", meaning, if a player is forced to spend a fate point to pull his bacon out of the fire, it probably means he may have been dealt a deadly critical wound. Crits are deadly in WFRP and can often result in neat new nick names like "Lefty", "One-Eyed Jack", or "Crutch". It is a grim and perilous world.

Thus, having the Barber-Surgeon appear the next day was a great boon for Gottfried. All turned out well for the initiate. The surgery was performed by an old bone-saw that had seen much action in the Imperial Army.

I let five game days pass. This allowed Gottfried some much needed healing time and it gave the characters an opportunity to spend some of the 25 gold crowns they had been paid. Willow the halfling took advantage of this, and had some new armor tailored to fit her small frame. The elven Wizard's Apprentice replenished his stock of magical components, which included some time spent trying to catch fire-flies. Bartloff, being the good protagonist he is (read "Asshole for Hire") went looking for trouble and easy coin.

Trouble he found, along with an offer to make much more money then he'd ever dreamed. He met a fellow protagonist named Rudolf (yes, he had a red nose) that after Rudolf challenged Bartolf to fight, in which Bartolf gave as good as he got, he told him that his boss, one Three-Fingered Willy, was looking to hire a few blokes for a dirty job. Rudolf gave no details, he only stated it involved busting some heads and that it would pay 100 GC for each participant. He also mentioned that if Bartolf knew a few blokes that were looking to make some coin, he could get them in on the deal. The job was to happen in a few days time.

The next night, a thief that had been secretly following Willow around after seeing her pay for new armor, tried to rob them. The players had opted to get themselves a private room instead of staying in the common room that they were previously. Willow awoke to find the thief trying to steal her purse while she slept and she alerted the other characters to the situation. They easily overcame him in a short pursuit. The thief had nothing of value on him but some lock-picks and a dagger. He was also carrying a note with a leaf motif that had one word upon it: "Malindi". Bartolf then shocked Willow with how he dealt with the thief. His solution was to tie the thief's hands behind his back and throw him out the window, where he fell upon his head, snapping his neck.

A couple of nights later, the characters met Rudolf and Three-Fingered Willy and were given more details about the job. The job consisted of raiding a place called The Asylum. The Asylum is a complex that three separate gangs use as a hide-out: the Schatzenheimer's, the Valatina's and the Huyderman's. Three-Fingered Willy is a prominent member of the Schatzenheimer Gang. He has the backing of over half of the gang behind him and he is looking to depose the current gang leader Kurt Volger. Three-Fingered Willy is being bank rolled by Alphonse Oldenhaller, the younger brother of Counciller Albrecht Oldenhaller who is a successful merchant of Nuln.

Alphonse hopes that with a newly organized Schatzenheimer gang on his side, that he can take his older brother's place as head of the Oldenhaller Merchant Family. Also, Alphonse had hired the Schatzenheimer gang to acquire an item for him. Smelling more money then what was offered, Volger has been refusing to turn the item over. Willy was made it a point to not tell them what the item was.

Willy's plan was, he had a majority of the Schatzenheimer gang willing to back him. His "boys" were to be in the hide out that evening, with Volger and a much smaller number of Volger's supporters. Willy had arraigned for the bulk of Volger's supporters to be out that night doing a job, which they were not to return from until early in the morning hours. Willy and Rudolf were going to lead the characters into the hide out where they and Willy's supporters on the inside, would slaughter Volger and his boys. When Volger's other supporters returned in the morning, they would set up an ambush, giving them two choices: accept Willy in charge, or die.

The characters were of course suspicious, but the lure of a king's ransom in gold helped them overcome their doubts. When they arrived at the Schatzenheimer's den, it was obvious that someone had beaten them to the punch. All of the Schatzenheimers were dead. The Valantina Gang had killed them leaving calling cards on the corpses that read: "Congratulations, you have just met the Valantina Anti-Personnel Crew". The characters noticed that the leaf motif on the calling cards, matched the leaf motif they had found on the body of the thief that had tried to rob them. After searching, Willy announced that the item that they were to retrieve from Kurt Volger was missing.

Willy stated that he had to report this to Alphonse Oldenhaller. He asked to characters to enter the Valantina hide out and retrieve the item. An argument occurred at the end of which Willy offered to increase their payment to 150 GC's and he was forced to tell them what the item looked like: a small lead box fixed to a chain, the lead box has a single coin in it, and it should remain inside the box. Rudolf also informed them that the calling card they had found upon the thief was most likely the Valantina's current password.

The agreed to the terms and proceeding forward, they used the password, Malindi, to gain entrance to the Valantina hideout. There, they managed to pass themselves off as stevedores. After posing as stevedores, they managed to gain an audience with the leader of the Valantina gang: Emilio Valantina; however, someone had managed to sneak into Emilo's room and behead him. They found his headless body, no head was found, nor was anything found that matched the description of the item they were sent to retrieve. A trail of blood led to a book shelf and ended. After a short search, they discovered a hidden door behind the bookshelf.

That is where play ended, session 6 will pick up in action.

Today's Find at the Hobby Shop

After many years of haunting ebay and after being outbid more times then I can remember, I walked into my hobby shop today. Not believing my eyes, I pinched myself to assure I was indeed awake, I spied a copy of WFRP Empire in Flames on the shelf.

For those that don't know, EiF is part five of the classic Enemy Within Campaign. It was published by Games Workshop many moons ago. Fans received it, and Something Rotten in Kislev - the volume preceding it, poorly. While Shadows over Bogenhafen, Death on the Reik and The Power Behind the Throne (the Enemy Within parts one, two and three respectively) were all applauded, most found the final two installments lacking.

I've run SoB and DotR, plus I've been a player in the Enemy Within up through PBtT. I own and have read SRiK. Up until now, I've never had the opportunity to read Empire.

I'm sad to say, while all the pages are there, there are loose pages in the beginning and end; however, the price I paid reflected the damage. I paid $40 and I've routinely seen this book online with a $99 price tag. So overall, I'm happy with the price I paid.

I'm looking forward to finally being able to form my own opinion on the concluding chapter of the Enemy Within.

Mini Review of Plundered Vaults and Report on Sessions 3 & 4 (WFRP)

One of my players all ready posted a report of session 3, but I wanted to add my own short report of that session and session 4 in preparation of session 5 tomorrow night and as a mini-review of the adventure and book it is found in itself.

I've been running my players through an adventure called "Sing for Your Supper" which is included in the book Plundered Vaults which you can read about here.

The book includes 3 reprints:"Rough Night at the Three Feathers", "Grapes of Wrath" and "The Haunting Horror"; and three new adventures: "For Love of Money", "Carrion Call" and the adventure at hand, "Sing for Your Supper".

Before I get to "Sing" I will say a few short words about the book itself. When it was first published in 2005 by Black Industries, it represented exactly what I had hoped for in a second edition of WFRP. When Hogshead (hereby designated "HH") stopped publishing the first edition of the game, fans such as myself were left in hiatus. HH had promised reprints of many long out of print Games Workshops titles. I was eager to buy, read and play a promised revision of the final chapter of the Enemy Within Campaign. The original "Empire in Flames", I have never owned, read nor played, but from what I've gathered, it was a flopping disappointed. I had managed by haunting my local game store and shopping online, to acquire most of the original first edition books; however, a few always alluded me. "Empire in Flames" and "The Restless Dead" were two of the few I have not yet managed to acquire. For the most part, I've given up on finding those books I've missed. The Doomstones Campaign never held much interest for me and the uber hard to find Realm of Chaos titles are too expensive for my purse.

Plundered Vaults was an early publication in the new line up. It included two scenarios from The Restless Dead, two adventures I did not own, and three new adventures. It seemed things were of to a good start. Black Industries was doing as promised. They were bringing back some hard to find older materials and publishing new material to boot. To their credit, before 2nd edition went "tits up" this promise was mostly carried out; however, a revision of "Empire in Flames" went, well, up in flames (pun intended). Now, with 3rd edition being published by Fantasy Flight Games, it is once again in doubt that an official revision to the seminal conclusion of TEW will ever see light. Three is a wonderful fan created re-imagining available by the golden pen worthy MadAlfred available for download here (I discourage my players from downloading and reading it).

I chose to open my campaign with "Sing for Your Supper" because it offered my favorite style of WFRP adventure which includes investigation, creeping doom and just the right mixture of combat. Written by Nathan Greavey, "Sing" is not a perfect adventure. While it does not necessarily depend upon players being led by their noses, it does make a few leaps in faith that players WILL follow up on sometimes obscure leads. I anticipated this ahead of time, and was able to fill in the blanks by making things jive on the fly. This didn't bother me for as GM, I welcome this opportunity. It did do exactly what I wanted. It served as a nice introduction to the flavor of the city of Nuln and despite a few false starts and a bit of moving things along on my part, it was a good investigation adventure. I added a bit more combat then was originally called for, but I did this by choice to knock the dust off the WFRP percentile dice. Now I will address the sessions themselves.

Session 3 was our first evening with no combat. There was actually minimal rolling of the dice. After the action heavy session 2, this was a nice change of pace. The players dug into the meat of the investigation itself and moved things along nicely. There were only three players for this session. Our new player was once again a no-show, and was for session 4 as well. We have not heard from him and at this point, I've ruled his character on official "Red-Shirt" status. Our out of town player was having technical difficulties and was thus unable to Skype in.

Session 4 was a different beast. We were up to what I now consider full-force, our out of town player was able to Skype in. As a group, they quickly followed up on loose ends from session 3 which launched them into the final confrontation with the adventure's villain, Emil Stark. This final confrontation involved confronting Emil himself, whom they killed, and encountering two beasts of chaos, the poor missing daughter of the butcher Herr Fleischer and a missing noble rake named Rudi who had also been horribly mutated.

In the end, despite the fact that the girl and her father were given the final mercy by Shallyan Priests, they received their promised reward of 25 gold crowns, quite a small fortune. Gottfried, our initiate of Sigmar, received a critical wound to the left hand. No doubt, they will spend part of session 5 learning the fate of Gottfried - it is not known at this point if he will be able to keep his hand -and spending some of their new found wealth. After this, I will launch them into an entirely different style of adventure.

The Enemy Within: Session 1

Two weeks ago we had our first WFRP session. We are playing Warhammer Fantasy Role Play Second edition. While I am using the second edition rules, I typically ignore the Storm of Chaos element that is embedded within the edition.

For those that do not know, when the second edition was released, it was done so with an advancement in the time line of approximatively 12 years later then that provided in the first edition. During those 12 years, the Old World was nearly overrun by a Chaos Hoard from the north. Accept for my first time running second edition, I typically ignore this timeline advancement and have chosen to do so with this campaign as well.

This will be the classic WFRP Enemy Within Campaign. Almost all of my WFRP campaigns are set within the EW, or at least in some hybrid form. Three of the current members of the group have experienced elements from Death on the Reik , but have never played Shadows over Bogenhafen. We may have one more player Skype in for the game, and he has played SoB before, but I can trust him not to ruin it for the others. We have a fourth player that has never played WFRP in any fashion as well. With this in mind, I will be playing them through SoB, and an abbreviated version of DotR before launching into The Power Behind the Throne and beyond. I did choose however, not to start them with SoB, but something else. If all follows my nefarious plan, the characters should be in their third careerer, or close to it, by the time we play tPBtT.

We had one missing player of our typical four, but that was okay as I was expecting a slow start. We spent half the session making characters. When characters were completed, I started the characters out on a river barge destined for Nuln. I had considered before hand playing out the river barge journey, utilizing part of DotR along the way, but decided against it and brought them straight into Nuln.

I gave them a bit of flavor text so they could get a sense of what Nuln is like. To the best of my memory, I don't think I've ever portrayed Nuln to this particular group. I tried to give them a sense of how important the Gunnery School is to the populace. Also, Nuln was one time the capital of the Empire. With this sense of past pride, the nobles and noble-wanna-bees of the city are very fashion sensitive. The latest fad in Nuln to date are exaggerated and extravagant cod pieces.

By the time they made their way off the river barge, it was late and drizzling rain. The characters were seeking shelter and not having much success. A beggar offered to lead them to an inn where he was sure he could find lodging for them if "the g'zz 'im a couple shillins". They were not surprised when he led them into an ambush.

Since we had one player who has never played WFRP in any form before, and for the benefit of all as it's been a while for the old guard in the group, I had decided to have a combat early in the session to warm up the dice. I placed them against four thugs and didn't expect them to have too much trouble with them. Also, a TPK (Total Party Kill) had abruptly ended our Tunnels & Trolls campaign, so I was not inclined to make it difficult. I did decide to keep my dice rolls in the open though, as I still believe in letting the dice fall where they may.

They did win the combat, but I was a bit surprised that one player ended the combat with 1 wound point left and another with only 4. In WFRP terms, this meant that the player with only 1 wound remaining was heavily wounded and could only heal one wound point per week without the benefit of a physician. With a physician, she can earn one wound point per day maximum. When she reaches four wound points, she can then either heal one wound point per day, or visit a physician and heal 1d10 per healing session. In short, she was not in good shape.

After the combat, they did not have any more luck finding an inn. They did find one with lodging available; however, a mishap with the door and the an extortionist inn keep convinced them to not stay there. They were lucky enough to have a town watchman take pity upon them. He allowed them to stay the night in a cell and even fed them a meager prison breakfast of gruel in the morning. He suggested to them that they may be able to find work at the Reik Platz. At the Reik Platz, there is a tree where job notices are posted. They would, he warned them, have to find different lodging for the night.

They thanked him and set out on their way. The first found lodging, then after asking directions, found a physician. There visit to the physician went well for them. Only the heavily wounded character is still injured. After paying the physician, the still wounded character, a female hobbit, went back to the room to rest. The other two players, a male human Protagonist and a male human Marine went to the Reik Platz to seek work. They found four possible leads for jobs posted at the tree.

That is where we ended the session. Not much was accomplished and most of the night was spent with me spouting flavor description to them to illustrate Nuln and the Old World to them. I was surprised by the level of carnage reached during the combat, but in the end I was pleased as it showed very well, especially to our new player, just how deadly combat can be in WFRP.

I'm handling experience very ad-hoc. I am simply awarding 25 xp per each hour of real time played. Our average session length is 3 hours. I'm offering a 25 xp bonus for a short session report, which if I get any, will be posted here.

We didn't play this past week, but hope to next week.