Fee Fi Fo Fum

When we left them last time, the party -- Aelric the elf-mutant wizard, Magnar the iron-clad meat shield, Drandruel the wuxia wood elf, Rudiger the alleged vampire hunter, and Thorek the suicidal maniac trollslayer -- were roaming the Drakwald hunting for ingredients for a ritual that was hoped would cleanse the Chaos-tainted bell clapper they'd picked up in Averheim. They'd encouraged a pack of wolves to give up their skins and convinced a minotaur to donate his head and so, laden with bloody trophies, they headed back to Middenheim for the ritual. On the way out of the city they'd paid a local hunter to guide them through the forest but they'd sent him back earlier with professor Robertus von Oppenheim and so had to find their own way back; for some reason, despite growing up in the forest and, you know, being an elf, Drandruel had no ability whatsoever to navigate in the wilderness or follow a trail and the rest of the party were even worse off so it came as little surprise that they blundered around for a bit, until the sound of something huge stomping around nearby brought them to a halt.

Scampering up a tree, Drandruel spotted the head and shoulders of an enormous humanoid above the tree canopy just a few metres away from the party. There was a brief -- and hushed -- conversation as the group decided that they -- or rather Thorek -- were still a bit beaten up from their encounter with the beastmen and that they'd come back to deal with the giant later. Thorek of course wanted to deal with the giant then and there but wiser heads prevailed. Also, Thorek's player was absent and let's just say that when he's been at the table he's been role-playing the part of a suicidal dwarven drunk very well.

Rudiger sneaked up after the great beast and followed it to its lair in a hillside cave, making a note of the location for later, then the party carried on to Middenheim. Once again they were charged an entry fee and once again they grumbled about it but paid their dues; they had a plethora of adventure hooks to pursue in the city and I assumed we'd be spending a number of sessions there but I suspect that the high prices on almost everything put them off. I can't wait to see what they make of Altdorf, capital of the Empire.

The quivering lump of gore sometimes known as Thorek was dropped off with the priestesses of Shallya once more, along with yet another donation to the temple; they left the city before they could discover whether the temple's new roof would be dedicated to the dwarf. While their friend recuperated the rest of the party zipped around the city ticking off their To Do lists; the wolf pelts were booked in for urgent -- and of course, expensive -- preparation to be worn as cloaks during the ritual, the minotaur horn was given to a halfling herbalist for grinding into a fine powder, and Aelric went back to the Collegium Theologica to research giants and their habits. The wizard also tracked down the family heirloom he'd pawned for petty cash back in Averheim and its current owner, Johann Scheune of the Middenheim Marauders Blood Bowl team; it seemed that Scheune had given it to an elven maiden of his acquaintance in order to woo her, but the bitter and twisted Aelric cared nothing for the petty concerns of love and romance and convinced the footballer to return the bauble in exchange for a necklace of similar worth.

Later, in a tavern, Rudiger was approached by a bawdy woman with a moustache and an eyepatch who turned out to be Olaf, the gentleman of dubious employment history the thief-turned-vampire-slayer had asked about not-so-legal job opportunities a few days beforehand. Olaf told Rudiger that some friends of his had been arrested for a crime they did not commit and that their trial was in a couple of days; there was only one witness to the alleged theft and Olaf wondered if Rudiger and his friends could arrange for said witness to change his story. Rudiger and Magnar agreed; Aelric had got rather drunk by this point and lost track of the conversation, becoming fixated instead on Olaf's moustache and wondering if all human women had such voluminous facial hair.

The next morning, heads pounding just a little, the party went to the temple of Ulric to meet von Oppenheim and conduct the ritual of cleansing. The professor gave each of them a job to do during the ceremony: Drandruel was to stand at the doors and howl like a wolf, Thorek was to hold a stone goblet filled with wine aloft for the duration of the ritual, Rudiger had to walk a defined path around the temple with a lantern, Aelric had to hold the tainted clapper, and Magnar was supposed to guard the sacred flame of Ulric itself. All went well, aside from Rudiger finding his path blocked by a locked door -- only a minor obstacle as he'd stolen a set of temple keys days earlier -- and Drandruel having to fend off a drunken Knight of the White Wolf who thought it would be a grand jape to join her in her howling.

Oh, and von Oppenheim got burned to a crisp by the sacred flame when he thrust the clapper into it but given that the entire temple didn't explode and the clapper's taint seemed to have been removed, certain members of the party considered his immolation to be an acceptable outcome.

The party stuck around Middenheim until von Oppenheim's funeral, at which Aelric and the dwarves each spoke to varying degrees of embarrassment, then they left the city -- leaving Olaf's job unfinished -- and returned to the giant's cave. I'm not sure if giants in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay are rubbish or if my rolling was poor but the closest to any sort of peril for the party came when one of the giants -- for there was more than one; plot twist! -- fell on Magnar as it died, but the dwarf is so tough at this point that he emerged from beneath the great brute unscathed.

On the plus side, Thorek struck the killing blow on one of the giants and so was at last able to progress to the giant slayer career. It is unlikely to improve his chances of survival.

Still Fighting On

After a lengthy absence old school gaming magazine Fight On! has returned with its fourteenth issue!

I have a couple of bits of art in the issue but the real treat is the ninety-ish pages of old school gaming goodness from Lee Barber, Patrick Farley, Jeff Rients, Gabor Lux, Peitsa Veteli, Kevin Mayle, Douglas Cox, Chris Kutalik, Jennifer Weigel, Tom Gordon, Michael Curtis, Sniderman, Calithena, Richard Rittenhouse, Hudson Bell, Michael Mornard, Baz Blatt, Jonathan Linneman, Simon Forster, Gavin Norman, and more. I believe there will be one more issue after this one then the magazine will be retired; I hope that ultimate plan changes.

You can buy the issue in old-fashioned paper format here and in pdf here.

Farewell Dwarf

I haven't bought an issue of White Dwarf since last century but even so the news that the magazine is to end in February has come as a bit of a shock. I may not have read it for over half my life but even so there was a certain comfort in knowing that it was still out there, plugging away each and every month; it looks like the magazine is going to be replaced by a weekly newsletter version but White Dwarf as I know it is going away and that makes me sad.

I wasn't even aware of it during its golden -- pre #100 -- age and my current enthusiasm for those excellent early role-playing-heavy issues is all down to going back and catching up with what I missed. Even so, White Dwarf is responsible for getting me into the role-playing hobby in a roundabout way.

I had been playing Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and reading TSR novels for a number of years but I wasn't a gamer as such so I was just the sort of person that Games Workshop and MB were after with HeroQuest; one day I'll write about that venerable game but for now it's enough to know that I loved it. Then one day while in Hailsham town centre -- probably looking for comics -- I saw the HeroQuest logo on the front of a magazine and that was it for me.

The magazine was full of games that I didn't recognise but I did know that logo and I could tell that that the orcs with guns on the back cover were akin somehow to the ones in my HeroQuest box so I bought it and read it from cover to cover. Then I bought the next one, and the next, and I bought Space Marine, and started playing Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer and Blood Bowl, and I was very much a Games Workshop man. Then one day +Timothy Coxon told me that if I liked the orcs-with-guns of 40K then I would like the orcs-with-guns of Shadowrun and I discovered a whole new hobby. Some time later I found out that the magazine I'd been reading had once supported my new pastime and so I went back and uncovered a wealth of great content that still influences me today; my own Forgive Us owes no small debt to early White Dwarf articles and adventures.

So here's a pint of Bugman's Best raised in thanks to White Dwarf for years of enjoyment -- both direct and indirect -- and I suppose that at least this will stop people saying that it isn't as good as it used to be.

Thieves of Time

If you contributed to the fundraising camapign -- thank you -- you will have received an update about this already but after what has seemed like aeons I am pleased to say that Forgive Us, the adventure anthology for Lamentations of the Flame Princess that started out as Horror Among Thieves, is complete and is in the layout stage. I've seen a rough version of the book and it looks amazing, thanks to the clever eye and deft skills of Eero Tuovinen; I don't know if I'm allowed to show off any of the pages from the rough draft so here instead is one of the maps from the book picked at random.

I will post further updates as we get closer to the actual publication of the book. Having worked on it for so long I am more than a little excited to see it getting closer to completion but I must be honest and admit that there's a little bit of trepidation mixed in there too. I hope people like it.

Beastly Behaviour

In the last session of The Enemy Within II: Freddy's Revenge the player-characters resolved to meet up with the witch hunter Adele Ketzenblum after pursuing her for weeks. The two dwarves Thorek and Magnar also resolved to not get into any more unnecessary drinking competitions -- although they'd argue over the proper definition of "unnecessary" -- before the important meeting, so that they'd be at their best if things went wrong. Alas for the party, the meeting with Ketzenblum did go a bit wrong as they let the less-than-charming Magnar do the talking. Again. I'm not sure what Magnar's exact Fellowship score is but it only just scrapes into double figures and both Rudiger and Aelric are much better speakers, although I can understand why the latter, a skull-faced mutant elf wizard, was reluctant to talk to Ketzenblum, given her profession. On the plus side, the meeting didn't turn violent, but it was clear that the party did not make a friend.

The party returned to Professor von Oppenheim to tell him about their success at the temple of Ulric, and the somewhat addled academic revealed that the ritual he expected to perform -- and that Aelric expected to result in the complete destruction of Middenheim -- was a bit more complicated than the party thought and that there was list of requirements for success, including acquiring a number of fresh wolf pelts and a quantity of powdered minotaur horn.

While this discussion was going on in von Oppenheim's study, the two dwarves headed to the college canteen for an eating competition, since they were banned from drinking while on the job. After a good few rounds of thick bread and hearty stew Magnar ended up with a stomach ache and Thorek ended up with vomit in his beard -- and across the canteen -- but also with the respect of the student body, if not the caretakers.

Rudiger knew that according to Middenheim custom the party would have to kill and skin the wolves themselves but Magnar and Aelric thought they might be able to get away with buying the powdered minotaur horn. They found a halfling market trader who claimed to have some for sale but her ruse was discovered and after some persuasion from Magnar -- it says "Intimidate" on his sheet -- she agreed to crush the horn for them if they brought one to her. This did leave the player-characters with the small problem of finding a minotaur and convincing him to give up part of his head.

Ranald seemed to smile on them -- as he would later on -- as they not only found a trader who spoke of a woodsman he'd met outside Middenheim who said he'd seen a minotaur accompanied by a tribe of beastmen, but they also found a hunter named Jost who agreed to both help them find a wolf pack and take them to the woodsman's hut.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay doesn't have a simple metric for determining the strength of an encounter -- there is something of a vague and half-hearted attempt in the monster book for the second edition -- but you can sort of guess and wolves shouldn't be much of a challenge to a group of characters as experienced as this party, and so it proved to be. Sort of. Killing the wolves wasn't a problem but making sure that everyone -- including a reluctant von Oppenheim -- each killed one was more difficult. As a result the last of the pack was chased around the forest as the two dwarves sprinted on their stubby little legs in an attempt to tackle it; given that both are former Blood Bowl players, one would think they'd be better at such activities.

The beastmen were more of a challenge. The party found the woodsman's hut burned to the ground and the woodsman himself eviscerated and hanging from a tree -- this was my little bit of Christmas cheer -- so Jost refused to go any further and returned to the city with von Oppenheim. The beastmen had shown no attempts to be stealthy so even the untrained party had no trouble following their trail to what seemed to be an ancient elven temple deep in the woods. The creatures of Chaos had defiled the place in the name of their dark gods by erecting some sort of altar or shrine made from offal and bones and were camping nearby; the minotaur was chained to the temple itself for some reason.

Rather than ponder the religious significance of the beastmen's odd living arrangements the party assaulted them. Or rather Thorek did. Regular readers will remember that the trollslayer also blundered into the undead-infested tomb and the skaven lair; the other members of the party are considering investing in some heavy chains for the impulsive dwarf.

Thorek was of course spotted and the rest of the party rushed to his aid. Rudiger dived into cover and Aelric held back as a voice only he could hear seemed to be urging him to stay away from the temple; the language was unknown even to him but the meaning was clear and the elf thought it might have something to do with the iron ring he'd found in the aforementioned tomb. Perhaps Thorek should get one.

The battle at the temple was the biggest fight we've had in WFRP2 so far but it was smooth and uncomplicated, even with a shaman, a chieftain, two squads of beastmen -- one of which arrived part of the way through the battle -- running around, and the minotaur too, although he wasn't doing as much running. We're not playing with the alternate initiative system any more as the players didn't like it but it would have been interesting to see how it would have worked on such a scale. After the game, the players all said that they felt genuine peril during the battle but as Ranald smiled on them again and I rolled a 90 or above for almost every attack their characters were never in much danger; the minotaur turned out to be a mutant with a magical third eye that inflicted a crippling malaise on a few of the party members and Thorek was mauled by the beastman chief -- almost losing his arm -- but they made it through the fight without too much trouble.

Poddo Bayleaf, the party's loyal barber-surgeon, was not so lucky and was spotted hanging around at the back unguarded, so a couple of beastman skirmishers started chopping him into pieces until he ran off in a panic. After the battle the party found him cowering under a bush and he soon lost himself in the cheerful work of slicing and sewing. Aelric and Magnar destroyed the altar of bones and Rudiger discovered a secret compartment in the temple pool; it contained a number of scrolls but the water got in and ruined them before Aelric could examine them.

Next time, the party returns to Middenheim for the all-important ritual -- assuming they are not waylaid before then -- and we see if Aelric's doom-mongering proves to be accurate. The death clock is ticking for Thorek at least, as the trollslayer is now out of Fate Points.

Battle-Axes and Bureaucracy

The previous session of The Enemy Within II: Money Never Sleeps ended in a cliffhanger as a band of marauders led by a HeroQuest Chaos warrior ambushed the party on their way to Middenheim. The group had heard stories of a vast Chaos horde rampaging through the northern half of the Empire and had seen Averheim's preparations for the war, but this was the first time they'd seen the face of the enemy. It wasn't long before they were kicking in the face of the enemy too.

Some very poor rolling on my part led to the marauders being somewhat less than effective as the dwarves soaked up the few attacks that did land and Rudiger and the elves danced about causing damage to the unwashed savages. Aside from a brief panic when the warrior spotted Aelric alone and unguarded at the edge of the fight and charged him, the most nerve-wracking aspect of the battle for the party was that the warrior's helmet was ruined by one of the wizard's lightning bolts and so wasn't able to be looted.

If you've read any Mark Millar comics it was akin to the limp resolution to one of his cliffhangers, except at least I wasn't doing it on purpose.

After that, the group arrived in Middenheim and were more upset about paying the one crown gate toll -- despite having the marauders' horses to sell for forty crowns each -- than anything else they'd run into so far in the campaign. Capitalist dogs, every one of them.

Once within the fortified city the party split up. Rudiger began investigating less-than-legal job opportunities in the city, while the dwarves rented a forge and spent a couple of days modifying the warrior's armour to fit Magnar, and Aelric headed off to the academic district to see if the not-at-all mysterious iron ring he'd found in the undead-infested barrow had any unusual properties. Rudiger made contact with a one-eyed fellow called Olaf, who promised to keep him in mind if anything lucrative came up, while the elf wizard played a series of chess games against the barman of a student pub -- his victories netting the party a one-off group Fortune Point -- and wandered about the Collegium Theologica, after a while bumping into Robertus von Oppenheim.

Von Oppenheim was the academic that they'd been sent to meet regarding the skaven bell clapper but before they discussed such unimportant matters Aelric asked the professor to examine the iron ring. In return von Oppenheim asked the party to organise a meeting with the priests of Ulric so that he could get access to the sacred flame of their temple in order to conduct his experiment on the clapper. The professor -- not much of a people person -- had been writing letters to the clergy but had not received any response to his requests; upon arriving at the temple and having to convince a corpulent clerk to arrange an interview with a young priest in order to arrange an appointment to access the flame, the party could see why, suspecting that Ulric was perhaps also the god of needless bureaucracy and that the letters were probably stacked on a desk somewhere in the depths of the building.

The group had some other business in the city. Back in Averheim, Aelric had been forced to sell an ancient elven heirloom and had heard it had made its way to Middenheim in the hands of one Johann Scheune, a name that seemed familiar to Magnar for some reason he couldn't quite place; they decided to not bother with that tantalising plot hook and instead went looking for the witch hunter Adele Ketzenblum, last spotted outside Talabheim, and a possible source of information on the party's apparent nemesis, the Black Hood. Ketzenblum herself proved as elusive as ever but the group did discover that she was presiding over a trial at the temple of Verena the next morning and made plans to return the following day, assuming the two dwarves didn't get too hammered -- ho ho -- in the meantime.

It Shouldn't Be a Surprise; The Game Is Called Warhammer After All

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a reputation for favouring investigation over combat so it felt a bit odd when my group's most recent session of The Enemy Within II: The Quickening was more or less fighting from start to finish. Part of this was the result of unlucky dice rolls but part of it was because these players seem to go out of their way to get into fights sometimes. Too much Pathfinder, I suspect.

Rudiger had just graduated from thief to tomb robber so on their way to Middenheim on a mission for Luminary Mauer -- to destroy the tainted bell clapper they found in the skaven lair -- the party decided to stop off in a part of western Stirland known to be scattered with the burial mounds of the ancient Styrigen tribal kings. This expedition went much as expected; traps sent piles of rocks bouncing off Magnar's tough skull to no effect and Thorek went around smashing burial urns and sending clouds of corpse dust into the air and into everyone's lungs, so now everyone is worried that they've contracted some kind of tomb rot.

Ho ho. As if.

The barrow was of course infested with the undead. The party faced only wights and skeletons but most large or supernatural monsters cause fear in WFRP, which can be quite dangerous as a character affected is paralysed and unable to flee or defend themselves, let alone attack. The griffon at the garden party and the large skaven mutant both proved to be tough opponents for this very reason but the risen inhabitants of the barrow didn't make much of an impression on the party and didn't last long. Alas for the tomb raiders, bashing skeletons wasn't as lucrative as they'd hoped and so with only minor loot to show for their troubles -- some old swords, a bag of Reman coins, a couple of bits of not-mysterious-at-all jewellery -- they returned to the road and headed for Middenheim.

They stopped off at a coaching inn and while most of the group retired to bed the two dwarves decided to have a drinking competition in which the loser would be the first one to fall unconscious. It was something of a draw and as such, the two toughest fighters in the party were out of action when a skaven assassin sneaked into the player-characters' room during the night to steal the artefact. Drandruel leaped through the small bedroom window and across a few metres of open space, to land on the narrow top of the inn's surrounding wall right next to the fleeing thief, a feat so implausible that the other player-characters were as surprised as the skaven. With Rudiger and Aelric in support, the rat man did not get far -- by "not get far" I mean "was blasted into atoms by Aelric's magic" -- and the bell clapper was recovered. Meanwhile, the dwarves dreamed of gold under the mountains as they snored in sticky puddles of their own vomit.

The rest of the session was made up of random encounters along the road to Middenheim. The Enemy Within II: Havana Nights is written for the third edition of WFRP but I've been running it in the second edition of the game and it's been easy to convert as there isn't a great deal of rules material in the adventures. The main exceptions are the little bits about travelling between cities; there's all sorts of stuff about building dice pools and counting symbols and the like but I simplified it into:

On the Road Again: Half-Arsed Travel Encounters in WFRP2

For each leg of the journey the party should make a single roll against a value chosen based on their method of travel. If the party are travelling by foot, then they should use Toughness or Navigate; Ride or Drive if travelling by coach or wagon; Ride if on horseback; Row if using a boat; or Navigate or Outdoor Survival if avoiding the roads and going cross-country. It's not an exhaustive list and I tend to let them use any skill they like if they can make a good argument for it being appropriate in the context. The difficulty of the roll should be modified by conditions so for example if the road is in poor repair there may be a -10 penalty.

The key bit is that one roll is made for the entire party so the player-characters should choose the highest value among the lot of them if they want to succeed. My group missed out on a sub-quest that would have given them a carriage and a professional driver for the trip so had to rely on their own resources and skills.

If the roll succeeds then that leg of the journey goes without a hitch but if it fails then the trip has been rough and tiring and each member of the party is at -10 to all rolls until they have rested. If the roll succeeds by 10 or more -- we call this a "raise" because Savage Worlds has corrupted us -- then the party has a friendly encounter but if it's failed by 10 or more then there is a less friendly encounter.

My players fumbled every travelling roll except for one -- meeting a group of Strigoni travellers -- and even that turned a bit ugly when they started bullying an old lady for being a stereotype. At another point, they were assaulted by a giant spider -- and this time the fear effect was more, er, effective -- but managed to get rid of it before it could harm anyone except for their plucky halfing surgeon, Poddo Bayleaf, who got poisoned and was rigid with paralysis for hours.

The last roll of the evening was one more travelling test to cover the last stretch of road before Middenheim and relative safety. Of course they fluffed this roll too and we ended the session with a band of mounted marauders bursting from the trees, led by a platemail-clad warrior of Chaos.

Random Skull Face

Last time on The Enemy Within 2: The Enemy Within Takes Manhattan the player-characters solved the mystery of the missing people of Averheim but were too beaten and bruised to deal with the apparent culprits, a trio of skaven, so the rat men escaped into the sewers beneath the city. As Aelric the wizard-in-training recovered under the watchful -- and expensive -- eyes of the sisters of Shallya he researched possible sources of the tome of magic he needed to progress in his studies; he identified a handful of other wizards in the city but the party decided against trying to rob them and instead focussed on rumours of an abandoned wizard's tower a day's travel from the city walls.

When Aelric and Thorek the trollslayer had both recovered from their injuries the party searched for traces of the Black Hood, the new crime boss in town; it had not escaped their notice that the skaven they faced had been wearing black cloaks. They started by trying to get retired racketeer Frederick Grosz's gang on side, only to discover that the Hood had already recruited the ruffians and had given them instructions to kill the party. Grosz'z former gang of lowly street thugs were no match for the player-characters but in the confusion of the fight the leader of the group -- and the only link back to the Black Hood -- was decapitated by Aelric's wild magic.

Frustrated, the party decided to head to the abandoned tower of the wizard Johannes Pappenheimer. There they ran into a group of bandits using the ruin as a hideout but made as short work of them as they did the gangsters back in Averheim, although the bandit leader got a lucky hit in on the otherwise near-invulnerable Magnar -- an invocation of Ulric's Fury for about twenty points of damage -- and the idea of searching the cellars of the tower for the wizard's belongings with the dwarf so weakened had them all spooked, so they chose to return to Averheim and resume the search when rested and better prepared.

A day later they arrived at the gates of Averheim to hear the sound of bells and streets thronged with people. While they were away news had reached the city that raiders from the northern wastes had swept through Kislev -- Warhammer Russia, more or less -- and had broken into the northern part of the Empire. The Emperor was raising an army to fight the barbarians and there was great excitement in Averheim with many young men signing up for the front; with no desire to fight, the player-characters decided to lie low and hope that no one noticed them. A letter on Aelric's doormat from captain of the Averheim garrison Marcus Baerfaust requesting their presence suggested that such subterfuge was already too late.

The party rested and the next morning Aelric woke up feeling quite unwell, his face feeling prickly and hot. Looking in the mirror he discovered that all the flesh had fallen from his face leaving a hideous skeletal visage; his scream brought the rest of the group upstairs and insanity points were handed out to one and all.

Back when they were running around the sewers looking for rat men Aelric had picked up a tainted throwing star with his bare hands and failed the Toughness roll to resist corruption; his body had been warping ever since but only that morning had his mutation blossomed. In the spirit of fairness I had Ben roll his own mutation for Aelric and he could have spent a Fate point to avoid his, er, fate, but he was quite sporting and decided to keep his new face.

After that shock and the subsequent discomfort of watching Aelric trying to eat breakfast, the party went shopping. They bought a decorative mask for the wizard -- they think they can pass it off either as an odd elven custom, noble fashion, or weird wizard stuff -- and secured the ongoing services of Poddo Bayleaf, a halfling barber-surgeon with perhaps more enthusiasm than experience, but also cheap, keen, and oblivious to the inherent dangers of hanging around with the player-characters. With their plucky new assistant in tow they then returned to the tower for the most underwhelming battle ever. The cellar of the tower was swamped in magical energy, clear to Aelric's witchsight but palpable even to the less aethyrically attuned members of the party, the source a secret room emanating a dull pink glow. The room seemed to be Pappenheimer's secret study, complete with a workbench covered in magical paraphernalia and a bookshelf of musty tomes. Oh, and a magic circle holding some sort of daemon.

Aelric sneaked into the room to grab one of the books but before he could say "don't disturb the magic circle lest you release the daemon within" Magnar disturbed the circle and released the daemon within. The brief panic that ensued was somewhat unnecessary as the daemon failed to slap Aelric to death then was smashed into a pulpy pink goo by one blow from the trollslayer. There was a chance that the thing would either explode or multiply upon death but neither happened, to my great disappointment.

With a grimoire of celestial magic in their possession the party returned to Averheim and went to see both Baerfaust and the wizard Konrad Mauer to ask them for help in tracking down the Black Hood. To their surprise Baerfaust asked them to help him find the mysterious villain, sending them to talk to the witch hunter Adele Ketzenblum, while Mauer knew next to nothing but did give them the job of taking the corrupted bell clapper the skaven had fashioned to Middenheim for cleansing or destruction. By a curious coincidence -- and nothing to do with soft railroading -- it turned out that Ketzenblum had left Averheim and was heading for Talabheim, which just so happened to be on the way to Middenheim.

Chainmail Burqas and Sewer Elves

(For a suitably comedic look at the campaign so far from a player's perspective have a look at Stuart's blog.)

After a brief break for a bit of Savage Worlds we returned to The Enemy Within II: The Wrath of The Enemy Within last week, picking up in the aftermath of the worst garden party ever. Both dwarves had been dragged off to the temple of Shallya for emergency treatment, leaving the thief Rudiger Adler and the elves Aelric Shadowstar and Drandruel to investigate the scene of the crime. Some good and clever investigation turned up a number of clues including a possible connection between the wound that enraged the rampaging griffon and the bodies found at the docks, and an unusual throwing star that gave Aelric a sickly feeling deep in his stomach when he touched it.

There was an interesting clash between player and character knowledge at this point as a couple of the players suspected the involvement of skaven but in the setting most people consider the rat men to be an urban legend; to the considerable credit of my players they kept to what their characters would have known and it was made a bit easier for them by having two dwarves in the party -- dwarves being well aware of the existence of the skaven, Magnar describing them to an incredulous Aelric as "light and agile, like elves, but living in sewers" -- and by the wizard Konrad Mauer identifying the throwing star as a weapon used by the creatures.

Things moved fast after that. With Thorek and Magnar out of immediate danger the party put their clues together and decided that there was something fishy going on at the docks. Ho ho. Their investigations brought them to a certain building on the waterfront and that is where things started to go wrong. Thorek blundered into a trap and set off an alarm, forcing the party to think fast and abandon a more stealthy approach, then he decided to run off and circle around to assault the building from the other direction. By himself.

This may seem like a rather stupid thing to do and perhaps it is, but Thorek is a trollslayer, dedicated to dying in glorious combat with some fearsome beast, so it is also rather in character.

Inside the building the party found a skaven sorcerer who waved his little claws in elaborate patterns in the air and vanished in a puff of green smoke. They also found a seven foot tall skaven mutant who -- alas for them -- did not vanish.

The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay rules on fear are quite brutal and both dwarves found themselves frozen to the spot as the frenzied giant bipedal rat launched itself at them. Everything went a bit chaotic -- small "c" -- as the trollslayer was smashed into a pulp for the second time in as many days, Aelric got his ribs crushed by the mutant and then punctured a lung when trying to clamber over a wall to safety, and Rudiger had a brief rooftop battle with a third skaven before diving off the roof wuxia-style and nipping inside the building -- while the mutant was busy trying to eat Aelric -- to loot the skaven lair. Magnar, clad almost head to toe in heavy mail as he is, walked out of the fight without a scratch.

The player-characters' assault occurred in the morning so a crowd soon gathered and the skaven fled into the docks' dense tangle of twittens and ginnels. Inside the rats' lair the player-characters found the remains of most of the missing people -- although Rudiger's brother was not among the bodies -- the gold plaque stolen from the aforementioned garden party, and an odd silver bell clapper that gave off the same eerie vibes as the jade mask from the party; when later presented to Mauer, the wizard suggested that the two artefacts may somehow have been the same object.

That's where we left it, at the end of the first book of the campaign. It has gone quite fast, with three chapters being completed in four sessions but the structure of the campaign changes in the next book so it's difficult to predict if that will be just as swift. Before we get to that there are some loose ends to tie up and once again there are two members of the party in serious need of healing; in Pathfinder what happens is we kick the door down, kill all the monsters inside, then steal their stuff. In WFRP what happens is the door gets kicked down, the monsters kick the player-characters down, the player-characters steal the monsters' stuff, then they run away. I love it.

Zombie Titan

I have been meaning to mention both of these snippets for a while but I'm rubbish at promoting myself, so that's why I'm only now announcing that I was asked to get involved in Nerd Titan's Halloween gaming article. The request came as a bit of a surprise and I suspect I missed the point a little with my contribution but the rest of the article is good stuff and well worth reading.

The other bit of news isn't late because the book isn't out yet, so I can still tell you that the Borderline Press anthology Zombre is available for order right now. My contribution to the book is a single page so I feel like I can promote it without the embarrassment of promoting myself. I haven't seen any of the stories from the anthology but I know some of the names of the writers and artists involved and they're a talented bunch so I'm sure it'll be a good book and a bargain at £12.95.