On Sunday, my RPG group completed The Enemy Within, a lengthy campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition. Now finally free to talk about the plotline without ruining things for my players, I started a lengthy blog post about the things I liked and disliked, and the things that needed reworking in The Enemy Within.
Yesterday I posted about 3000 words on things I'd do differently if I ran it again, and today I'll blather on for about that long again.
***SPOILER WARNING: the following contains MAJOR SPOILERS for The Enemy Within (for 3rd Edition WFRP)***
As a reminder for those who missed
yesterday's post, The Enemy Within is divided into Four Books, each of which takes place in a different geographic region. Book One is in Averheim, Book Two is Middenheim, Book Three is Altdorf, and Book Four takes place in the Chaos Wastes (essentially hell itself).
We Don't Need No Social Actions In Middenheim
Book
Two is kind of a problem, and definitely the weakest chapter of the
scenario. It's not nearly as sandbox or detailed as Book One. It's not
nearly as tight and structured as Book Three. It's just underdeveloped.
The players come to Middenhiem with three quests, but they can safely
ignore all but the most annoying of them.
I've
discussed previously how the NPCs in Book Two are under-developed and have no stats. I provided home-brewed stat-cards for them here. That was months ago, so now I'd like to talk about other elements of Book Two that drove me up the wall.
The
main quest (of the three quests in Book Two) has to do with the Corrupted Bell Clapper. This is vital to
the plot, and must be accomplished... but it's also a big deceptive hose
job. As written there's 100% chance the players will actually fail in
their mission, and a 95% chance they'll think they succeeded. At the
time, it probably seems to the players as an innocuous side-plot and a
nice change of pace. It's only much later in the campaign that the
players will realize it was a terrible bit of railroading. That they
were being manipulated by the Devil himself (Tzeentch) is epic and very
true to the setting, but it's also kinda awful the way this situation
has zero chance of success. PC actions can alter all sorts of little
details along the way and make the tasks and consequences more or less
arduous, but no matter what they do the players are actually going to
lose here, and they won't know it. While that's great drama, it sort
loses sight of the fact that RPGs are not Movies/Plays/TV.
The
quest also takes several days to complete, and more-or-less runs on
frustration and stonewalling, with several unsympathetic NPC
gatekeepers. This is another section of the module that probably runs
better as a biting satire or over-the-top farce than as grimdark
realism. That works in Paranoia, with all it's commie-mutant-traitor nonsense to
have you laughing at the fubar bureaucratic nightmare, but the
mutant-traitors in Warhammer don't wear fuzzy red ushankas. As I said yesterday, if only the tonal advice on page 147 had been on page 5
(or even page 87) you'd get a more consistent and rewarding experience
for the players. The PCs should feel frustrated, but you really don't
want the _Players_ to experience that particular emotional state too deeply.
The
one part of the quest that's really cool is the ritual itself. I really
admire the way it's broken up in to turns with an interesting action
and die roll for each PC during each step. It's frustrating that even if
every single PC succeeds at every single die roll the ritual just
doesn't work, but again, it'd be an awesome plot for a TV series where
the audience can see how they're being manipulated as it's happening.
For the interactive collaborative storytelling of an RPG it's kind of a
let down, since you generally want PCs (and players) to have some impact
in whether they win or fail. It reads fine on the page, but in actual play it felt cheap and hollow to me. I think the players enjoyed it, but they don't know how badly they were being shafted.
There's
two other quests running concurrently with that one, both of which
involve the crazed Witch-hunter who is secretly a Slaanesh cultist. Both
of these quests have a lot more agency for the players in that they can
more directly influence how things play out and have much better odds of
success. Unfortunately, many play groups are likely to feel they get a
satisfactory resolution of those quests from a single scene. I mean, you
don't really want to spend any more time than you have to around the
Witch-hunter, and the person she's put on trial is a stranger to the PCs
and business rival to their employer. You could sit back and avoid the
plot, and everything would end up mostly okay.
The
saving grace is that there's a whole other subplot about cultists that's
only tangentially linked to main plots. If the players seem bored, or
are willing to let the witchhunter do her thing off camera while the
clock advances on the bell clapper plotline, the GM has a number of
hooks for introducing some excitement (and chaos) to the adventure. If
handled correctly, it can lead to an actual victory against the forces
of darkness. My PCs wiped out every mutant or cultist in Middenheim, so that makes up a bit for being shafted by the main plot.
All of main quests could have been
structured to make heavy use of
social encounter rules, but for inexplicable reasons they were
specifically written to avoid those mechanics. This is just a Shame
(pun/mechanical-reference intended). Instead of solid social encounters
with progress trackers and NPCs who can "fight" back in the
conversational arena, we're given a series of single die-roll scenes
that the GM can't afford to let the PCs fail.
Let's
look at the main bell-clapper plot. Each day you meet a priest, and you
get a single roll to influence him. Then he sends you away and tells you
to return tomorrow. If you succeeded, when you return he passes you to
the next priest up the line. Do that twice and you meet the head priest.
If you influence him too, you gain access to the ritual and the holy
flame. Each failed die roll adds at least a day of delay, but other than
that there's no real challenge on those daily rolls. It's the entire
Party ganging up on one NPC, plus a huge laundry list of positive and
negative dice modifiers. As long as at least one PC has Fellowship 4+
and Charm or Guile trained, success is eventually guaranteed. If none of the PCs have those stats, the entire campaign will stall out
until the GM decides to just hand-waive them through the last obstacles
to save the campaign. So even if your party does have a smooth-talking
character who ought to thrive in the spotlight of a social scene, they
don't really get anything out of it. It's still 3 days, and 3 rolls, and
any XP they spent on Social Actions are completely beside the point.
The
Witch-hunter's trial is even less engaging and more of a stonewall. It
doesn't matter how amazing the PCs oratory and social or legal skills,
they can't convince her of the victim's innocence. This could have been
an awesome full-on Social Encounter with progress trackers for her
madness and the evidence or oratory. Something more like this:
Yep, that would have done the job.
Instead, as written, the PCs will probably just flail about until the actual badguys screw up and provide a lead.
Again, it's like we're watching a TV series. I love good TV shows, and
this would be a great one, but when playing an RPG I'd rather empower
the players a good bit more than this.
If the PCs do keep poking
at witch-hunter, as written they'll eventually they'll activate one of her murder-triggers
and she'll try a bone-headed assassination attempt to get rid of them. I
say bone-headed because she lacks the necessary action cards (or stats)
to have a chance of taking on three or more PCs, and her plan is
basically just "wait outside their hotel room until I can shoot them".
It's stupid, especially given her position and the resources at her
disposal. She could have used her legal powers to condemn the PCs. She
could have used her cult connections to curse or corrupt them. Instead, she chooses suicide-by-PC.
So
I raided my old first and second edition books (and the seedier corners
of my own imagination) to come up with a solid Slaaneshi plot for her
to embroil the PCs in. She racked up a bunch of corruption, unleashed
some perverted demons at the PCs expense, and escaped with her life and
reputation intact. It was pretty twisted, and a little racy, so I'm not gonna go into details here. It's not the sort of thing you'd want to just spring on your play group unless you had a really good idea of where people's boundaries were.
Returning
to my previous theme, if I'd realized then that the adventure is meant
to be a dark comedy, then in that context it would have been fine for
her to make an inept suicidal attack. I would have just brainstormed
something slapstick to have punch up the goofiness in the middle of the
fight, and a ridiculous monologue to hang a lampshade on it.
A Thousand Dwarves Cried Out, and Were Suddenly Silenced
One last minor gripe about Book Two: the Middenhiem
description and map is really vague and minimal. So I broke out Ashes
of Middenheim from 2nd Ed. It's set roughly 6 months to a year AFTER the
timeline of 3rd Ed's The Enemy Within. It is shocking how much 3rd Ed
left out. My favorite example is about Dwarves. In 2nd Ed, Middenhiem
has a thriving Dwarven community that's been there for generations and
has several prominent institutions and guilds that interact with the
humans. In 3rd Ed, there's "almost no permanent dwarf presence in
Middenhiem". I corrected that bizarre oversight, worked in a subplot
about
Dwarven
Hospitality, and added several other bits of flavor from
Ashes of Middenhiem to help fill out the Book Two slump.
With that, let's meander over towards Book Four
Expressionist Chaos
The four Books that comprise The Enemy Within for 3rd Ed are all over the map in terms of plot and tone.
Book
One is wonderful mystery opener, and does an amazing job of
establishing a sense of place and community. The fun scenes happen on a
timeline that's about realism, not traditional narrative tropes. It can
be a little disorienting, and have a minor hiccup or two, but it's
great. You can't solve the mystery here, but it'll set up the groundwork
to revive the cold case in a later book.
Book Two
is rather a mess, as mentioned previously. There's some interesting
religion vs chaos themes being explored, but it suffers from the fault
of not giving player agency and decisions much weight.
Book
Three is tight and taut. The plot barrels along, and there's rarely
time to think. It's not only cinematic, but also honestly hilarious.
There's some great comedic material there, followed by a gripping,
all-or-nothing, climactic battle.
Book Four is another
beast entirely. The plot is very linear, but simultaneously
incomprehensible. That's actually fitting, as the entire plot takes
place in Warhammer's equivalent of Hell. It's an optional epilogue,
where the PCs know exactly what they want to accomplish, but not how to
do it or what to expect when they get there.
The plot focuses on rarely seen places and themes of the
setting. Lesser-known aspects of the Ruinous Powers come to the
forefront.
- Tzeentch is best known as the God of Trickery and
Witchcraft... but the adventure also explores his role as the God of
Ambition and Schemes.
- Slaanesh is best known as the God of
Debauchery and Perversion... but the adventure also explores his role as
the God of Dance and Physical Perfection... and God of Gluttony.
- Nurgle is best known the God of Disease and Filth... but the adventure also explores his role as the God of Despair and Sloth.
- Only
the depiction of Khorne remains true to his simplest and most famous
attributes. Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne! Rage
for the sake of bloody-minded rage.
Giving "screen time" to these lesser-known aspects of the Chaos Gods is pretty darned cool. Unfortunately, that screen time for both Slaanesh and Nurgle risks getting lost in the wash if the PCs are wary or in a hurry. Tzeentch as Ambition-Dealer is covered repeatedly in the adventure, and works well. Slaanesh as Lord of Dance gets a quick spotlight that most likely devolves into combat instead of exploring the theme more thoroughly. Slaanesh as Gluttony didn't even happen with my group, because the players were in such a hurry to escape they never got near the banquet. I was able to cram in Nurgle as Despair though, despite the PCs being in a hurry, and I was pleased with that. Plus, we had a memorable discussion with a Great Unclean One about just how generous and charitable Nurgle was. Nurgle gives, my friends. He gives and he gives, from the bottom of his gut.
Impressionist Chaos
Book Four is either
a triumph of dreamy world-building, or a garbled mess as incomplete as
Book Two, depending on how you look at it. The laws of physics change
around the players, and nothing is what it seems. It's a fun place for
the GM to improvise. Think of it as a big tone-poem, or a dream sequence
with consequences. There is a small problem with Form following
Function following Form eating it's own tail. Like Book Two, parts of Book Four are a little
underdeveloped, though given the setting of Book Four you can almost forgive it.
To some extent this is understandable, as well, for monetary reasons.
It's the optional Epic-level Epilogue at the end of a very long
campaign. While the first three Books have crazy tonal variations, that
at least all take place on the same planet. Raids into Hell and back may
"not feel like WFRP" to some groups, and you need very powerful
characters to have a chance of survival. So only a very small number of
players will ever face this chapter. As a result, FFG seems to have
tried to save a little money here by cutting corners.
The
adventure doesn't come with nearly enough stand-ups for the numerous
daemons of every variety, and it only has four Location cards for the
whole chapter. To put that in context, I could easily make a case for
needing no less than 13 Location cards for Book Four, with 6 of them
being inside the huge constantly changing Castle of Tzeentch. There are
individual fights with 20+ non-henchmen demons of the same type, and
it's hard to represent that on tabletop when a complete set of
everything they've ever printed only includes 2 tokens of nearly every
daemon type.
The encounters have clearly had little to
no playtesting for balance. So while I was constantly upgrading the
quality and number of opponents that my large and combat-focused party
faced in the first 3/4 of the campaign, once I got to Chaos I repeatedly
cut down on the numbers of the monsters. I still killed one PC and got
close a few times on the others. If I'd been inclined to end the whole
thing in anticlimactic failure just inside the gates of hell, it would
have been trivially easy to do so.
The trick is that there's a war of attrition going on, and if the players aren't cautious they'll find themselves nibbled to death. Healing methods in the game are
usually limited to once per target per day, but the otherworldly skies
in Book Four have no sun at all and the adventures don't have time to
dawdle. You'll get one first aid check after each fight, but other than
that you run out of healing options very quickly. My group stocked up on
Healing Draughts and Medicines before entering the rift, but after the
first fight with Khorne's hounds, all the remaining bottles were just
excess weight with no purpose. Since First Aid is limited by your
Toughness, any would past the 4th or 5th taken in a battle cannot be
repaired. There's potentially as many as 14 battles in this book, if the
PCs don't actively try to avoid fights. Some of those conflicts are
against foes of immense power, or huge hordes of lesser demons. The math of it all will wear down the toughest PCs.
Just
as the PCs are almost certainly unprepared for the scope of what
they'll be facing, the GM is under-equipped for running it all. I don't
just mean stand-up tokens and location cards. I'm talking monster stats
that are missing entirely. Some examples of incomplete combat stats that you don't want to discover at the table:
- This is almost a direct quote for the stats on the ghostly librarian: "If you
have access to the creature vault, use the stats from monster A, but
with the following bonuses. If you _don't_ have the creature guide, use
the stats from monster B from the core-set instead, but with a different
set of stat bonuses and this extra power that, by the way, is also from
the creature guide. Don't worry, we'll also hide it in a sidebar on a
different page of this book that you may have already skipped past
without noticing. Good freakin' luck."
- There's an animated stuffed crocodile (it's in the room with a ton of subtle Disney film references) that as Strength 5, DR 5, Toughness 5 and Wounds 15. It gets two manoeuvres per turn. No other stats are provided. So I guess that means
Defense 0? That's pretty rare that a monster would have neither Defense
nor Armor ratings. With neither those nor an A/C/E budget, it's not
likely to survive past the first attack. Does it have the special abilities of a beast, an undead, or both? And what happens if the PCs try
an Action against it that's opposed by the target's Willpower? They only gave us 1/3 of what you need to run a monster in this system. The GM will need to make something up there.
- There's
two different encounters where the monsters get random reinforcements
each turn, from a pool of 6 different monster types (and zero overlap
between these two encounters), some of which come from other random
supplements you may or may not have. Anyone who's GM'd this game knows
that it's really hard to run more than 2 monster types in one fight.
Each monster type basically has its own deck of cards, and three piles
of tokens. If the fight runs to a third round with those sorts of
reinforcements coming in to play you've run out of table space.
So, GMs, if you're gonna run Book Four, you'll need to do more prep work than it took for the other parts. I suggest try running a dry run of each fight for yourself. Run one round of each battle in advance all by yourself so you can catch all the subtle hidden problems before they bite you during actual play.
My First Job Was Programming Binary Load Lifters
One
of the best elements of the 3rd Ed WFRP system is the non-binary dice
system, where every action has at least 4 possible results, and most
have around 64 different meaningful result variations. There's the
pass/fail axis, plus the boon/bane axis, either of which can have many
degrees of variation, plus the possibilities of comets, chaos stars,
delays and exertion.
That's the core of this system...and yet Book Four
is packed full of Binary rolls. A check to see if you fall for an
illusion or mind control should NEVER be binary pass-fail in this
system. Those sorts of effects scream out for bane and chaos star
results. If you pass with banes you should retain your free will but
still suffer penalties on certain action types because your senses or
emotions are conflicted.
That, plus all the random charts for resolving Castle Tzeentch feels like Book Four may have been originally written for a different system -- probably 2nd Edition -- and given a hasty conversion to 3rd Ed.
The Return Of The King
Have you ever seen The Return of the King? Remember how it fades
to black like 50 freaking times as the last hour of the movie teases you
with the promise of actually ending? Hope you didn't get a big soda
with your movie ticket. Book Four does the same thing.
The
PCs think they've escaped, but it's all an illusion created by
Tzeentch. If they fall for it, there's plenty of opportunity for their
ambition to enslave or corrupt them. If they figure it out and resist,
they can break free of that world, only to end up in an illusion created
by Slaanesh. Then you break free of that, and end up in an illusion
created by Nurgle. You break free again, and you're finally home, but
then Khornate daemons attack. If you survive that fight, you get the
real epilogue.
Trying to time your last session is
really hard. If you reach the Tzeentch illusion late in the session, the
players will assume the campaign is over, and be more inclined to
except little discrepancies because they're trying to rap up all the
plot-threads in a narrative hand wave. So they fail and lose their souls
because they were trying to help you "stick the ending" of the
campaign. Oops. If you stop just before the illusion, you'll raise
suspicions and that's almost as bad. No one wants an entire session of
tidying-up, "so why don't we just play an extra 15 minutes tonight to
wrap up the whole campaign?" is what they'll ask you. Basically, the
campaign is 2 to 6 hours longer than the players think it is, and you'll
"ruin the surprise" / "give them an unearned victory" if you let on
about it. That's fine if you game on a Friday or Saturday and no one
minds running past time, not so great if you game on a weeknight and
some of your players rely on catching the bus.
My
advice:
Leave off with the players passing through a door in Castle
Tzeentch. Don't tell them what's in the room they arrive at, leave that
for next week. Then start the final session in the Torture Room. Keep it
brief, and make it seem like monstrous reinforcements are on their way.
With any luck, the PCs will activate the gem and bail as fast as they
can... leaving you several hours left in your normally scheduled session
to run what should normally be less than an hour of wrap-up and
epilogue. Then proximity to the end of the session won't make them
ignore clues, and proximity to the start of the session won't make them
doubt it, because they didn't know prior to the session that it was
going to be the final chapter. Ideally, you'd end the session just after
the PCs figure out that it's a Tzeentch illusion, but before they've
escaped it. They'll have a week to brainstorm and worry about escape
routes. At the start of the next session, give them a good chase scene
or fight as the illusion crumbles around them, and ideally dump them in
the Slaanesh world after roughly an hour of adventure so again you're
not too close to the start nor end of the night. They'll take less time
getting out of Slaanesh land, and hardly any time with Nurgle, and then
can either can wrap up there, or leave off with them assuming this must
be a Khorne illusion when it isn't (so you'd end up with one more
session that would actually be shorter than normal).
That's
_not_ what I did, but I foolishly thought I could cram through all 3
illusions in one session. Instead, it was an unintentionally
double-length session and everyone left really late. Depending on your group, that might not be so good.
Well, that got a lot of the rant out of my system. I may revisit the topic if I dream up some better solutions to any problems I glossed over here, but for the most part I've unleashed my own personal Enemy Within and am ready to move on.
Again, I liked the campaign enough to run 50+ sessions, despite all the flaws. Overall, there's more good than bad there.
