One of my players could not make it today, so I decided to whip up something else for the two remaining players. To keep it still slightly connected to the Norsca stuff I'm running, I decided to go with the adventure in Liber Carnagia: "Crimson Rain". This is also an adventure where there is a chance of loosing a character in the finale, so it is nice to play as a one-off.

What I need though, are some pre-made characters I can hand the players. I can knock out the stats and stuff pretty easily, but I need good character concepts. The benefit of running a one-off is that you can have characters specifically tailored to the adventure. They can be people who are much more deeply connected to the NPCs or even take the place of NPCs in the adventure. So I am looking for character concepts that fill one or more of these points:

* Have a good reason for being in the city.

* Have a personal motivation for participating in the adventure.

* Have a somewhat violent disposition (I mean, if you don't have at least one person with a chance of falling, you might as well run another adventure)

* Be a person that would actually be put in charge of a scouting group by the mercenary captain.

I have been thinking of having the players be two brothers of a minor noble house invested in the town. But there are a lot of options. Like a priest coming to inspect the spear, a mercenary in the kislevite company, a member of the handgunners stationed there etc.

So, anyone have any suggestions for interesting characters to use for this adventure?

There are some suggestions in the adventure, but you might already have looked at those?

I'd recommend creating Rank 2 Characters for the players, the adventure is quite dangerous.

Other than that, I've always been a fan of Witch Hunters (and their fall to chaos). Witch Hunters certainly have a violent disposition and it fits well with the Khorne-theme. The other could be a Zelot, Demagouge, Priest of Sigmar or someone else who would join forces with a Witch Hunter.

Beeing a Witch Hunter and/or a Priest of Sigmar would certainly give you the authority needed to be put in charge of a scouting party. They'd probably be in town investigating rumors of corruption (due to the spear?), or they could have been dispatched by Witch Hunter command, with vague orders to make sure chaos doesn't fester in the town.

A few other ideas that could fit:

A Soldier who was accused of beeing drunk on duty (falsly, maybe?) and was kicked out of his/her unit. Has not had a job for several months and has spent them drinking. Hopes to win glory/fame/restitution through the adventure to be able to start anew.

A Slayer looking for a glorious death.

Hm, the witch hunter idea seems tempting. I once ran Grauschloss with the premade characters (Witch Hunter, two knights and an Agent) with great success. (One Knight became the deamons servant, Witch Hunter got killed by deamon, Knight managed to regain control for a moment and let the other Knight decapitate him. Agent fled during battle and rode out through the burning madhouse that used to be the village. The End)

What I have decided so far is a deeply devout Knight Of The Blazing Sun who hopes this is the Spear Of Myrmidia and a young outrider who is the nephew of Emil Paxmann who chafes under the pressure of family when he just wants to join the military again and chase glory.

I might add a Witch Hunter and one or two more characters to the list, so my players have some choice in what to play.

You could try the ones that I made for "One Hand Gives..." -

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167876/WFRP%20STUFF/ONE%20HAND%20PREGENS/WFRP3%20-%20Pregen%20Characters%20for%20One%20Hand%20Scenario.zip

I ended up going with the two characters I posted earlier (the knight and the outrider), since it was getting too close to play-time to start working on additional character concepts.

The adventure worked pretty well. It ended with them on top of the tower, the knight (who was still convinced this was the spear of myrmidia) picked up the spear and lost the battle of wills. He then turned around and impaled the outrider (I let the knight player make the attack roll ), hoisting him up like a grizzly banner atop the tower, while the imperials and norscans below tore each other apart and a booming laughter rolled across the sky.

Notes:

I made sure that both characters were very combat competent. This made the war/peace choices more meaningful because they were almost never worried about loosing the combat, so it became a question of wether they wanted to start a fight or not. Turned out they did want to start a fight. Every time it was available. Including riding down fleeing enemies, shooting them in the back, executing prisoners and holding them captured in a burning barn with gunfire.

The adventure will have a LOT of combat. Luckily, I saw from the first combat encounter (three marauders storm into the bar) that the fighting would take WAY too much time and we would be lucky to get even halfway through the adventure. And the combats are not even really important. The important bit is wether or not the characters decide to instigate combat.

So for each fight I just had each character make an appropriate test with a difficulty based on how hard the combat was. Fails and banes led to taking wounds, chaos stars to recieving criticals.

This moved the adventure along rapidly and let us concentrate on the roleplaying instead of the roll-playing.

The characters racked up a lot of khorne points and maybe one or two shallya points during the adventure, but they still barely reached 15 points. And I used almost all the encounters and the players went for the most bloodthirsty solutions in every case. You have to play like some kind of raving psychotic to reach 20 points.

By the way, I never revealed the point-counter. It would seem like revealing the whole twist of the game to the players and give them too much under-the-hood information about the story.

The final duel at the top is awkwardly written. It tries too hard to contrive a filmatic climax that is almost guaranteed to be disturbed by the players. In my case, the knight gets to the top of the tower and just barrels into the maruaders to get to the spear. I had to skip forward to get to the point where Olaf is about to win. Then the knight kicked Zigi his sword and Zigi won but the knight grabbed the spear first. So now you have the duel of wits, which should be the focal point of the story. But I also have 3 marauders who were fighting with the outrider. Not to mention Zigi, who is not mentioned again in the adventure. They are just hanging around on top of the tower while the battle of wills is going on.

The outrider never even thought of trying to help the knight as he was busy holding his guns trained on everyone.

The scene would probably be better to run by having the first character arriving at the top seeing Olaf standing over Zigi and having one chance to intervene before Olaf wins.

In addition, I am becoming more and more in favour of just avoiding rolling any dice for NPCs. It generally works much, much better to just let the players do rolls for their characters and use the dice as the narrative tool they are intended as.

If I was to re-do the battle of wills, I would simply have the knight do a bunch of Discipline-vs-Discipline rolls where successes moved the demons marker towards the end while failures moved the knights marker towards the end. It halves the amount of rolls needed, is more engaging for the players and makes the scene easier to narrate as there is less breaks in the narration to construct a dice pool.

Edit: Just to be clear though. I really liked this scenario. I thought it was very nicely constructed by just giving the GM a bunch of narrative tools.