I'll try to be brief.

But first: *SPOILER ALERT*

My group have been doing exceptionally well. Last session they succeeded in killing the Myrdthroth in 'Harrower of Thanes' - using all the traps they could muster - and some lucky hits from the rank 3 Ironbreaker.

As part of our running story - the Ironbreaker is from Karak Dranor and is trying to salvage his homeland. Unfortunately (or not ), they have been dogged by the Necromancer from Gathering Storm - as they have taken an item of his he wants back.

This has resulted in the Necromancer showing up at Karak Dranor, just as the party have dispatched the Myrdthroth - the necromancer has the added benefit of previously dead PC's to help him and a keep full of bones!

My party have fled with the intent of returning with a dwarven army to ransake the place and recover ownership of the hold. (and with the hope of also finally taking care of the necromancer.... again).


My question is this: How do I make this enganging without making it a slog of encounter after encounter.
I was planning to allow them to pick up a handful of Dwarven allies from various Dwarven holds that they have helped in the recent campaigns - but I am unsure of how to make it.. meaningful.

I don't want the party to show up and get x number of dwarves by passing a fellowship check - then simply use those dwarves to deal with the wider undead. I want there to be real risk/reward. I want them to have to plan out a way to attack and (eventually) succeed or not. The reason I chose Karak Dranor, is that for the most part it is pretty well fleshed out so the party now know much of how it looks inside - but I also mentioned that it is also much larger as we only explored the immediate areas. (This allows for the possibility of expanding upon the design to offer them multiple avenues in.)

Any suggestions?

How do I enable them to get help in a meaningful way?
How do I layout the encounter to make it... engaging and fun, without being a long grind?

I have access to all WFRP3 stuff, aside from Player.GM guide and Hero's Call.

Well the classic Gotrek/Felix style thing is that for the big ole'army to succeed in its assault the redshirts, ahem, elite PC group must make its daring infiltration/take out the strategic big bad etc.

Typically, kill a necromancer all the animated dead fall down inert. So the "daring mission" seems pretty clear...

The dangerous secret/forgotten/was sealed up but if we plant the explosive right way in, a few guards, oh unexpected complication (rival vampire, skaven at work after some trinket of the necromancer) and the confrontation with big bad, while dwarves keep the horde of undead busy (and the longer you take succeeding PC's the more dwarves fall, did we mention a wereguild owed their families....).

My thoughts were to draw a large map of the inside of the hold as they players have been there before - and to essentially design patrol information etc so that it's possible for the players to sneak in- (or at least try to wearing all that mail armour!). They know once the necro dies, they're largely safe - the party's celestial wizard can probably divine some information about the numbers and so on.

For me, the real issue is making the acquiring of the NPC's seem substantive. I want their to be a chance they may not get a whole lot of help - so they'll need to plan how to use that resource. I'm just not sure (or experienced) enough to figure out a way to make it seem fun and engaging.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm................

What type of gamers do you have in your party?

If they are "roll players" I would recommend a tracking chart similar to a party card. That would fulfil their desire to roll some dice and let you establish the pace and "key points" in each Dwarven hold to garner support based on success.

If they are "Role-players" let them go nuts and minimise the dice rolling in favour of more character driven results.

For Example, My current toon is a Dwarf Pit fighter/soldier. His background is he was taken at a young age to be a pit fighter and learned how to be a soldier (because he feels he must defend his allies). As he was Taken however, he feels a strong need to restore Dwarven Honour and goes sorta nuts when he see's dwarvish work being misused/abused. Storywise however he has the mark of both Sigmar and Ulric, so he can walk the line between the faiths, and raise them up as well.

In essence, play to your characters AND your players.

I am not clear about how many npcs are involved in this scenario. My players get mixed up in these kind of situations quite often.(I like keeping a group of vaguely defined allied NPCs around so that if anyone dies, there is a handy group for a new player character to be generated from).

For a small skirmish, just have the players roll for the allies. It is a lot more engaging than watching you do a bunch of rolls, basically playing with yourself

For something a bit larger, I would suggest doing a roll for how well the group of NPC dwarfs are doing. Just a Weapon Skill test with an appropriate amount of difficulty fortune and misfortune dice to represent how dire the situation is. Actions the players do could effect how many enemies the npc dwarfs have to handle. It could even go the other way too; how well the NPCs do affect how much opposition the players face.

One thing I have found to be useful, is to not assume what the players will do. Just create a goal and some obstacles and let the players figure it out. They will usually wind up doing something smarter or dumber than you thought they would anyway, so you might as well avoid having your plans messed up by not having any plans. This also lets the players do part of your job for you.

I would probably have done something like this:

1: Make some rules for resolving skirmishes. Something that lets you resolve a minor fight of two NPC groups fighting in a roll or two. For example, have each dwarf NPC count as a blue dice and each PC count as a green, red, yellow or white dice (as appropriate for their combat capabilites). Then have two undead count as a black dice and four undead count as a purple dice. Now you only need to make a roll or two with these dice each time there is a minor fight.

2: Make a map of the area they are fighting. It can be as specific or vague as you want. Then populate it with groups of undead that are defending it.

3: Give the players a map (without the undead marked obviously) and ask them how they want to approach it.

There's 4 in the party, 2 roleplayers and 2 who enjoy smashing things -so the party works reasonably well.

I'll think I'll sketch out the area and plan out a map and groups of undead as suggested and let the players figure out what they're going to do -and allow them to direct the NPC's.

Thanks for the help!

You can let directing/recruiting NPCs be matter of sometimes roleplaying and Leadership checks and sometimes rollplaying and "look how good I am at smashing stuff, don't you want to be on my team".

Recruiting can also be encounters of both sorts. Help those dwarves honourably get out of bad contract and they join you, help those other ones trap those gobboes (who keep running away so it's a matter of blocking off one avenue etc. more than sheer force of arms) and they join you etc.

Picking up the extra NPC's took several hours of work with a few novel enocunters along the way!
We ran with an abstracted combat system for the dwarves and in my view - it was far far too easy for the players.

That said, they split the party up and almost lost 2 of them - Gaze of Nagash hits hard! But the NPC's were far too beefy and the abstraction far too lax to make it much of a challenge.

The players enjoyed themselves, which is what counts - but for the next time this type of scenario occurs - the lesson has definitly been learned. (I thought it bad form to change how the game is played mid way through the encounter : Consistency is best imo)

Next and final stage of the encounter is meeting Henrich Kemmler and Krell: Which should kill off just about everyone (except the now- new Dwarven Thane - who has retired from adventuring) in the party in time for us to start a new scenario.

Anyone any ideas where I can find stats for those two?

What kind of abstraction did you use? I am still testing out new versions of this as my players keep having somewhere between a handful and a few hundred people fighting alongside them. Finding the right balance is hard. Particularly in making sure the players are actually threatened while at the same time making sure they don't just spontaneously die due to one bad roll. I usually give out Crits for Chaos Stars for example, but seldom do much to affect their wounds. So by the time they get to the "boss fight" they are a bit worn down and if they get knocked down to 0 wounds they might die from all the crits.

I have found that whenever I am working a bit outside the normal bounds of the game I use the dice roller to calculate odds. So I can see ahead of time if the chance of success/failure is about right:

http://www.theforbiddentome.com/rollers/wfrp3e/

(Make sure to select the link "calculate probabilities" at the bottom)

@valvorik

perhaps your dice pool setup from TTT Reaper's Bounty encounter could be used to handle side skirmishes.

What kind of abstraction did you use? I am still testing out new versions of this as my players keep having somewhere between a handful and a few hundred people fighting alongside them. Finding the right balance is hard. Particularly in making sure the players are actually threatened while at the same time making sure they don't just spontaneously die due to one bad roll. I usually give out Crits for Chaos Stars for example, but seldom do much to affect their wounds. So by the time they get to the "boss fight" they are a bit worn down and if they get knocked down to 0 wounds they might die from all the crits.

I have found that whenever I am working a bit outside the normal bounds of the game I use the dice roller to calculate odds. So I can see ahead of time if the chance of success/failure is about right:

http://www.theforbiddentome.com/rollers/wfrp3e/

(Make sure to select the link "calculate probabilities" at the bottom)

I had a system where we had built a dice pool for groups of NPC's (Normally 4 blue, and 1-2 white) and versus target DEF of skeletons. I had the players roll for individual Dwarves/NPC henchmen group. Two successful rolls was necessary to take out a skeleton- but 2 failed was enough to kill the NPC.

On hindsight it was far far too easy - the player controlling the NPC's enjoyed it as he was creating the distraction and taking out the large group of Skeletons so that the other 3 party members could sneak in elsewhere.

The other 3 had a real tough time fghting a few mobs. He had it really easy.

In future, I think I'll use a more complex system - I was aiming for simplicity (due to time constraints) with this one - but it resulted in his choices being rather limited and dull.

They all seemed to enjoy themselves which is what counts in the end.

A good starting point is to remember that 2 Characteristic Dice vs 1 Challenge Dice is about 50/50 success/fail ration.

4 Characteristic vs 2 Challange Dice is even closer to exactly 50/50.

So aim for a system where if completely equally matched groups face off, you end up with one of those dice pools.

I am actually planning a new session right now where the players will be trying to charge a village with about 40 followers defended by an equal or greater force. I am going for something like this:

1 Start with a dice pool of 4 Blue and 2 Purple Dice.

2 Calculate what the difference in numbers is and add dice according to this:

For every 5 man the defenders outnumber the attackers: Add a Misfortune Dice. (At three Misfortune Dice, convert them to a Difficulty Dice)

For every 5 man the attackers outnumber the defenders: Add a Fortune Dice. (At two Fortune Dice, convert them to a Characteristic Dice)

3 Added some special rules for special units. For example, a group of armoured elite warriors let the attackers convert a dice to Conservative.

4 Make a roll each turn where each success is a defender dead and each fail is an attacker dead.