I'm a little surprised not to have seen anything on Edge of Night, since it came out at GenCon! A ninja shopper picked it up for me, and while I haven't finished reading through everything yet, I like what I see.

Here's my observations based on reading the first couple chapters and skimming through the rest, obviously this is all IMO, and based on only limited information -- spoilers!

This has a very cool Old World feel to it. It's based in the town of Ubersreik. One chapter is a gazetteer of the town and seems well-written and useful, with some history of the town going back a few hundred years and then going over more recent events. I love having more context and descriptions, especially since this was all pretty thin in the core box. This is definitely useful stuff beyond the context of the adventure itself.

The context of the adventure is that several noble families are jockeying for status in Ubersreik, which has been a free town for a while, but rumors are swirling that the Emperor is about to revoke that status and everybody wants to be the guy in charge. One such noble, an out-of-towner, is hosting a masquerade ball. Additionally, Morrslieb has been acting strangely, and seems to be hanging constantly over the town. This has inspired a gray seer lurking beneath the town to try and poison the guests at the ball with warpstone. Overall, the adventure is a large amount of socializing and politicking building up to a pretty epic fight. This happens to be my very favorite kind of adventure structure -- but if you or your group prefer more combat-heavy adventures, this might not be the one for you.

The first part of the adventure is very loosey-goosey and involves the party basically exploring the town. Various events they can get into can modify their influence with the various families, and by eventually impressing one of the families enough, they get an invite to the masquerade (and need to find themselves some costumes!), kicking off the second part of the adventure.

The ball chapter first describes the numerous guests -- there's a large cast of characters -- then goes into a breakdown of the events during the ball, which runs from 7 PM - midnight. For every 15-minute increment, several events are described. The party can get involved with as many of these events as they want and get involved with as much politicking as they want. The three families are all trying to curry favor with various partygoers and rules are given for how these attempts go and how to track what's going on.

At five different points, skaven make attempts to poison the food or drink at the party. Unless the party catches wind of these attempts and stops them, at some point all hell will break loose as the partygoers being mutating as a result of consuming the warpstone-laced food and drink. Eventually, the party will track the skaven to their lair in the sewers underneath the town, which kicks off the last part of the adventure.

This section is essentially a short dungeon crawl where the party discovers and beats down the gray seer and his minions.

Overall it looks like a complex, but very fun adventure to run. Honestly, the details of the ball are so well laid out that I could see dropping the skaven attacks entirely and just basing an adventure on the political machinations -- since the political stuff will assuredly end (possibly quite early in the evening) once the party figures out what's going on, there's a lot of good stuff you might not get to use.

Plenty of goodies, as you'd expect.

- You get a tracking card for each of the three families, which represents how the family regards the PCs. If they advance far enough up the track, they are offered patronage: gaining patronage offers a several concrete benefits, including a new talent card socket. (IE, having the Aschaggenbergs as patrons gains 1 fortune die on Charm checks in certain circumstances, a 20 silver/month stipend, and provides the party with access to a Focus socket.)

- Some player handouts and maps. Unfortunately these are in the same size as in the Gathering Storm so a couple of the maps are a bit too small to be useful IMO. Frankly I'd probably do a full-size photocopy of these. I hope FFG moves away from this size for maps in future adventures!

- A bunch of new location cards and a few item cards

- Skaven action cards! You get six spells (4 rank 1, 2 rank 2) and one support action. These all seem really cool.

- A few new talents and a "Frenzied" status card

- Influence tokens for each of the families, and character cards for each of the major guests at the ball -- you can use the tokens to track who the guests are allying with, and also track how far along in their agenda the family is

- Various standups, and a 13-space ubertracker for tracking the families' claim to the town

- Some corruption tokens and mutation cards for warpstone mayhem. A synopsis of the corruption rules from Winds of Magic is also included in case you don't have that set. A nice bonus: the mutation cards are different from those included in Winds of Magic, so you can throw 'em in and won't have any dupes

All sounds nice, thanks for the breakdown of the story and bits. Much appreciated. I wish I was able to attend Gencon, I sure would have scooped up this and Signs of Faith.

Oooh...didnt know that also Edge of Night was avaible at gencon for you lucky US guys...

Thanks for the good description, it seems a pretty cool adventure, especially because using the tracking cards/tokens seems a good innovation to this kind of big social activitiy...where myself and my players usually lose the focus and wander whit little progress. It seems another good point scored by this new 3e system!!

The only thing that worry me whit this new edition is the lack of one big, cohesive, epic-scale full campaign...like the over the top Enemy whitin!! man, we loved that stuff. So I was a bit displeased to know that after EoN the next adventure set will be in marienburg, and as far as i know...totally unrelated to previous 3e material.

Do u see something like a big "to be continued..." at the end of EoN or is a self-contained setting?

Ghiacciolo said:

Personally I'd rather have several mini-campaigns, surported by scenarios, than a big campaign that will start good, but dwindle over time ending with some half-hearted work (drawing parallel to TEW).

Besides in this fast paced world we live in, I think half year campaigns work best. How many havn't tried starting up a grand scale campaign, only to stop half way done, because your group simply slowly vanished due to real life issues?

I think that if they put something in Marienburg, they'll also give us info about it

Yeah, as loathe as I am to admit it, the days of running 4+ year long campaigns has passed for me. Every epic, long-term campaign that I've started in the last 5+ years has fizzled, as much my fault as anyone else's. In addition to the possibility of the group losing interest, I find myself losing interest. Call it gamer ADD or whatever, but these days I get attracted to the latest new shiny and can't sustain interest in the grind of actually maintaining an ongoing campaign. If I never bought another thing, I've already got enough systems and adventures sitting on my shelf that I could run stuff for the rest of my life. In the last couple of years, I've really stepped up my purchases and can't even figure when or if I'll ever be able to do anything with most of it. That doesn't stop me from picking up every new thing that comes out that interests me (Deathwatch anyone?). The group I'm running TGS for has been playing WFRP since it came out, but we've already decided to take a break from it after I finish running TGS. So while I'll still get the new stuff that comes out, I'm more than willing to wait for Amazon to get it to me, since I won't be using it anytime soon. When or if we decide to go back to WFRP with so many other options out there is another thing. I hope we will, but we'll just have to see.

EoN sounds fantastic. Thanks for the write-up. Can't wait to get a copy now!

That does sound good, sounds like lots of roleplay and non-combat stuff possible - which is great as I find our group is really getting into roleplaying with the dice not just fighting with them under this system.

With the "factions and timelines", reminds me a bit of "Rough Night at Three Feathers", which is my favourite older edition adventure.

Rob

I playtested that adventure, and it was definitely a blast even in playtest. Lots going on, lots for the PCs to do and find out using social skills. The important thing, I think, is for the GM to track the positions of the PC and NPCs in the various rooms at the various times. I made location cards for each of the areas of the house and grounds, for example, and we used standups or tokens for the various NPCs. I then made a big clock with hands that I moved as the evening wore on as an obvious timekeeper. It was a lot of fun.

Oh yeah, and Skaven can be a pain in the butt for PCs.

Sounds very promising! I like the approach of using Progress Trackers to measure long-term disposition rather than "social hit points", since the latter approach just tends to result in PCs saying the same thing over and over again, worded slightly differently each time.

So, TGS or EoN? Which is the 'better' adventure? Although I like the overall vibe of TGS, I'm finding keeping the players interested in the very disjointed adventures (which feel more like 'intro undead', 'intro orcs', 'intro beastmen' and so forth than a cohesive adventure - even tied together with the stones) difficult. Maybe it was the premise we used for them to head into town (find the Merchant, he owes the Thieves Guild money so barring that - get his Merchant's Guild ring) but they don't really feel like participating.

Does EoN grab their interest? It sounds like it has a tighter time frame (a night or two in the game?) to cover, which I like.

After realizing that my players really aren't so much into combat I am quite happy that I haven't ordered the TGS box yet (I only bought the PDF so far). I am sure they will be far happier with the EoN setup.

I introduced them with A Day Late and now we're only just into An Eye for an Eye – they were really bored by having to fight again (the beastmen attack at the gate) before they can finally start to talk to people and investigate the strange goings on at Grunewald mansion. I think they’re just not willing to fight Izka and his beastmen, then waves of zombies and then a huge number of goblins with only little other stuff going on in between…

Fantastic write up, I'm very excited about the Edge of Night! Especially after seeing that it has a good deal of non-combat encounters throughout it. Thank you very much for your review!

What location and item cards are there?

Thank you very much about your EoN descrption, I'm thrilled it is a socially oriented adventure! I'm very glad that FFG has come up with such a thing, that they can offer this type of adventures to us, and I'm also very glad that WHFR community is supportive to this idea! That reminds me why, when I discovered the game (not so long ago) I gave up all the games I've been playing for years to focus on Warhammer Fantasy.

And... skaaaaaaaven! Great villains. :] Though I must say the idea of letting EoN be just a social adventure calls to my heart.

Ghiacciolo said:

I'm also with those who think a big campaign is not as good as small adventures. If FFG keeps releasing adventures, groups can play them as they see fit. I also think we are seeing a time when it is more difficult to run a large campaign because - or we are just older than we were, and maybe the most of other games' players. I've started a game of Paths of the Damned and we almost finished Ashes of Middenheim. It started with Through the Drakwald as a good bye adventure to a friend that was going do Japan, then the three of us that kept here invited other 3 people to play, then one of them left, than we invited another friend, than this other friend left.

Ok, ok, I know to play with a group that doesn't actually have a habit of getting together is not such a great way of keeping the game going.

Anyway, now I assembled those same three friends with whom I've played Through the Drakwald (yes, Andre has returned from Japan - after 2 years) and we started playing 3e. My idea is that we go through every 3e materials that I can lay my hands on, to test it - and have a lot of fun as well. They came up with the idea of playing three brothers who deal with low life. So together we decided their father, who has a smuggler, a drunk and a game-addicted, died few months before and a week before the game starts there are a group of thugs knocking on the doors of each one of them. Their father owned a lot of money to a maladjusted rich Burgher and they'll have to pay it somehow. They got together, a Thug, a Smuggler and a Grey Apprendice Wizard (who was told to deal with his debts by his master, but the other two don't know it) and left Altdorf only with their clothes and one dagger each to try and sell their abilities where they are not so followed by murdering-looking people.

I called them (and the game) The Three Scoundrels. Soon I'll be posting their adventures on a blog and adding any review, expansion or house rule we come up with.

So what I'll do is that I'll find a way of binding the different released adventures into a campaign. Probably I'll be making some adventures of my own in between the released ones, on thing that I love to do. Actually, this thing about running released adventures has gotten in my RPG life just when I started playing WHFP, because of the tradition of having such wonderful material.

One thing that I do think FFG could do is give some ideas in each new adventure on how this one can be glued together with previous materials, thus making everything they do a potentially great campaign. And if they do that, being a campaign or just small adventures will be a choice.

this qoute have been edited

mac40k said:

I second that. I feel the same. Only for me my interest for warhammer have increased. Reason why, we have run our first session of TGS and it was a blast. we played to 03:30 in the morning. long time we have done that.

But the time of the long campaign is def. over.

mac40k said:

God, that sounds so familiar!

Is there a way to get a component list on this adventure?

Have now read through and yeah it all looks cool.

A blown up map of the mansion like a "clue board" with trackers around the edges for the progress of different families would be a nice way to represent it all - will probably try to put that together when I run it.

Florian Pfeifraucher will be great, there was a Pfeifraucher in "Rough Night at Three Feathers" (which I used as first adventure for my group on their way to Stromdorf) who came off as an unscrupulous ladies man trying to run off with a local girl from Stromdorf. He will be "Florian" now and having him turn up in much same role will be great (accidental) continuity.

The additional info on travel costs of different forms (boat, coach etc.) is also very welcome as is the info on Morrslieb (ooooch that's nasty - good thing the adventure format calls for only one night of comabt!)

Rob

dvang said:

Great ideas! I will copy this approach.

- location cards

- big clock with hands

- and maybe adding a social progress tracker

I also created a sheet with times (every 30 min I believe), which listed NPCs that moved to different room during the course of the evening as well as which NPC was in each room. This included arrivals to the party. It greatly helped me keep track of who was where and who arrived when.

My group and I want long campaigns. We play once a month. We have almost finished The Thousand Thrones, that I have converted to 3rd ed. It has taken us almost a year, but it's been a blast. After that we will start a custom campaign based on EoN with TGS being weaved in, plus the other official 3rd ed. adventures (and some of my own writing).

While we play the EoN/TGS campaign, I'll convert TEW to 3rd ed., because that's what my players want to play afterwards. But considering the work involved and my experience with doing the TTT conversion I'll need the 10-12 months it takes for us to complete the next campaign.

Our play sessions last from 10-14 hours usually, so even though it's just once a month, we do have a lot of play time.

I do really hope FFG release a long campaign to give 3rd ed. its TEW.