While reading through the published adventures I noticed a certain trend there. Once upon a time WFRP scenarios was about characters solving problems and then getting accused of them. Now it seems that behind every scheme there's a "monster of the week". The scenarios themselves are quite good or at least have some good and usable ideas but the endings are quite disappointing. No matter what the characters do there's always someone lurking behind the scenes to act as a "boss monster".

Eye for an Eye - Daemon or beastmen - depending how you look at it. Still this one is can be lead to.

Edge of the Night - Skaven greyseer. "Hello! We're are to socialize with nobles and get a patro... Holy Sigmar! That's a big rat ogre you have there!"

Horror at Hugendal - Bigger daemon. As if solving a simple mystery behind a disease isn't enough a daemon just arrives to town!

The Gathering Storm - So they guy we were fighting for suddenly turned out to be the guy we were supposed to fight against! What a twist!

The Witch's Song - Dark elves and Kraken! Witch hunting at a smelly swamp turns into a full scale skirmish with an army of dark elves!

I think you get what I meant...

So what to do with this? I understand that some players and GMs like this. And it's okay. Once in a while. As a GM I couldn't dream of running a series of adventures where the players have to realize they just couldn't have solved the problem as it was in the first place. For me that would be a big turn of.

Now this could be easily turned into a bigger campaign.

Take the Edge of Night and the social aspects of it - characters have to do certain favors for nobles and they could as well be smaller scenarios. Aschaffenberg hires the group to inspect his manor. After the players destroy the Cult the surviving members become somewhat annoyed and plan to ruin the whole thing going on in Ubersreik. When the nobles go to party replace the Skaven with sneaky cultists and you have a more plausible revenge scenario in your hands than a Greyseer coming to town with a handful of minions just trying to "I dunno, maybe killmurdermutate a couple of slavethings".

Istm you could make a similar list with all the other iterations of WFRP.

monkeylite said:

There was a "how to build a Warhammer scenario"-thread somewhere. Could have been on BI 'cause I can't find it. But yeah. That would have been its last point.

Hi,

I pretty much did just that, turned the scenarios into parts of a larger campaign. It has been working very well so far. Most of the monsters of the week have made very effective long term red herrings. My players now have multiple theories about who's doing what and why with a mix of hitting and missing the mark. Requires a little work with each scenario but its been worth it. The real bonus for me is I like alot of what is written in the npcs and setting, saving me hours of work which would otherwise affect how often I can run sessions.

I agree. I haven't read all of the adventures yet though I know a bit about what's in all of them. I recently finished reading 'Witch's Song' and my first thought was 'what a shame the dark elves are involved'. Thankfully, I think the simplest solution is to cut them completely. It actually takes nothing away from the (much more interesting) stories revolving around the witch and the witch hunters.

Also - the dark elf plot makes absolutely no sense at all!

I think that dragging out some of the adventures will help too - spending more time on the human intrigue and socialising, and less time on the monster bits. I intend to run (I think) the Gathering Storm in at least two parts: Send the players to Stromdorf, have them complete one or two of the plots/subplots, and think that they've solved it. They leave. And then much later go back for some other reason, and find that things have changed: it's raining even harder than it was before, and several of the outlying villages and farmsteads have been attacked...

I agree - in a sort of "back-handed compliment" I think the large adventures tend to rush through/palm off stuff that can be expanded and enjoyed more. In Gatheringt Storm, Stromdorf has a murder mystery and politics brewing for example that begs for more attention beyond the shenanigans going on in the region surrounding town.

Edge of Night has nobles vying for power, with a presumably Free-State faction and the Graf von Jungfreud having their own interests that logically want to see them all fail (or in the Graf von J's case, perhaps only one succeed who is his agent/puppet etc.).

I've not dissected Witch's Song enough yet but it too has murder mystery, divine disfavour etc etc. One of my players' has a backstory about a noble mother on hard times and I've decided he's going to be the "witch's" cousin, his mother sister to Eldred von Stauffer (he's a wizard so magic potential in family can be theme). I do see the elves performing a "outside threat" role when there are the factions inside town, something that casts the Witch in a positive light.

I've ran a lot of different RPG's and this always seems to be the trend with published adventures. Most publishers don't make any assumptions about the campaign in which the adventure is running so the writers tend to make the adventures self-contained with a certain expected structure. I virtually never run published scenarios as written. You almost always have to take the time to dissect the adventure and custom fit it to your campaign so that it makes sense, meets your groups' needs, and fits in with the context of your campaign.

For those GM's not running an inter-connected campaign however, the "standard format" tends to work OK. "Tonight, on a very special episode of Warhammer FRP..."