INCLUDES SPOILERS FROM VARIOUS WFRP PRODUCTS

My players are positively paranoid about skaven. That is actually a good thing as I intend to run WFRP1 scenario "Shadow over Bögenhafen" as a "red herring" adventure for them. I would imagine this working quite good especially as one of my players is a veteran of the original adventure having played it over ten years ago.

The basic plot is this:

They've just arrived to Ubersreik in search of work after their home village was destroyed by skaven. I'll start the whole thing with the Edge of Night (rumors, searching for patrons and whatnot). After a while they realize there's no actually gain in any of the work that can be offered to them unless it's unhealthy. I will skip the Schaffenfest from SoB and introduce the secret temple in the sever to them via a job offer to clean the sewer gates (a quest hook from WFRP2 Career Compendium).

According to SoB there's a guardian daemon at the temple in the sewers but I'll change it so that there are giant rats "guarding" the door. Actually they just happen to be there but it gives the players the reason to suspect skaven. After that it's mostly run straight from SoB (with altered names).

Gideon will be replaced with mr. Tavelli from Tilea (a name the characters already connect with the skaven). He's up to no good and is trying to corrupt the Ordo Septenarius who are actually only trying to cast the ritual of "Handrich's Gracious Blessing of Bountiful Commerce" (from WFRP2 Old World Companion). Ordo Spetenarius is actually trying to do good and improve the towns Silver Tier influence before the ball of Edge of Night. In SoB Gideon can change shape but this will be replaced with skaven agents if necessary.

Tavelli has no interest in foiling the ritual as he knows it'll make the merchants more easily blackmailed and corrupted. There's no "summoning of daemons and warp gates" only an actually good secret society. Tavelli is there just to raise suspicion in players and give them the feeling that they have to stop the ritual.

I've absolutely no idea how this will turn out but at least I think it should be a memorable WFRP adventure as two of my players have never played Warhammer before.

Ideas and comments are more than welcome!

FREAKING MISSING EDIT BUTTON! >______<

Had a thought: I intended to cut out the "double lighting fires" scene from SoB (the event where Gideon changes his shape to one of the characters) but just noticed I could use this to introduce Lieberung and run "Mistaken Indentity" when they (most likely) escape from Ubersreik. Or I could use Lieberung as a scapegoat to allow my players to return to the city one day. Hmmmmm!

Very interesting stuff, please keep posting and outlining how you're weaving.

The Ordo having more innocent objectives allied with aiding Ubersreik is interesting, they would be a natural Free State faction likely wanting no noble family to come to the fore or perhaps the von Saponatheim's since they are supposed to be pro-commerce. Interesting "coincidence" that that ritual also needs 7 to work it and brings in Handrich/Haendryk nicely (I admit I prefer to see him as a fairly transparent alternate face of Ranald).

The one thing I dislike about SoB as written is the "framed and can't get out of it, must flee town" angle. I changed that "you have to leave town and not come back" part of Stromdorf for the same reason. Once I introduce background and NPC's, etc. for a location I don't want it to have to be avoided thereafer (even if leaving a string of wanted posters behind you seems to be a theme in earler warhammer editions).

If you wanted Mr. T. to be foiling ritual, the effect of weakening powers of priests when foiled might be the reason - setting up the merchants to need to find "alternative patron...."

I have forgotten to keep you guys updated. As I've notes on our wiki about the adventures (in Finnish) I try to recap them here.

Party consists of:

Synab Eichenfass - ex-peasant, Boatman

Barnabas Esker - rat catcher

Nils Bärherz - hunter

Something Rotten in Ubersreik

After the characters have taken residence in Red Moon Inn they try to make their living with honest jobs. As the city is still suffering from last winters plague jobs are not that hard to find. Quickly the characters noticed that there is something rotten in Ubersreik as there were various rumors about ratmen and their vile kin.

Barnabas (who is obsessed about Tileans and their fight against the skaven) leads his young "apprentices" on the trail of the skaven. They visit Borgan Foambeard and after some serious ale drinking manage to convince him that they are formidable allies.

After they return to the Inn Noseless Brandt advances Synab and hires him to clean up a blockage in the sewer.

This is where the paranoia kicked in. Brandt really was there only to hire help. But the characters naturally assumed him to be an agent of Skaven. With a cunning plan Synab hired another boatman to clean up the sewer and when the party found him with a crossbow bolt in his back they were sure that Brandt was out to get them.

Actually the blockage had prevented some smugglers of entering the city and as the unlucky boatman turned up the smugglers shot him trying to keep him from discovering their hideout in the sewers. Characters made their own way through the filth and found two giant rats clawing a secret door. Behind that door was storage where the smugglers had hidden their cache of Bretonnian goods and some warpstone.

The body of the boatman caused a lot of trouble for the characters as they were worried he might rise up as a zombie... So they alerted the guards. And when they were suspected Synab killed the two guards with his bare hands in plain sight of other guards (on the wall). Thus was the Slaughterer of Ubersreik born and the second session ended...

... I will finish the catch up later today...

By the Light of Mórrslieb

While trying to outrun the guards Nils and Synab get lost in to the sewers of Ubersreik. Nils manages to get away but Synab is caught literally bloody handed and is taken to Magnus's Tower.

Meanwhile Barnabas has encountered his old friend Hieronymus Blitzen (who didn't die as CotHR indicates but went into hiding when the skaven were on to him) disguised as a knight of the Reiksguard. Blitzen is worried about the skaven and too paranoid to stay in the town but leaves his apprentice Joachim Schwartznatter to help his old friend. A new PC introduced.

The help is surely needed as NIls returns to Barnabas bearing grave news about the fate of Synab.

The skills of the shadowmancer apprentice are put to test immediately as he breaks into the Tower in disguise (doppelganger spell) to break Synab free. Joachim is somewhat troubled to release a known murderer but does so anyway. Even when Synab releases all of the other prisoners Joachim still does not see that this man is on the road to chaos. Together they flee the tower as the guards butcher the escapees.

After the two of them have healed from some nasty flux they got while in the dungeon of the Tower Barnabas moves the whole party into a abandoned hovel at the edge of Ubersreik. Joachim plans a mourning costume for Synab to wear as his face is in every corner of Ubersreik as an escaped murderer and fiend of chaos (while freeing Synab Joachim miscasted a spell causing all drinks around the Tower to go sour and as nobody knows about Joachm's involvement Synab was accused of this too).

When the local patrols finally give up tracking the Butcherer and issue a curfew the party takes the night and moves through the sewers to investigate the mystical hidden door. They find the storage used by the smugglers and Joachim sees traces of Dhar lingering there. The party is sure that this must be the work of skaven and after a while they find the house above the basement.

The merchant house looks empty so they decide to break in only to find the guard dog dead. Suddenly the light of Mórrslieb shines through a window and wakes the dog up as an undead menace. Arcane Orrery is already in work and the presence of warpstone in the cellar have caused the house to gain an unnatural effect.

After re-killing the dog the party sneaks into upstairs but instead the lord of the house they find his servant - also risen as a zombie. PCs kill the zombie and after some looting find strange glasses (check the picture) and an enormous load of writings in different languages (even one particular red grimoire).

The Monastery of Rotstier

The "all-or-nothing"-kind of PC, Synab, was bitten by the zombie in the merchants house. Naturally the whole party was afraid of zombie infection... And as Mórrslieb kept them from healing they decided to contact a priestess of Shallya. The temple was full but a novice hinted them that they should travel to Rotstier Monastery in Buchedorf and so the party rented a raft and arrived to Buchedorf the same day and the PCs were taken in to heal their wound, diseases and insanities.

As a kind reward for the Shallyans the party gathered rumors and were soon aware that certain mr. Brauninger whose house they had just broke into was also committed to the care of the Shallyans.

Failing to gain an audience with mr. Brauninger (who, they learned, was quite insane) Nils and ...yes... Synab devised a plan to climb the outer wall to the room of mr. Brauninger.

After the nightfall the two burglars set into their mission and after much sneaking and failing managed to find mr. Brauninger babbling on his bed. His whole room was covered with writing and mr. Brauninger was weeping for he could not read them anymore. Brauninger had been in his house when the smugglers attacked it suspecting that he had failed their agreement about the use of his basement. Brauninger escaped but without his glasses and was driven insane by the lack of that artifact.

Nils and Synab kidnapped the merchant and Synab carried him into the forest where he was met by other members of the party woken by NIls. Synab explained that he had used the glasses to read the writings on the wall of Brauninger's cell and even though it had nearly costed him his mind he had gained a lot of information about certain Ordo Septenarius and their plans of performing some kind of ritual at the heart of Ubersreik.

While trying to interrogate mr. Brauninger a band of mutants were lured to their fire and the frightful party escaped the horrible beasts and let Brauninger to be mauled by the creatures.

As the morning broke the PCs were lost in the woods and Synab had a strange itch on the back of his head...

The Butcher of Ubersreik

While the Party was getting back from Rotstier and Buchedorf they encountered a forgotten watchtower that one of the recognized as a former guarding post of the Order of the Raging Boar (minor knightly order created for the campaign). They could not enter the tower however as it was plagued with chaotic beings that looked like Reikeels living in the solid rock!

The party left the tower in fear even though they had seen someone spying on them from the its top parts...

Getting back to the city proved to be a minor task. The sun had already set and the Mórrslieb (even though not full) was lurking on the sky, bigger than previously. Barnabas bribed the guards while Joachim fooled them with an illusion to believe Synab was not who he seemed to be. The guards did however notice a fresh bruise in the head of Synab.

After a good night's sleep and some restocking the party was ready to get into action. They had decided to confront Noseless-Brandt once and for all and set to track him down.

Joachim was successful and after a tavern tour and some bribery managed to learn the address of the sewer jack and set out to spy him from the shadows. Joachim had learned that Brandt had been on a bender and was most likely sleeping off his hangover and as the grey wizard noticed this was true.

Suspecting something Joachim climbed into the sewers from where he could keep an eye on Brandt's house and the sewers beneath it. Naturally this was the time for skavens to appear.

Two gutter runners were sent to assassinate Brandt for getting too close to exposing the skaven and naturally Joachim was sure that they were there to serve their master. Joachim tried to escape but was caught by the agile ratmen and nearly lost his life in the fight before fleeing. He returned to the party's safehouse and alerted all of them to rush to Brandt's apartment.

The Skaven were frightful of the wizard and went to get help and therefore were only nearing the house again when the PCs arrived.

While Joachim kept watch Barnabas and Synab sneaked in. Suspecting nothing Barnabas sent Synab upstairs (well the player certainly suspected something). After a while Barnabas heard unnatural voices from above and climbed the stairs...

...only to see his "apprentice" hacking Brandt into pieces with two daggers and an enormous malignant eye staring from the back of his head!

As a side note I might add that we are playing something of a plot point based sandbox game (meaning that when certain things happen certain other things happen). Synab's player just wanted to get on the wild side and I did not want to spoil his sport. He made all of the decisions that turned a farmer boy into a murdering mutant with a smile on his face. And after Synab had been spotted he fought like a devil against the watch and his former companions.

Barnabas went to alert the guards while Synab tried to cover his tracks by burning down the house. He made it to the streets where he was met by several city guards as well as Barnabas (and Joachim in the shadows). In the following fight Synab managed to deal a critical hit on Barnabas and kill two guards before being killed by Barnabas's crossbow bolt and Joachim magic missile.

After the dead of the Butcher of Ubersreik Barnabas was questioned for his relationship to Synab. He managed to convince the guard that he had nothing to do with the lunatic and was released (naturally without the reward for the Butcher).

Thanks for the updates, it's fun to see old adventure and sandboxes come together.

Rob

Knock on the Door

Last night was the lamest session of our campaign. Everybody was feeling quite tired but we managed to go with the flow anyway as getting the group together is always a BIG hassle.

Joachim and Barnabas woke up at the morning after the death of Synab when the was a knock on the door. It turned out to be two men with a boy (There was a guest player around playing a one of the city watchman who was there when the Butcher was killed and Synab's player introduced his new character, Hjalmar Bächer, a seventeen year old graverobber with a seven year old apprentice).

I tried to explain to the players why they were there and why it would be a good thing to invite them in. But you know how the players are. After a serious interrogation all of the new faces were embraced and event though the watchman had a Bretonnian accent and was asking the PCs to "investigate something in the mountains" they considered him to be a good guy - because he was a PC...

Naturally I had written the background for the watchmen and had told his player that his character was actually a Bretonnian spy trying to work out what was happening in Ubersreik before his master could turn up to the Ball held be von Holzenauer.

So after they had all introduced themselves they (naturally) decided to drop all the leads from previous sessions and follow one of the new guys to the cemetary as he (the graverobber) had told them that he had seen a "ratlike figure" there.

Of they went then! A city watchman with a suspected criminal (the rat catcher), extremely weird guy who just "happened to know things about Mórr's Garden" and a shadowmancer... dressed as a priest of Mórr. They all realized that it was an absurd thing to do but came into a conclusion that as nobody else believed in skaven they could do nothing else than investigate.

They snuck into the Garden through a hidden hole in the wall and found out that skaven had actually been there, stealing the corpses of last winter's plague victims. They tracked the skaven to a crypt where they found a tunnel possibly leading the Under-Ubersreik. There was a distinctive smell of "Musk of Fear" in the crypt and it was enough for the party. They left the place and left the door to the crypt open so that the workers of the Garden could seal up the tunnel.

Returning to their hideout the Party met an errant send by von Holzenauer who requested to meet with the "Torch of Tilea" (as Barnabas had introduced his "posse"). After wondering why everybody just seemed suddenly to know where they were hiding there was another knock on the door and a request for a meeting with von Saponatheim was delivered. Aschaffenberg's didn't know anything about the group - their interest track having moved only one step.

While Joachim, Barnabas and Hjamlar (who had just assumed that he could "crash in" and had fallen asleep on Synab's bed...) were sleeping the watchmen went to report Hjalmar as a grave robber.

Next morning the party decided to visit both nobles and went to see von Holzenauer first. All of the other went straight in but Hjalmar wanted to sneak around and get to know the places... Having already ran a "rescue a stupid player from the Tower"-session I just declared that Hjalmar was arrested, thrown into jail and by spending all of his fortune points got away somehow.

The dinner at von Holzenauer was over before it started as Barnabas decided to rant about skaven and their menace almost immediately. Baron decided that he could use the group to guard the sewers during the ball and sent them off.

...So our next session (hopefully next tuesday!) will start with the meeting with von Saponatheim and be about the decision whether to participate to the ball or to foil the ritual of Ordo Septenarius (who are actually just trying to perform the Ranaldian ritual) and the next after that being the conclusion of this "season" be it the ritual or the ball.

Just realized I've not updated how the campaign ended. Sorry for that. I'll try to recapture it for your pleasure.

Interlude: The Copper Boar

To help one of the characters back on the track of what was going on in the campaign I ran an hour long one-to-one session for one of the players who had been missing for a couple of sessions. He played the hunter Nils and had been a bit bored to his characters so I wrote a small knightly chapter for him to try to join into.

Nils had been out of Ubersreik for a couple of days. He had been thinking about the mystical "tower of eels" and the Order of the Raging Boar that had once ruled it. So Nils decided to hunt down a huge boar called Bragg that had been terrorizing the locals. He did manage to track down the beast with his friend but quickly they noticed that the boar's hide had mutated into copper! Bragg the Copper Boar mutilated Nils's friend and drove the hunter off.

While fleeing from the monstrosity (that started out as a simple boar to whom I drew a mutation card and turned into a reoccuring monster) he stumbled upon another village that was just raided by the skaven. From his hideout Nils spied the Skaven Engineer that had burned and enslaved his village to wreck havoc. After the skaven had left Nils searched for survivors but when he couldn't find any he returned to Ubersreik to tell his friends about their Nemesis and to learn that his good friend had been killed in combat.

The Piper and the Way Down

At the beginning of this session Nils gets back from his own quest and tells the party about a henchman of skaven who had just come to Ubersreik. Joachim leaves to investigate this (mainly because his player had to leave early).

This was a small session during which the only thing that happened was Nils and Barnabas visiting von Saponatheim and Hjalmar finding a hidden door to the tunnels of skaven. I've no recollection about the social encounter with von Saponatheim but clearly the characters were not inspired by him as they decided to support von Holzenauer in the coming ball. Most likely they were suspecting him to be in league with the ratmen (as well as the Ordo Septenarius).

Hjalmar however managed to find the door to Underbelly (yes. I used the location from Wanted here and the irony is not lost to me as it was my idea to NOT include skaven in the Underbelly... ) and while he was searching it he encountered the three gutter runners of the Skaven Engineer (I wasn't going to use a grey seer for EoN) and he tried to follow one of them.

Incredibly enough he actually did manage to follow one of the skavens but only to be ambushed by it. In a fast combat that followed he was nearly killed but managed to perform an miraculous stunt while lying blinded in the mud - he bunched the creature to its groin with all of his strength and pulled...

When Hjalmar got back to the party's hideout stinking of mud, skaven urine, blood and musk of fear he alerted his friends to search for the hidden door. So Barnabas and Nils left him to recover and found the door with little effort. There did not seem to be any guards at the door but an enormous amount of rats. And while they were a little nervous they still tried to enter the tunnels only to find out that the door was locked and the rats could "swarm up".

After fighting the swarm of rats they noticed one of the homeless that had been sleeping in the abandoned houses near the entrance. He was playing an old flute with a strange melody. Barnabas succeeded in a folk lore check and remembered a story about Marienburg and a piper (a reference to WFRP1 supplement Marienburg: Dying of the Light ). They captured the piper and took him to their hideout.

Some charm, torture and interrogation revealed them a lot of important facts they needed. But the piper had no idea whether the skaven were about to strike the Ball or to participate into the ritual of Ordo Septenarius.

So we leaved the decision of which event the party would go to the next session.

And naturally they decided to split the party...

I'll try to write the last session down today.