TEW the next generation. (Many Spoilers)

By player548443, in WFRP Gamemasters

Hey guys,

This is a bit of a monster project so please bear with my rambling explanations.

What I’m attempting is basically The Enemy Within the next generation. Like many others I’m a huge fan of the campaign that kind of started it all. But instead of trying to convert the campaign I wanted to bring my players into the story after the events of TEW have been fully completed by a previous group of adventurers.

The official ending of TEW has emperor Karl Franz dying which changes the history of the world forever. And then all official fluff written since ignored that it ever happened and the emperor is alive and fighting the good fight. An amazing alternate ending was written by Mad Alfred called Empire at War that lines up much more with our current fluff cannon.

During the final showdown in EAW the Crown Prince Wolfgang Holswig-Abenauer’s mind is shattered when his consort turns into a greater daemon of Slaanesh. He is taken to a Shallyan Asylum to live out his days in madness. This is my starting point.

How it starts- The Mad prince needs to escape. In my game my players let Gregor Piersson from EFAE and the demon he summoned escape. These two are the ones that break out the prince. During his incarceration the prince has come up with a plan to fix the world into what he thinks was supposed to happen. And once he has been released he can begin with his plan.

The Plan- The prince manages to summon a Changer of ways and makes a deal. The greater daemon will enact a spell that will roll back time and give the prince a chance to change the events of the ending of TEW. But the spell is massively complex and requires many specific things to happen.

The spell- The daemon and the prince will have to find a group of adventurers to “re-enact” the major events of TEW.

The opposing groups involved-

The Knights Panther- In EAW the players are made official Knights Panther. Now they are lord knights basically in retirement. But once they receive word that the prince has escaped they are working directly against the prince and they have the most information on what’s going on.

The Purple Hand- While mostly destroyed in EAW they have grown again and have plans of their own. The former Magister Magistri of the Purple Hand Karl-Heinz Wasmeier is back in Middenheim and trying to rebuild his seat of power. His plans, while not directly against the Mad Prince he is one of the pieces of the spell as the adventures will have to uncover a conspiracy in Middenheim. And the destruction of rivals is always a bonus for any agent of Chaos.
There are a couple of smaller groups that I plan to bring in to cause trouble as well-
Cult of the Red crown-led by Eva Schwarzmann
Cult of the Scarlet Member- Gets a special place of hate from the mad prince as one of the causes of his downfall
Sons of Ulric- I plan to use these guys as guerilla terrorists causing incidents throughout the campaign.
Von Jungfrieds/Bruners- Not sure yet weather these guys will be helping or hurting (probably both) Depends on how my players get along with them.
I also plan to use many of either the children of NPC from TEW or older versions of the NPC’s themselves.

I don’t plan to drop the PC’s into the middle of everything right off. All my players and myself are still working on getting the system mechanics down so I’m running EFAE to GS to EON to HIH (I’ve posted my session reports so far here on the forums- called Session Report[spoilers]) all the while dropping in more and more characters and info from what really going on. Then we will move into directly following and stopping the plan of the Mad Prince.

One of the first is actually going to be the Changer of ways in the form of an aged Britonian Gambler named Phillipe Descartes. The players will soon be literally playing poker with the devil. And he’s on his way to Stromdorf.

My GM style leans heavily towards reactions to what the players are doing. I like to set the scene and let the players successes and fails dictate where and how they get the info. Most of my ideas on how to move things forward come from them. But as this is a lot of info and as I really really like foreshadowing and reoccurring NPCs I wanted to get more of this planned out.

For the most part I plan on cherry picking TEW to save me from most of the hard work.

I would like to put a call out to see if anyone would like to help me with putting this together into an adventure format for others to use. I could also really use the help of a more graphically minded person to help with putting together location cards, maps, and other handouts.

Also any thoughts, comments, and ideas would be more then welcome.

Hmm... Well that will certainly be interesting. I'm not sure it'll be any less work than converting the original though!

The players you're converting this for... Have they played the Enemy Within or not? When you refer to the 'original PCs' who 'completed' TEW campaign, are these completely made up NPCs for use in your 'next generation' adventure? Or are they going to be actual PCs, or at least based on actual PCs, that the players have played (or that you have run TEW for) before?

I've never seen MadAlfred's EAW, unfortunately. Is it still available from anywhere? Was it sold, or available for download somewhere? I'd love to see it (especially as I don't have the original Empire in Flames either - so I've got nothing really on how to end TEW campaign if I ever run it).

I have not run it but I did go through it as a player back in the day. My players have not played through the origional. As for Empire at war its on the strike to stun downloads page here-

http://www.strike-to-stun.net/downloads

The PC's that "finished" the game will be based on the generic charactors that are included with the first part of TEW. It is about the same work as a conversion yes but I have inspirition to do it this way so its more fun for me.

I like your ideas. I am new to Warhammer, never having played the previous editions. I have a hodge podge of various books that I have liberally borrowed for ideas. Namely the Paths of the Damned campaign. I don't worry to much about the classic story, I just am looking for filler to creates vignettes for my groups story. So along that line, I like what you are doing.