HI,

*SPOILER ALERT! ANYONE STARTING THE GATHERING STORM CAMPAIGN STOP READING!*

I'm a few weeks into the Gathering Storm Campaign - the first proper WFRP campaign I've run. I have quite a large group (6 players). Things are going on the whole very well - the majority of players are really enjoying it.

I was getting a little concerned with a virtually untouchable Dwarf IronBreaker. Concerned that is until the party reached the Garden of Morr and were beset by Zombies. Great I thought, the 'No escape, no hope' action will slow the Dwarf down somewhat.

'Somewhat' seemed to be a little underestimated....

1st round the party (all in one engagement) are beset by four groups of 6 zombie henchmen.

The Dwarf triggers an action (cant remember it's name off-hand but it was a chant (probably along the lines of 'skol, skol, skol....') which means all opponents in the engagement must target him.

So - first NPC group attacks. Dwarf is adding a silly number of misfortune dice in due to armour etc. so I throw in all four aggression fortune dice, plus one fortune dice for each 'assisting' henchman (10 fortune dice).

So I roll three successes - triggering the 'target suffers 1 additional stress and 1 additional fatigue FOR EACH UNDEAD ENGAGED WITH HIM'.

Ouch.

That'll be 24 stress and fatigue then?

This seems a little silly - Have I read the card right?

I didn't actually play the ability as read- I amended this to be 6 stress and fatigue (representing one group of henchmen), so the Dwarf was still up.

Then the second, third & fourth groups attacked. The Dwarf was most definately down after the second group. This raised another question:

At some point it would have been phsyically impossible for any more Zombies to reach the Dwarf (and his chanting would have been muffled anyway!). So what happens to the groups of henchmen who cant attack? Do they just stand around doing nothing, or do they attack another target (I ruled the later much to the chagrin of one of the rules -lawyery types in the group who vehemently argued the former!)

Just interested to see how others handled it?

Perhaps amend the card for groups of Henchmen so that each group counts as 'each undead'?

What about NPC's who can't comply with an action?

Shieldstromme said:

I haven't handled it yet, but I would think this is where your own GM interpretation, be-damnn the rules, comes in. - "You chant and the zombies all turn towards you in silent rage. There are so many in the horde that only the first ranks of the shambling horde stand a chance to rip you limb from limb...(only one group gets to attack)....IF THE ENCOUNTER IS GOING TOO EASY...."Some of the zombies begin to lose interest since they can't get to the Dwarf and slowly turn towards other flesh to eat"......(just as it appears you interpreted it).....IF THE ENCOUNTER IS GOING TO TOUGH...."The zombies in the back struggle to get to you, but can't. Slowly at first they push and shove to get past their undead brethren. Then something odd happens. The shuffling for position starts to turn violent. You see zombies begin to bite and tear at each other"......

I think in this case I would count each henchmen group as a single creature for the effects of the card. After all, henchmen are fodder, not a huge threat all alone. As far as how many can reach him? Well, have you ever seen those zombie films where is becomes a dogpile of zombies attacking one poor little human? Yeah, that's what happened here.

I would allow each group, to attack and form the zombie dogpile. Just because the zombies can't "reach" the dwarf, doesn't mean they aren't helping the other zombies fall all over him gnawing and clawing and scaring the crap out of the corpse-covered stunty. I might put a limit in extreme cases, and 24 is cutting it pretty close, but if the whole group stays bunched up, let them suffer the consequences. Remember, an engagement isn't the same as D&D's adjacent rules, it could represent the whole party fighting the horde, but a majority is focused on the dwarf.

awesome. hope they pulled his beard out.

This is one of those cases where the players should be careful what they ask for. If the Ironbreaker wanted to be targeted by 24 undead(!), then he should suffer the consequences.

Plus, it really sells the terror of that scene when the "unstoppable" dwarf gets swallowed by the horde.

gobelins have a very similar card (aka Swarm'em) where all engaged foes attack a single target at the same time which can be veryyyy dangerous even for a saga-of-grungni-dwarf.