Hey guys, I just got WHFR and my players are just working on creating their characters, at which point I'm looking at running An Eye for an Eye. This is my first time GMing, so I'm a bit nervous. I'm good at the story telling, having been a player who really enjoyed getting into my character's mind. However, I'm worried about keeping everything flowing and remember all the stuff I have to do. I read through the Tomes but a lot of it is pretty confusing.

Any advice would be wonderful! How do you guys do it and make it look so easy??

Some of these quests you guys have posted look really interesting, hopefully my first campaign will go well and my players would like to continue. They've played Warhammer Quest for the last few years, but this is their first time doing anything other than a dungeon crawl. Wish me luck!

Aw, give it 30 years of trial & errror and you'll do fine

Welcome to WFRP (we call it woof-rup!).====

Here are my secrets:

• Dont fret the rules. Designate a player to look some stuff up while you run the game when necessary.
• Be descriptive and embellish on whats in the text. Imagine the scene in your eye and describe it. Give the players lots of options of things to do.
• When initially describing a scene, tell the players what they see rather than telling them what they did (e.g. "beyond the doorway is a bedroom with a 4 poster bed, chest, and painting of an ugly nobleman on a horse. there is some writing under the painting on the frame.." is better than "you walk into the room, grab and open the chest, and read some writing under the painting...")
• Keep the combat action moving by having people with the same initiative roll at the same time
• Do not withhold vital clues from players. If they're struggling, don't let them sit there bored, give them a suggestion like "Would you like to go recheck the hospital, talk to the dogman outside, or see what the staff is up to in the kitchen? THEN, reiterate why they're there, and what they already know.
• For this scenario, give the players a photocopy of the list of NPCs (remove the section that says if they're cultist and if they're wounded or poisoned).
• Put post-it notes in your book with reminders and suggestions for teh module. Definitely mark pages you'll need often. Have an extra print out of the gruenwald lodge ( www.headlesshollow.com/offsiteimages/ManorMap.jpg
• Pre-draw that map out (except for the secret stuff) and label the locations so the players can just say "i want to visit the kennels" or whatever. This makes your job easier and keeps the game moving..with the list of NPC's (say that Ashaffenberg gives them the staff list), they will have a good time
• Give your players a little sheet with the list of maneuvers
• Keep a list of skills next to your GM area so you can frequently reference skill checks other than combat observation and stealth
• Do not kill of all the players in the beastman attack (have the beastmen run away in superstition if things look too dire.
• Have fun, stay excited, be happy, have a couple caffeienated beverages while/before you play
• Help the players prep in a couple areas: 1) Have them write down their TOTAL SOAK next to their armor, 2) write their TOTAL DAMAGE next to each weapon they use (DR + strength as you know

Good luck

jh

..

Thank you so much, that's a HUGE amount of help! However, my guys stopped half way through character creation (when they had to get action cards, and we realized that when it says 4 players on the starter kit, one of those players is supposed to be GM, and no one wanted to share the cards) so now we have to go get a player's vault so that we have enough cards for anyone.

Any suggestions on anything else we should grab as well? I picked up the creature guide already because I'd eventually like to make my own quests, but I wasn't sure if there was anything else I should look for...

Thanks again for that advice, I've printed out the map and will look over all of your pointers again before we run the quest. It might be a while before we do that though because boys can be such babies when it comes to sharing.

(Yes, I'm the only girl, hence why I'm the GM... that and the fact that I'm the one with the most player experience so they're hoping I can do the best job as GM).

Try copying the cards and using a basic action summary sheet (officially available for download on the FFG support page)

FFG even made an "Action worksheet."

Wow Thanks!

I gave up helping them half way through last night, since I'm better at the storytelling than the following of steps for building characters. Apparently they spent 3 hours and didn't get a single character created. Any "Character creation for dummies" tips? They got up to the action card things but then just couldn't follow it from there, what do we do with all those cards? Especially when you add in the Tactics, Reputations etc cards.

Sorry if these are really stupid questions, like I said, I'm really new.

Emerikol, can you do me a favour and take down that basic action summary sheet I did. For various copyright reasons I'm not doing any reference material for WFRP3 and I don't wish to have what I did originally distributed. Thankyou!

U.Head. Done. I changed it to the official basic action sheet summary.

hi!

character creation can be very difficult when done the first time. my group also made mistakes in the creation phase the first time which resulted in their chars being WAY overpowered.

• just try following the steps listed in the book. and as a good advice: in creation it is better to invest creation points in characteristics and skill training rather than talent/action cards. the players are gonna gather tons of these over time anyways but it will be very expensive to up characteristics!
• have them read their career desciption on the back of the career card, that helps them identify with theit role.
• as mentioned above, stick with the basic action cards for the start, maybe 1 additional. if you have a wizard or priest, read through the part of the tomes where the rules for favour/power are given. this sounds very confusing at first, but is actually one of the easiest magic managing system i ever played with

for the eye for an eye campaign:

it was also the very first camp i ran as a gm and i had a hard time with it in the beginning. firstly, we are playing in german so i had to translate all of ít...

but for you as the gm it is important to know the NPCs in this campaign, read through the hole thing at least once, so you know what is going on in the mansion! this campaign also features the progress tracker....which i ended up hating in the end. i think you should always advance it when players find a clue and when they delay, giving the cult time to prepare for their ritual in the end.

i would say you leave out the progress track, you will sense when the moment has come to progress in the story line. once your players think that they have discovered enough, let dinner be served. but dont tell them why it is now not yet time for dinner, just say it isnt ready yet.

to vern herndirk and him hiring the players: have the players make up their own backstories on how they got to ubersreik. that way they already are more familiar with their characters and then let vern hire them. maybe for various reasons, that makes it a little more intresting. one might be in need of money, one might have to hide because of some "incovenience" he may have caused in the town, one might be send by a relative of rickard aschaffenberg who received a letter to send his daughter/son to ubersreik for some assistance...

as for otto geizhals, the librarian. the way he is described in the book is SO **** obvious. my players almost immediately wanted to hit on him. make him a little more sublte.

as for the painting, i drew my own painting to showcase it during the session, that had a huge effect. i also made the painting a little more disturbung, so that players looking directly at it might catch an insanity right away. this way they are also introduced into the whole insanity thing and will learn to be cautious with curtains *hehe*. in my group of 3 players 2 caught themselves temp insaities right away, one amnesia and one nightmare. they really fit!

in my session the players ended up killing all the cultist after the ritual had already been completed and them they almost destroyed the whole mansion. they nailed the leader to the roof and totally dismembered a wargor in the entrance area...lord aschaffenberg was not happy with that i tell ya!

but eye for an eye is a really nice story to start out with, as the players will get a nice look at the game mechanics and one of the biggest threats in the empire, the cultists.

..of course I forgot to mention all of the pre-generated characters in Liber Fanatica7 (up to witch's song).

jh

Emirikol said:

Thankyou sir!

Thanks a bunch guys, my husband and I are going to try and put together his character first so that we can help the other guys when we get together next.

I would use some of the premades personally, but the guys are dead set on making their own characters.

Even if you don't want to use pre-mades (I would like to create my own character too), you can compare them with the characters your players are creating to ensure that you're on the right track.

There's a 'reckless dice' podcast (haven't listened to it, but it's got good reviews on this forum), about WFRP. I have a feeling that the first or second episode covered character creation, so you might find that helpful to talk you through it too.

Finally; you mention that your players were overwhelmed by cards. My advice is to remind them that they'll only picking a few to begin with anyway. Tell them not to read the rules. Tell them to pick the 4 or 5 with the names that sound most suitable and just read through those before picking. But make clear that you'll happily let them swap actions and talents out for the first few sessions so they can get to learn the rules and if the cards they've chosen are any good.

You could even let the players take double the number of action cards and let them pick which ones to keep during the game. e.g. If they're allowed 2 cards, have them pick 4. Then if during a fight, they want to do a trollfeller strike, then pick that and make it 'permanent'. Once they've picked a second action, they discard the other 2.

Again - I would still recommend allowing players to swap out cards they're not happy with for a the first few sessions.

Basically; just try to take some of the pressure off at the beginning.