Power Behind the throne is a short scenario by Carl Sarent. It is a scenario where the PCs rub elbows with nobles, much like in Edge of Night. It is set in Middenheim.
As it was shoehorned into The Enemy WIthin series, late in the series, it didn't see a lot of play for most groups.
The copy I have, is the 1988 hardcover by GW.
There's one thing I can't figure out: What the hell is the guy with red clothes and green armor doing on the back? Is he a cutout of artwork from somewhere?
jh
Emirikol said:
Power Behind the throne is a short scenario by Carl Sarent. It is a scenario where the PCs rub elbows with nobles, much like in Edge of Night. It is set in Middenheim.
As it was shoehorned into The Enemy WIthin series, late in the series, it didn't see a lot of play for most groups.
The copy I have, is the 1988 hardcover by GW.
There's one thing I can't figure out: What the hell is the guy with red clothes and green armor doing on the back? Is he a cutout of artwork from somewhere?
jh
Hmmm. Not sure I agree with any of that.
I wouldn't consider it short - it's about 92 pages long and there's quite a lot packed into it. I also don't recall it being shoe-horned in - it follows directly from Death on the Reik, ties directly into Empire in Flames, and has the Middenheim book as a companion volume. (Something Rotten in Kislev, on the other hand, is definitely shoehorned in, having no real link with the overall campaign.) Also, why do you have the idea that it didn't see a lot of play for most groups? As far as I can tell, SRiK is the one that tends to get dropped.
No idea about the origins of the guy on the back - I wouldn't be surprised if he orginally appeared in an advert in White Dwarf for Chaos Sorcerers.
Cheers
Sparrow
I'm with Sparrow here, it's not particularly short, and given that it's actually the highest ranked WFRP rpg item on rpggeek I don't really think you can say that it wasn't played much. It's rated by 66 persons, which, in my opinion, is comparable to the 86 ratings for Shadows over Bogenhafen. I think it's a fantastic adventure, and actually probably the defining adventure in the EW campaign.
Can't really give you any input on the image, I have the City of Chaos version of the book.
I stand corrected. It was Kislev that was the "shoehorned" scenario.
jh
I haven't read PbtT for many years, but for me it was a landmark RPG supplement for its emphasis on character interaction and flexibility. Whether or not it stands up today, I don't know - I've just decided to reread The Enemy Within from start to finish so I may find out at some point.
My memory of SRiK is that it started well, but the final part - and Sulring Durgul in particular - was pretty bad because it left the characters and players with little choice. I'd need to reread it, but I'd be tempted to keep Kislev as part of The Enemy Within, but turn it into a story detailing the PCs' involvement in the transition of power from Tsar Radii Bokha to his daughter Katarin.
Cheers
Sparrow
I'm as impressed with the NPC interaction information in this scenario as I was in Spires of Altdorf. For ease of use, Altdorf was better (the NPC interaction chart was simply brilliant, especially when you give a blank copy to the players). I may create something similar for this scenario.
Like you, I too am re-reading The Enemy Within to see how well I can jive boogie it all together with the upcoming scenario. The upcoming scenario promises lower page count, but new ideas, and I'd like to cover my nut when it comes to extent of playability of an unpredictable future.
jh
EDIT: I apparantely do not know how to hide the spoilers, so you have been now warned!
Our group played the whole TEW not too long ago with 3rd ed rules. PbtT was quite a chore to run through as it has a huge amount of NPCs, a sandbox style adventure and the PCs don't have a clue what they're supposed to do.
The PCs have just witnessed the fall of Castle Wittgenstein and get a vague hint that they should go to Middenheim. They have probably lost a lot of their posessions, they come to the city only to find out that they're treated very rudely and that they have to pay a huge tax only to enter and stay in the city. In my group the PCs mostly just wanted to leave the place. They certainly had no motivation into finding how they could fix the taxation in the city. And this feeling is only enhanced by the fact that their main reason to come to the city in the first place, to find Gotthard Wittgenstein, turns out to be just a red herring.
However I tried to prepare myself well and I warned the players beforehand that this adventure is very challenging to the GM. The main problem (besides the lack of motivation towards the main plot line) was that the party was quite poor with social skills, which meant that they faced a lot of dead-ends and that I had to fudge many social interactions. But in the end I think the adventure turned out to be quite enjoyable. PbtT offers a lot of refreshing new things to the adventure, and I just loved the transition from this adventure to SriK.
As for SriK, I think people should just skip it. Although all of our group had heard warnings that SriK is not really worth playing through, we still decided to try it out. The book starts off well and has many interesting storylines and situations. The problem is that the PCs often have no ways to actually resolve the main adventures in a "proper" fashion. There are only very odd deus ex machina resolutions to the main plots and completely unavoidable game breaking features.
e.g. the PCs get no warning beforehand, but they suddenly turn undead just by entering a single room in a cavern that they must explore anyways. Also I had to convince the PCs in meta-game just to leave the whole city, because Sulgring Durgul would have wiped out the whole party in a moment. The PCs had decided to ambush him, even after I tried to use every trick to convice them in-game that they don't stand a chance. But they had a which hunter in the party, so how could they not try to kill him?
Also the world in SriK feels very different from all the other books form TEW. Maybe this is logical and acceptable, since the players aren't in the Empire anymore. But the adventures had really strange features and plot twists.
The most amiable character in the whole book is a necromancer dwarf who thinks he's an elf, living in a zombie city in the middle of nowhere. And if the PCs decide to kill the necromancer (which would be a very in-character and logical resolution), there's practically no way to survive the adventure alive.