Enemy Within - for GM thoughts, prep ideas etc.

By valvorik, in WFRP Gamemasters

Yeah, they mostly want to talk to her because the investigation is going no where and there's this one really interesting person staying right in the middle of the mystery. It seems obvious that she's tied into it.

Having them break into her room actually works fine. After all, she is supposed to be suspicious of them. So this just gives her a really good excuse to assume they are agents of the Black Cowl.

I've actually written some new parts for the campaign after the garden party to give the players some more avenues of investigation and to build up to Book 2.

There is a corrupt city watch member. He can be put into any suspicious activity where the watch does not step in to hinder the Black Cowl. For example, letting the cart with stolen gun powder roll into the city without question.
He also stole a stamp from the watch-seargants office which was then used to create the fake letters and notices used to shut down the tanneries.
He was getting bribes from "Kneecap Karl" who is grumpy that Bischoff has been put in charge, since he earned that place before the Black Cowl came along.
So if they follow the money to Kneecap Karl, he might divulge where Bischoff has his hideout and can inform them of a meeting planned that night between Bischoff and someone "dangerous". (With the skaven, to get the bell clapper, but Karl doesn't know that.)

At Bischoffs place, they find everyone dead after a fight. Bischoff is tied to a chair in the basement, tortured to death. Adele Ketzenblum got here first. If they check the pieces of skin next ot his partially flayed body, they find the dolphin tatoo.

At the meeting place, the skaven stay away so it's just Adele Ketzenblum with a bunch of sigmarite fanatics and the party. Adele will probably assume the player characters are who Bischoff was meeting. If they manage to talk their way out of it Adele will comment that they should leave this to professionals and stay away from the docks when it rains (yes, heavy handed hint, but seriously I am suspecting my players might be developmentally challanged :P)

(Btw, in my version Adele is NOT a member of the Jade Scepter. Seriously, there is WAY too many cults in this campaign. And neither Adele or the Purple Hand guy needs a cult. She can easily have sigmarite fanatics and he can have mercenaries.)

Edited by Ralzar

Having Adele as a cult member works very well to explain why PC would benefit from replacing her with her tutor Gregor Whatshisname during the trial in book 2. There are indeed too much cults, but that gives PC the view on how corrupted the Old World is, and that corrupted forces do hate each other more than want to ruin everything.

Problem is, my players are allready getting pretty allergic to cults and skaven. Every adventure for WFRP ends up with a cult. If TEW is your first forey into WFRP then cults can work, but when you've been playing a while it starts becoming a terrible cliche.

And in book 2 I was reminding of the old Ophra meme: A Cult for you! And a Cult for you! Cults for EVERYONE! :P

There is allready the Red Crown, The Conspiracy and the Skaven. I think giving every bad guy his own cult sort of makes the world very black and white. If you're a bad guy, you're in a cult. If you're a good guy you fight against cults.
Adele works much better as an example of how the Sigmarite faith is not "the good guys". They're the Inquisition and Catholoic church on steroids.
It seems sort of cheap to allways blame people being bad on Chaos, when they can just be bad people. Adele can still be mutated, which is why she is so intense: she has only a limited amount of time until she falls to chaos or is discovered, and she'll use it to burn as many heretics as possible. She doesn't need any cult or chaos influence to enjoy torturing and burning people.

Edited by Ralzar

Hello If some are alive, and still need/want some materials...

A particular one, cause it's a video (to resume where players are in the story ( I mean start of chapter 3) and reintroduce each character)... and, it's in French :)

Yes, sorry, but maybe can give idea to any?

https://vimeo.com/223771951

pwd : JAestGrand