Early modern corpse medicine

I recently read a book called Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, by Richard Sugg. Despite its title, it's not about monsters. Instead, it's a history of what Sugg calls 'corpse medicine' - the early modern practise of using bits of dead people in attempts to cure the living. Sugg can be a bit credulous in places, but he does a good job of establishing that human blood, fat, and bone saw fairly widespread use in both European folk remedies and 'academic' medicine during the period, giving rise to a range of often gruesome medical practises that, in some cases, lingered on as late as the nineteenth century.

Here are the most gameable bits.

Skull Moss: The theory went like this: during life, your brain is constantly sloshing around inside your skull, marinading the bone in brain juice (AKA 'vital spirits'). So after you die, some of the life-giving power of your brain juice should logically still inhere in your skull. You could just grind up a skull and use the resulting powder as medicine, and indeed many people seem to have done exactly that. But the best way to get the power out is to take a human skull and grow moss on it, preferably by moonlight or starlight. The moss sucks the power of the vital spirits out of the skull, and you can then powder and eat the moss as a remedy. 

Plot seeds: 

• 'My loved one is sick! Bring me the powdered skull of something with really powerful brain-juice! Maybe a wizard or a dragon or something.'
• 'Actually, what we really need is their whole skull, so we can grow moss on it in the light of the full moon. That won't be a problem, will it?'
• 'And we need the brain-juice to be super-fresh, so you'll need to either find one that's just died, or kill one for us yourself. Remember - the skull must be intact! No headshots!'
• If your PCs end up building some kind of freakish garden full of moss growing on the skulls of everything they've ever killed, then so much the better!

Strangulation boosts skull quality: If someone dies by hanging or strangling, then at the moment of their death their life force will obviously be trapped inside their head, unable to escape down into their lungs. This means they will die with a head full of super-charged brain juice, making their skull (and any skull moss subsequently grown on it) extra-potent for medical purposes. There was consequently a brisk trade in the skulls of the hanged.

Plot seeds: 

• 'We need the skull of a [wizard/dragon/whatever] that died by strangulation. Any other death makes them useless to us. Here's a noose. Good luck!'
• 'Did you hear? They're hanging Horatius the Hexmaster tomorrow! Everyone's going to want his skull! We need a plan to get in first...'

Subdermal talismans: One particularly hardcore early modern soldier apparently wore a lump of skull moss under the skin of his own head, presumably by cutting a flap of skin off his forehead, pushing the moss under it, and then sewing up the wound and letting it heal. Probably the intention was to fortify his own skull with a double-dose of life-giving brain-juice. Apparently it worked, too, protecting him against being injured by sword-blows to the head. 

Plot seeds:

• PCs should absolutely be encouraged to sew lumps of skull-moss from all the scariest things they've killed under the skin of their own heads. Give them mechanical bonuses for doing it. You should be able to spot a real monster-slayer from all the weird scarred-over lumps bulging out of their foreheads.
• An enemy with a sufficiently impressive skull-moss collection might be almost unkillable, requiring PCs to specifically cut away their subdermal talismans to render them vulnerable to harm - tricky if they're also wearing a helmet!

Wound salve: According to the early modern doctrine of sympathy, a connection existed between a wound and the weapon that caused it. Rubbing a 'wound salve' made of human blood, fat, and skull moss on a bloodstained weapon would make the wounds caused with it heal, no matter how remote the victim might be.

Plot seeds:

• 'I can't treat this injury - the poison is far too powerful! Find me the knife that made it! I'll treat that, instead!'
• Wounds could be used as a means of ensuring loyalty at a distance. 'Oh, that wound looks pretty mortal, doesn't it? But as long as you keep making payments, I'll keep applying wound salve to the knife I just stabbed you with...'
• Sugg doesn't discuss it, but there was also believed to be a 'powder of sympathy' which, if stabbed with a weapon that had been previously used to wound someone and which was still stained with their blood, would cause that person to experience sudden pain, no matter where they were on Earth. The potential value of such powder as a weapon (or, indeed, as a long-distance signalling mechanism) should be obvious!

A cure for bad blood: To reconcile enemies, take blood from both of them and mix it with fertile soil, then grow herbs from the soil and feed the herbs to both enemies. This mixing of their life forces will soften the enmity between them. 

Plot seeds: 

• This scenario basically writes itself. 'Here's a bag of dirt, a bag of seeds, a sharp knife, a bottle, and a cookbook. Now get out there and end that feud!'
• Good luck convincing someone who knows you've been consorting with their mortal enemy that you've got a totally innocent reason for first cutting them open and stealing their blood, and then coming back and feeding them a bowl of herbs with questionable origins!

Blood lamps: Take a lamp, fill it with human blood drawn from one person, and then light it. The light from the lamp will reflect their condition - if it burns clear and bright they're probably OK, but if the flame wavers it means they're troubled, and if it goes out suddenly for no reason it means they've died. Presumably the lamp required periodic blood top-ups to renew its connection.

Plot seeds: 

• A ruler or spymaster might maintain whole rooms full of blood lamps, one for each person they want to keep tabs on. Plenty of opportunities for sabotage by spiking one person's lamp with someone else's blood!
• 'I know he says he's fine, but how's he really doing? Here - take this lamp, steal some of his blood, and pour it into it. I just want to make sure that he's actually OK...'

The Hand of Glory does appear in the book, but is surely too well-known to need writing up here.

Dead man's hand: One seventeenth-century doctor recommended treating piles and swellings with the sweat of a dying man. This was obviously a pretty time-limited resource - if he's genuinely dying, you've only got so long before he tips over into being dead - but luckily, there was an alternative: you could rub them better with a dead man's hand! (Presumably he had a preserved one that he used for this purpose? I imagine it mounted on a stick for easier rubbing...)

Plot seeds: 

• A particularly stubborn disease might need rubbing with a particularly powerful severed hand - perhaps one belonging to a dead cleric, wizard, etc. If you can grab some of his sweat while he's dying, that's a bonus!
• A curse or monster might inflict terrible swellings on those who oppose it, requiring the PCs to rub one another down with severed hands in mid-melee!

The executioner's other trade: Each human body was believed to possess a certain allocation of life force, which leaked away through age and sickness - thus the bodies of young people (especially healthy young men) who died suddenly by violence were held to possess great power, as so much unspent life force remained bottled up within them. Many early modern executioners thus carried on a thriving trade in the blood, bones, skin, and fat of their victims, all of which were believed to possess healing properties and even to be able to ward off black magic due to the life force with which they were charged. The fresher these body parts were, the better - people desperate for cures would sometimes come to beheadings with cups, ready catch and drink the victim's blood right at the foot of the scaffold. 

Plot seeds: 

• A corrupt magistrate might be in league with the local executioner, having specific people executed on trumped-up charges because he believes their body parts are likely to fetch a particularly good price on the open market.
• In a region plagued by witches, different families might compete fiercely for bits of each person executed (and agitate constantly for more executions), seeing such corpse-talismans as their best hope for protecting their families from dark sorcery.
• A PC suffering from a magical curse or disease might learn that their only cure is the freshly-spilled blood of an executed man. When's the next execution happening, again? And they'd better be ready to fight for a spot at the foot of the block - they won't be the only ones there waving empty tankards around and trying to guess the likely trajectories of arterial spray...
• PCs tend to inflict a lot of violence and untimely death - what if they start selling the blood and bones of their victims, too? How will the local executioners react to someone trying to break into 'their' trade?

Blood against age: Drinking the blood of the young and healthy was thought to grant strength to the old and infirm. Normally the 'donor' was paid, though rumours circulated that some rulers had young victims abducted and murdered for the sake of their life-giving blood.

In-game uses:

• 'No, I need someone really healthy. Get me... like... a barbarian champion, or something. Then tie him down so I can drink some of his blood!'
• Campaign start concept: the PCs are a bunch of random travellers kidnapped because their hardy, athletic frames make them ideal targets for the local lord's medical vampirism. Now they need to break out of his horrible castle before he drains them all dry like the ghastly, thirsty, geriatric monster he is. Good thing they're all such vigorous specimins!

A cure for flatulence: Tired of farting at inconvenient times? Try wearing gloves made of human skin! For some reason they're good for the joints, as well! 

(We can only hope that not too many people tried putting this one into practise, although the idea of human leather doesn't seem to have disturbed our ancestors as much as one might expect. Books continued to be intermittently bound in human skin well into the nineteenth century.)

Plot seeds:

• 'So what you need to do, right, is wait until he begins his big speech, and then pull his human-skin gloves off! His uncontrollable flatulence will finish his career on the spot!'

Preserved scalp of the Red Barn Murderer, Richard Corder, and a book of his crimes bound in his skin. From 1828.

Mummy: The crushed flesh of Ancient Egyptian mummies was believed to have many healing properties - so much so that demand for it soon outstripped supply. Egyptian corpse-merchants made up the shortfall first by substituting 'natural' mummies (the dried-out corpses of travellers killed in desert sandstorms) for the ancient kind, and then by just buying up as many bodies as they could, drying them out in giant ovens, and exporting them as 'mummies'. Paracelsian medicine maintained you could make a home-grown version just as good as an ancient one by taking the freshly-killed body of a young man who died by violence, leaving it out overnight, cutting it into strips, and macerating it in wine. So as well as moss-covered skulls, dead men's hands, human-skin gloves, crushed-up mummies, and pastes made from human blood and fat, the workshops of early modern doctors may also have contained shredded corpses in wine. For, y'know, medical reasons.

Plot seeds:

• 'Find me a genuine ancient mummy, with a pyramid and everything! Then crush it up so I can rub it on my injuries. You can keep the inevitable cursed gold for yourselves.'
• PCs may kill a lot of people, but they probably don't carry giant urns of wine around on adventures with them. So for an extra pay-off, why not drag all those corpses back to the local wine-merchant and have them made into medicine? Let's just hope no-one asks any awkward questions about why you're dragging all these hacked-up corpses around...
• With all these mummies being traded back and forth, how long can it be before an undead one gets mixed in with the rest, and wakes up just as it's being unloaded from the ship? Imagine how angry some ancient priest-king will be upon discovering he's narrowly avoided being ground up for medicinal purposes...
• Some early modern doctors also broke into barrow mounds in search of ancient dead people to grind up into medicine. Think of all the furious barrow wights!

The Black Doctors: Suspicion of the medical profession seems to have run deep in rural Scotland. There parents would warn their children of 'the Black Doctors', medical murderers who lurked around looking for potential victims. When they spotted a likely target they'd sneak up behind them and slap a black adhesive patch over their nose and mouth, suffocating them and preventing them from calling out, then drag them off to make healing broth from their bodies and bones. (Very similar stories circulated in early Victorian London, where medical murder-gangs were rumoured to garrote pedestrians and throw their bodies down through hidden hatches into ever-boiling cauldrons in the tunnels below.)

Plot seeds: 

• Hunt down the medical murder-crew preying on the local population! Then struggle with your conscience over what to do with all the cannibalistic healing broth you've just acquired from their hidden lair!
• Actually, those suffocation-patches sound pretty handy for adventurers, too...

Drunken incompetent regional magnates: the purpose of aristocracies

First up, a brief announcement: the kickstarter for Knock! issue three has now gone live, packed with material from the old-school blogosphere's finest. It will also have a couple of my articles in it, so if you've ever wanted to own a physical copy of my d100 problem-solving items table but couldn't be bothered to print it out yourself then this is your chance.

Anyway. Something mildly interesting happened in my game this week: the PCs were negotiating with a king to end a civil war, which had started when the king had framed a mostly-innocent nobleman for his own misdeeds. The PCs wanted him pardoned, and suggested that the king should instead pin the blame on a different, more powerful nobleman, who was (a) actually much guiltier and (b) a drunken wastrel whom nobody liked. The king baulked at this, which somewhat confused some of the players. 'Isn't he a drunken incompetent?' one of them asked. 'Yes', I replied, 'but he's a very rich and influential drunken incompetent!'

The negotiations moved on and a compromise was ultimately reached, but thinking this over I feel there may have been a disconnect between the assumptions that I and (some of) my players were bringing to the table. To them, I think that getting rid of a corrupt lord who was despised by his own people seemed like pure upside, something that should be easily acceptable to everyone who wasn't him. Whereas my assumption, roleplaying as the king, was that openly moving against a powerful regional magnate - even one he personally disliked - would be something that he'd want to avoid unless he felt that there was absolutely no alternative. This isn't the first time I've felt such a disconnect: in reading discussions of fantasy RPGs and similar online, I've sometimes seen the view expressed that pre-modern aristocracies are purely parasitic, something that can be circumvented or done away with without disadvantaging anyone other than the aristocrats themselves. Frequently these seem to be rooted in modern liberal-democratic assumptions that aristocracies are obviously stupid ideas, and that any society that has one would be better off getting rid of it as soon as possible.

Nice throne, but what exactly is the point of you?

Now, I myself believe in democracy, and I am very glad that I don't have to spend my life bowing and scraping to the guy in the castle down the road. But I also think that social forms develop for a reason, and that if most of Europe and Asia kept circling back to social systems built around powerful land-owning aristocrats for thousands of years, then that probably wasn't just due to some kind of historical accident. When people think of aristocracies, I think they often tend to think of nineteenth-century aristocracies, lounging in their stately homes, expensive and decorative and mostly useless. But pre-modern aristocracies have a function, one that is not easily circumvented before the rise of the modern state, and understanding this function can help in making settings where all the obligatory dukes and barons and whatnot actually have some reason to exist.

Pre-modern life is local. There are no accurate maps, no accurate census data, no accurate statistics: the only way you can properly learn about a region is by living there, not just briefly but for years on end. Learning who lives where, what they produce, what they trade, understanding the social fabric that connects each family or community to those around it... all this requires specific local knowledge, and there are no shortcuts to acquiring it. Under these circumstances, establishing an effective system of resource extraction (taxation, conscription, etc) is often going to be the work of years, if not of generations. Any thug with an army can ride into a major population centre, steal everything not nailed down, and ride off. But if he wants his power to extend into the woods and the hills, the hamlets and villages, then that thug and his family need to be prepared to settle in for the seriously long haul.

This is the service that the local lord provides. If they've been there for long enough, he and his relatives will have wound their tendrils deep into all the prominent local families, bought off or intimidated all the local village 'big men', and learned through a grim process of trial and error roughly what kind of tax burden can be extracted from the region without actually triggering famine and/or revolt. He's probably been hunting and hawking in the area his whole life: he knows where to find all the hidden villages nestled deep in the forests, the ones that will never appear on any official map. His family's grip on the area will often have been decades if not centuries in the making. If you just banish them and install someone else then it might take a long, long time before his successors are able to exploit the region with anything like the same success.

Thus I have made myself INDISPENSABLE!

And above the local lord is the regional magnate, who is playing the same game one level up. As the local lords work their hooks into the local clans and prominent village families, so the magnate works his hooks into the local lords, gradually establishing a network of family ties and legal dependencies and bribes and threats and traditions and alliances that allow him to tap them for resources, and to call upon their aid in times of war. The whole system is intensely local and intensely personal: it's 'I know a guy who knows a guy' all the way down. A really well-entrenched regional magnate can run his domain like a petty king: the royal court can issue laws and proclamations, but the court is far away, and royal power can only extend out into the regions via networks of local intermediaries. In the little hilltop towns that the king has never heard of, the law is usually whatever the local lord says it is.

As a result, for a king to antagonise one of his regional magistrates is a really big deal. That magnate stands at the head of a patronage network that reaches all the way down into miserable, marginal settlements that only a few outsiders even know how to find, and alienating him - or alienating his family by executing or banishing him - risks disrupting the functioning of government across a whole chunk of the kingdom. Dispossessing his whole family and installing someone else could easily be even worse: while they'd presumably be loyal to you, it might take decades for their replacement to get a proper system of leverage up and running to replace the one you've just destroyed. (Remember, all of this is personal - a matter of 'you owe my brother a favour' or 'my cousin married your sister' or 'our grandfathers served together in the war' - and so none of it is straightforwardly transferable to a new candidate.) And of course there's always the risk that the offended magnate (or his family) will simply storm off and rebel, relying on their remote strongholds and local support networks to keep them safe. You'll probably win the resulting civil war - you're the king, after all - but winkling them out of their distant castles is probably going to be a slow and bloody business, and exactly the kind of thing that rival kings love to take advantage of if given half a chance.

So when the PCs in our session this week proposed to King Bahir that he should sacrifice Lord Maruf, I think that what they meant was 'You're the boss, so why don't you pin this whole mess on this under-performing middle manager?' But what I, in character as the king, heard was: 'Hey, that guy whose family network you rely upon to hold down the northern provinces and the border lords? The one whose people know how to extract tax revenue and conscript soldiers from the upland villages around the domains of the Broken One? He's expendable, right?' The fact that King Bahir personally disliked Lord Maruf was beside the point. He just couldn't afford to take that kind of hit unless he really had to.

Luckily, in the end the party circumvented the whole issue by staging an illusionary wizard battle in a desert instead!

The march of empire

I've mentioned before that the setting of ATWC is loosely pegged to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which for the peoples of Central Asia were an era of imperial encroachment. Equipped with new gunpowder weaponry and a greatly improved logistical base, the Eurasian empires of the early modern period - Romanov Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, Mughal India, and Qing China - were able to project force into the steppe, mountains, deserts, and taiga much more successfully than their predecessors. By the time the Nerchinsk Treaty of 1689 was signed, many once-impassible regions such as Azerbaijan, Sibera, Mongolia, and Afghanistan had been more-or-less carved up between them.

In ATWC, this hasn't happened yet. The steppe and taiga khanates still enjoy an uneasy independence, but every observer of current affairs can tell that change is on its way. Travel down the Great Road and you'll find foreigners everywhere: some southerners and some easterners and some westerners, but all carrying splendid-looking documents from far-off imperial courts and flanked by serious-looking men wearing strange military uniforms and carrying guns. They are always on the move, these foreigners. They study local languages. They map and survey and observe and inquire. They preach new religions, or disturbingly unfamiliar interpretations of old ones. They hold secret meetings with local princes that go on long into the night. Their horsemanship is comically terrible by steppe standards, and they possess a knack for starving to death in deserts that the locals find quite astounding, but despite these failings they carry themselves with a strange confidence. They seem convinced that the future belongs to them.

For the Tsar!

Wherever you go in the steppe khanates, or in the oasis kingdoms of the Great Road, you can bet that agents of foreign empires are there too. (They haven't made it very far into the taiga yet, but they're working on it.) Roll on the tables below to find out what they're up to.

Who is here? (Roll 1d8)

1. Merchant-adventurers, scouting out the region's goods and markets on behalf of some far-off trade consortium, watched with loathing by local traders who have operated in this area for centuries. 
2. Missionaries for some foreign faith, armed with official letters from a distant emperor, scornfully surveying the local temples.
3. Negotiators come to arrange a treaty between a nearby ruler and some distant imperial state, speaking the local language very badly and looking extremely pleased with themselves.
4. Explorers on horseback accompanied by local bearers, making notes and checking compasses, steadily filling in the blank areas on their maps.
5. Scholars affiliated with a far-off university, surveying local customs and monuments and nodding sagely to themselves. 
6. 'Archaeologists and antiquaries' (read: grave-robbers with fancy licenses), poking around in the ruins outside of town and casually asking where exactly your ancestors are buried.
7. Military advisers decked out with the very latest in modern firearms technology, offering to help the local rulers modernise their pitifully outdated cannons and fortifications in exchange for a little quid pro quo.
8. Roll again, but they're actually spies from a completely different foreign empire, here in disguise to watch over the activities of their rivals as part of some complicated game of international intrigue. 

For the Sultan!

Who leads them? (Roll 1d8)

1. Bright-eyed true believer who genuinely believes that absorption into the greater imperial polity is the best thing that could possibly happen to a benighted backwater like this one.
2. Dead-eyed veteran of the imperial war machine, whose utterly impersonal brutality makes even the most savage khans shiver.
3. Long-term field agent who went native years ago, and now identifies more with the khanate they're posted to than the distant empire they supposedly serve.
4. Embarrassing failure from a minor imperial house, sent out to the back of beyond with strict orders not to return home until they've actually accomplished something.
5. Disgraced courtier who knows full well that they've been sent out here as a punishment, and resents it bitterly.
6. Bookish academic convinced that their years of study in the archives have allowed them to understand the region much better than the people who actually live there.
7. Enterprising merchant who sees the whole region as a series of mouth-watering opportunities for economic exploitation. 
8. A member of a local ethnic group with a painstakingly acquired imperial education, who has carved out a precarious place for themselves as an intermediary between their country and the empire while feeling painfully out of place in both. 

For the Shah!

What is their true objective? (Roll 1d12)

1. To lay the groundwork for the conquest and annexation of the region by the empire they serve.
2. To change the region's culture and religion in ways that will align it with the empire.
3. To gain revenge on the descendants of the nomad warlords who terrorised their empire generations ago. 
4. To suppress the bandits and raiders based in the region, who are disrupting the empire's overland trade.
5. To gain access to the natural resources of the region and exploit them for everything they're worth. 
6. To turn the local rulers against their imperial rivals, who are also active in the region.
7. To establish new trade routes and markets for the empire's merchants and manufacturers. 
8. To bring down the local regime and replace it with one more amenable to their empire's interests.
9. To establish a military alliance with the local rulers, in the hope of securing troops to fight in some distant imperial warzone. 
10. To loot all the valuable books, treasure and antiquities they can get their hands on, on behalf of some far-off imperial archive or museum. 
11. To establish covert diplomatic ties with the Wicked City. (All the empires insist loudly that they would never bargain with a state so obviously impious, but many of them do so anyway, albeit in secret. Empires always have uses for another delivery of cut-price muskets and clockwork soldiers!)
12. Roll again, but the second roll is just a cover story: they're actually part of a rebel faction within the empire, secretly gathering allies and resources for a planned uprising. (Yes, if you also rolled an 8 on the first table, this means they're actually spies posing as rebels posing as something else. Welcome to the Great Game!)

For the Shahenshah!

How much backing do they have? (Roll 1d8)

(All imperial representatives travel with fancy letters declaring that anyone impeding their mission will face the wrath of the entire empire, but ink is cheap and armies are expensive. If push comes to shove, will anyone back home really care?)

1. Less than zero. This mission has been deliberately set up to fail, as a deniable way of getting rid of someone inconvenient. No matter what happens to it, the empire will do nothing to intervene.
2. Zero. This mission is essentially a punishment assignment for people who've made the wrong enemies. No-one in power will care if they don't make it home alive.
3. Minimal. This mission is a gamble by some minor minister or provincial governor, who would very much like it to succeed but doesn't really have the resources to properly support it. Minor levels of military and/or financial reinforcement will be sent if they are in truly desperate need.
4. Local. No-one really cares about this mission back in their distant imperial capital, but one local faction (roll 1d4 - 1 = religious group, 2 = ethnic group, 3 = political faction, 4 = merchant consortium) would like to see it succeed for private reasons of their own, and is willing to commit substantial resources to bring this about.
5. Financial. This mission is being financed by someone with extremely deep pockets, and carries letters of credit that allow them to call upon staggering amounts of money on demand. 
6. Military. This mission is being backed by someone with a lot of soldiers at their disposal, who is perfectly willing to send a whole lot of men to their deaths if it will help ensure the mission's success.
7. Covert. Although only minimally supported by its notional patrons, the mission is actually being backed by another imperial power, for nefarious reasons of its own. They are willing to offer it substantial support, but only in indirect and deniable forms. 
8. High. This mission has the full backing of the imperial government, which regards it as a strategic priority and are willing to launch large-scale military or diplomatic reprisals against anyone impeding or threatening it.

For the Son of Heaven!

Echoes and Reverberations 6: Zweihänder

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the various 'dark Eurofantasy' RPGs that appeared in the wake of the abrupt demise of WFRP 2nd edition. Like Shadow of the Demon Lord, Zweihänder started life as someone's attempt to write their own personal 'WFRP 2.5', pointedly taking a completely different direction to the one chosen by FFG for the official WFRP 3rd edition. (The game's author, Daniel Fox, described WFRP 3 as 'sugar-coated' and 'too much like D&D'.) It began back in 2013, as an attempt to create a WFRP retroclone called 'Project COREhammer' on the Strike to Stun forum - but swiftly grew into a game in its own right, boosted by a successful kickstarter campaign in 2016, and in 2018 it won the Best Game award at the Ennies. You used to be able to get a free no-art version of the game from Drivethrurpg, but that seems to have vanished now. I've only read the 688-page (!) free version, so it's possible that some changes have been made between this and the latest (674-page) version of the game.

Zweihänder is basically what happens when someone's document of house rules for WFRP 2 gets so big that it turns into its own game. It addresses all the standard complaints that people have been making (and house-ruling) about WFRP since the 1980s, like 'why are some careers so much better than others?', 'how come a naked dwarf can ignore getting hit in the face with a battleaxe?', 'why does the game have all these stats that barely ever get used?', and the ever-popular 'why do I miss so fucking much in combat'?

In Zweihänder, every career offers the same number of skill and stat increases. The number of ability scores has been condensed down to seven. Numbers are higher across the board, making PCs more likely to succeed at whatever they're currently attempting. The combat and damage system has been rewritten: WFRP's system of wound points and critical hits has been replaced with a series of damage thresholds that forces players to roll on ever-more severe injury tables depending on how much damage they've taken, while combat now involves each character receiving three 'action points' per round, which they can choose to use to move, attack, perform special manoeuvres, and so on. Every monster comes with a sheaf of special rules, D&D 4 style, to make sure that fights will play out differently depending on the specific combatants involved. It all looks like a lot of work to me, but I'm very lazy about these things, and tend to lose patience with combat systems more complex than 'roll WS or under on 1d100 to stab the goblin in the face'. The same 'rules for everything' approach can be seen in the game's rules for social interactions, chases, wilderness travel, and just about everything else. A game that actually used all these rules would be far too heavy for my tastes, but I suspect that most groups will just mix and match, just like in every other RPG.

All of these are the kind of WFRP house rules that I can imagine a group making in the late 1980s, probably shortly after being exposed to GURPS, and represent a continuation of the changes that WFRP 2 made to WFRP 1. However, Zweihänder also includes some more 'modern' elements of game design. The four most important of these are Peril, Corruption, Fortune, and Professional Traits.

Peril is the way that the game tracks stress, fatigue, and all those other negative effects that fall short of actual injury. As you gain more Peril, your skills become less effective; if the Peril just keeps coming, then eventually you reach the point where you're so wrecked that you automatically fail at everything you attempt. I like the idea of this: I've written before about how I wish D&D had better ways of modelling the impact of hunger, exhaustion, cold, fear, and all the other cumulative stresses of the adventuring life, and I like the elegance of rolling them all together into a single mechanic that can cover everything from choking a guy out to someone being so terrified that they become totally non-functional, rather than trying to model them all separately.

What I'm less convinced by is the specific effects of Peril, namely disabling your skill ranks and pushing everyone steadily towards the level of untrained amateurs. If anything, I'd expect the reverse: the guy who's performed a task a thousand times before is precisely the one who's going to be able to perform it under crisis conditions, because even if his mind is currently blank with panic his hands are still going to remember what to do, whereas the half-trained amateur who relies on conscious knowledge rather than muscle memory might manage just fine under normal conditions, but is likely to be useless under pressure. It'd be easy to flip this, though, so that skill ranks were the last thing rather than the first thing to go as the Peril piles on.

Corruption seems to have grown out of WFRP's insanity point system. Anything likely to cause trauma - suffering serious injuries, witnessing horrible events, channeling weird magic, collapsing under a huge mass of Peril, etc - inflicts Corruption points. Using drugs and alcohol to temporarily blunt the effects of injuries, Peril, madness, or diseases also inflicts Corruption, as your short-term remedies exert a long-term toll on your mind and body: a brilliant bit of game design that I wish I'd thought of myself. At the end of every session you roll 1d10 and compare it to your Corruption score: equal or less means you gain 1 'chaos rank', higher means you gain one 'order rank'. (If you gained more than 10 in a single session, you get one chaos rank automatically for each ten points and then roll again against whatever's left.) Ten chaos ranks earns you a disorder. Ten order ranks earns you a fate point.

Where it gets weird is that Corruption also serves as the game's morality system. Corruption points are given out for evil actions, meaning that a PC who keeps being bad will go crazy just as fast as one who keeps getting traumatised, and a PC who does both will go mad twice as fast as either. This really does strike me as an attempt to make the same mechanic do two not-very-compatible things at once: and if I were using the system I'd be very tempted to decouple Corruption from fate points, and to reserve it for actions and experiences that caused mental strain, regardless of their moral status.

Fortune points are just reroll tokens. You can use them whenever you want, but then you have to hand them to the GM to use against you whenever they want. I'm really not sure about this: when I GM, it's very important to me that I try to run the world impartially. I think you'd need a very clear 'gentleman's agreement' between players and GM about whether the GM's tokens were to be used to make the game more interesting or more deadly, as otherwise I can imagine a lot of bad feeling being generated the first time the GM uses a bunch of fortune tokens to turn a trivial injury into a mortal wound.

Professional Traits are unique abilities that each career - sorry, 'profession' - grants to its members. Each profession grants exactly one special ability, and everyone who joins that profession gets it: so all Footpads can sneak attack, all Ratcatchers can speak to rats (yes, really), and so on. Some of these are really, really specific: Investigators, for example, get an ability called 'True Detective' that allows you to have visions, granting you extra clues 'when Intoxicated or under the effects of Deliriants', i.e. you are Rust Cohle. (Hope you didn't want to play any other sort of investigator instead!) I understand the desire to give the professions a bit more mechanical differentiation, but these traits strike me as needlessly narrow, and I probably wouldn't use them myself. I'm quite happy for each profession to just serve as a bundle of skill and stat increases.

Zweihänder's attitude towards its setting is a bit perplexing. It presents itself as a setting-agnostic toolkit suitable for use in any kind of low fantasy early modern setting, including seventeenth-century Earth, but its gods, monsters, and magic system have all been straightforwardly borrowed from WFRP. They're all here: orcs, skaven, Sigmar, Ulric, daemonettes, fimir, zoats, dragon ogres, slann, bog octopi, chaos dwarves, the chaos gods, the winds of magic... the entire Warhammer bestiary and cosmology, just with changed names and slightly modified descriptions. (Even mostly-forgotten oddities like WFRP's gnomes make the cut - as a PC race, no less!) Some of the changes are quite inventive, like the idea that goblins started out as chaos-tainted human children, but mostly they just look as though they've been subjected to tokenistic rewrites for copyright purposes. The bestiary gets most interesting when it goes furthest off-script: I liked its various giant intelligent animals, and I loved the idea of an order of jackal-headed vampire knights who use their long, forked tongues to drink the blood of their enemies. The vast majority of it, however, consists of straightforward Warhammer expies, clearly intended to allow published WFRP adventures to be run using Zweihänder with a minimum of fuss.

The Zweihänder core rulebook also includes an adventure, called 'A Bitter Harvest', which is essentially a rather grim historical adventure in flimsy fantasy drag. (The author even notes that it was inspired by an incident from the Baltic Crusades.) The PCs find themselves stuck in a village as raiders approach: the same raiders who attacked the village years before, abducting all the women and children who were hiding in a cave nearby, and carrying them off as slaves. But all is not as it seems: the leading men of the village actually sold the location of the cave to the raiders in exchange for being left alone, and one of the captured women - who was enslaved by the raider's leader, but has since come to effectively control the warband - now leads the raiders back towards the village in search of revenge on the men who sold them out. The roads have been cut, so the PCs need to find some way of resolving the situation, probably by uncovering the village's true past and leveraging what they've learned in order to buy it some kind of future.

This is a good adventure, filled with a rich tangle of interpersonal relationships, and the moment when the PCs discover what the 'heroes' of the previous battle actually did in order to get rid of the raiders should come as a genuine shock. The parts leading up to the siege are very linear, but the way in which the PCs resolve the main situation is left completely open, accommodating everything from the PCs assassinating the woman leading the raiders to them joining her in her search for revenge. (How often do you see that in published adventures?) That said, I had two issues with it. The first is that this is heavy stuff, much heavier than the standard-issue cultist-whacking that makes up most WFRP adventures. Not all groups are going to be comfortable unravelling a community's history of trauma and sexual violence, especially when there's no cathartic moment where you stab the bad people and make all the problems go away. The second is that, as I've indicated, this is barely a fantasy scenario at all. Supposedly the raiders are orcs (although they don't really act like it), and supposedly the woman has established control over them by dosing their food with alchemical potions, but this is little more than fancy dress, largely irrelevant to the real story. If your group plays fantasy RPGs for stories of magic and monsters, rather than sad stories of human weakness, then this might not quite fit the bill.

Overall, while I quite liked Zweihänder, I felt that it was aiming at a terribly small target market: people who had enough issues with WFRP that they weren't happy to just carry on playing WFRP 2, but who still liked it enough that they weren't prepared to abandon it for Shadow of the Demon Lord or D&D 5 or OSR D&D instead. That seems an awfully specific demographic of players... but, then again, Zweihänder is now an 'adamantium bestseller' on DrivethruRPG, so maybe there are a lot more of them than I thought. If you like the core ideas behind WFRP but want a more balanced career system and more options in combat, then give it a look. But main takeaways from it was that any WFRP-style system would probably benefit from some kind of 'peril track' to record just how tired, hungry, cold, sick, scared, and miserable everyone currently is, and that the world needs more jackal-headed vampire knights with serpentine tongues.

Echoes and Reverberations 4: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

If Shadow of the Demon Lord positions itself halfway between WFRP 2 and D&D 3rd edition, then Lamentations of the Flame Princess stands between WFRP 1 and B/X D&D. Its kinship with WFRP is obvious from its seventeenth-century Northern European setting, its fantasy-horror themes, and its focus on PCs as doomed, crazy low-lives rather than epic heroes of legend. WFRP and Lamentations share a common language of evil cults, body horror, and black humour, and many Lamentations adventures could easily be repurposed as WFRP scenarios, or vice versa.

There are, however, important tonal differences between the two games, as Lamentations is much more nihilistic than WFRP ever was. The Warhammer chaos gods are sometimes described as a form of 'cosmic horror', but a comparison with Lamentations shows just how humanistic they really are: they're all rooted in richly human feelings of lust and rage and disgust and ambition, whereas Lamentations mostly deals with completely impersonal cosmic forces that inflict death and suffering either by accident or just because. Chaos is all about the dark side of humanity, and confronting it is about confronting our own willingness to see other people as things to be sacrificed in the service of our own bloodlust (Khorne), pleasure (Slaanesh), survival (Nurgle), or lust for power (Tzeench). The antagonists in Lamentations, by contrast, tend to see people as just so much interchangeable meat. The chaos gods love us: Khorne loves killing us, Tzeench loves fucking with us, Slaanesh loves actually fucking us, and so on. But the beings in Lamentations just really don't care. (Do U?)

This tonal difference has some important knock-on consequences. The default Lamentations adventure pitch is 'get rich or die trying' rather than 'save the innocent from evil'. WFRP characters are plugged into the society around them by their careers: Lamentations characters are mostly assumed to be rootless wandering killers, with few if any connections to other people. WFRP scenarios tend to be human-scale, all about protecting individuals or communities, whereas Lamentations scenarios often include situations that can casually destroy the world, or at least depopulate large parts of it, in order to emphasise just how small and insignificant human lives are compared to the forces they depict. WFRP adventures are often very social affairs, all about understanding the relationships at work within settlements and organisations, whereas Lamentations adventures are usually much lonelier, set in desolated spaces where virtually everyone is already dead or worse. WFRP cultists tend to be driven by warped ambition, whereas Lamentations cultists usually just hate everyone and want us all to die, which makes their scenarios much more chilly and alienated than most WFRP adventures. Whether you view this tonal shift as an improvement or a weakness is going to come down to personal preference, but it means that several Lamentations adventures which seem on the surface as though they would be ideal WFRP fodder - No Salvation for Witches, for example, with its seventeenth-century setting and its demon-summoning coven - actually turn out, on closer examination, to be driven by very different themes.

Lamentations has been around for a decade, now, which is a long time in RPG terms, and its most WFRP-esque material was mostly released during its earlier years. Since 2016 it has increasingly focused on more experimental material, rather than on the early modern fantasy-horror that characterised its earlier output - and much as I love books like Veins of the Earth or Broodmother Skyfortress, I think you'd struggle to find a place for them in most WFRP campaigns. So what follows is a few notes on some LOTFP adventures that could be easily adapted for use as WFRP adventures, instead, insofar as they are fantasy-horror scenarios that should still work if the PCs are WFRP-style vagabonds rather than D&D-style 'adventurers'.

(I should note before I begin that I'm a year behind with LOTFP, and have yet to read any of their 2018 books, which are thus not included in this survey.)

Death Frost Doom (2009, revised 2014): This is one of the all-time great 'evil temple' adventures, and perfectly suited to games about bands of adventurous misfits getting in way over their heads. The antagonists here exemplify my point about the tonal differences between Lamentations and WFRP: they revere death and pain in an abstract, almost clinical fashion, far removed from the red-blooded messiness of the chaos gods. It could still probably be used in a WFRP game with some minor rewrites: you could swap the ice for bloodstains and use it as a Khornate temple, or else rewrite it as the base of a necromantic cult who revere Nagash as a god. Probably best to leave out the mountain-sized giant underneath it, though.

No Dignity in Death (2009): This odd little adventure from the early days of Lamentations is a pretty minor work. It is, however, very WFRP-esque in tone, being set in an isolated little town full of self-righteous nobodies, brutal authority figures, weird customs, and dark secrets. Could be used almost as written as a refreshingly non-chaos-based interlude in an ongoing WFRP campaign.

Tower of the Stargazer (2010): This adventure is very D&D-ish in its assumption that 'the wizard's tower might have treasure in it, let's go and loot it' will be a sufficient hook to set the PCs into motion. It's a good wizard's tower, though: it could easily serve as the home of some batshit insane Celestial wizard in the depths of the Empire, and the emphasis on exploration and investigation rather than monster-hacking means that it would be much easier to translate into WFRP than most traditional D&D dungeons. Just put something the PCs need inside it and point them at the door...

The God That Crawls (2012): An anonymous commentator suggested this one in the comments thread. I felt that all the ultra-weird and world-destroying artifacts in the catacombs weren't a very good fit for WFRP, and that if you took them out then all you'd be left with was a blob in a labyrinth, but Anonymous points out that the basic set-up of a Sigmarite cult guarding a maze full of relics they'd rather keep hidden would be a perfectly viable basis for a WFRP adventure, even if none of those relics actually have the power to destroy the world. And I have to admit that getting chased around a maze by a giant slime-monster is a very WFRP-y concept for an adventure!

Death Love Doom (2012): Fair warning: the body horror in this adventure is more extreme than in any other Lamentations book, which is really saying something. It's much, much more horrible than anything that's ever appeared in a published WFRP adventure, and not at all recommended if you or your group are likely to be disturbed by scenes of appalling physical suffering inflicted upon innocent victims, including children. That said, the structure of this adventure is pure WFRP, with the house of a wealthy merchant declining into horror under the influence of a cursed artifact. Most of it could easily be adapted for use by any WFRP group with sufficiently strong stomachs.

Better Than Any Man (2013): This adventure is very WFRP-esque insofar as it's about cults and witches in the middle of the Thirty Years War, but as with Death Frost Doom the specifics are actually quite different: the anti-human omnivorousness of the insect cultists here is quite unlike that of any WFRP chaos god, and one important part of the storyline revolves around an ancient empire of evil halflings, who have no obvious WFRP equivalent. Still, a bit of work could probably turn this into an adventure about a witch re-establishing an ancient cult devoted to the worship of a bound demon prince of Nurgle who happens to be really, really fond of flies and maggots, against the backdrop of a civil war between two Imperial provinces. I'd probably remove the time travel elements if I was running it in WFRP - I'm fine with my level 1 magic-users getting bounced into the last ice age, but I prefer my artisan's apprentices to stay a bit more grounded in reality - but YMMV.

Scenic Dunnsmouth (2014): This isn't a traditional adventure: instead, it's a mechanism for using a deck of playing cards to randomly generate an awful little village in the swamps, complete with a lurking monster and an evil cult. The tone of wretched rural deprivation is very WFRP-esque, and whether you actually follow the instructions in the book or just go through picking out all the bits you like best you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with the kind of blighted, squalid little community that would fit perfectly into any backwater region of the Empire. Once again the cultists are death-worshippers rather than chaos-worshippers, but this would be an easy change to make.

Forgive Us (2014): I suspect this actually was a WFRP adventure, or at least an adventure by someone who had played an awful lot of WFRP. Thieves in an early modern city accidentally steal the wrong treasure, which ends up unleashing a magical disease that causes horrible mutations. Just add the word 'Nurgle' in a couple of places and you should be good to go.

The Idea From Space (2014): This adventure deals with an aristocrat whose ship is stranded on a remote island, where the passengers and crew swiftly fall under the sway of the feuding supernatural forces that reside there. I think this could be run in WFRP as easily as in D&D, and would resist the temptation to replace one or both of the supernatural beings on the island with chaos gods: they can just be weird things in a weird place. The New World is an under-utilised region in WFRP, and this adventure is the sort of thing that could easily fit into it.

A Single, Small Cut (2014): Theo suggested this one in the comments thread - I somehow hadn't read it before. A crazy wizard and his hired bandits murder a priest and his congregation in order to steal a demon-summoning artifact from the crypt, only to discover that they have no way of controlling the resulting beast. The PCs arrive just as the carnage starts. It's more of an encounter than an adventure, but would be very easy indeed to translate to WFRP.

England Upturn'd (2016): Stephen and Jon suggested this one in the comments thread. It's set in a seventeenth-century marshland region, complete with witch-hunters and swamp-monsters, which could very easily be used as the backdrop to a WFRP adventure. I initially left it off the list because the main story is a bit big - flipping a whole chunk of the world upside down, creating a massive tidal wave in the process, in order to unleash the evil elves of the Hollow Earth just isn't the sort of thing that happens in WFRP. But a scaled-down version, built around (say) flipping over a single hill in order to release some medium-sized threat from the underworld, could probably work pretty well.

The Cursed Chateau (2016): Stuart suggested this one in the comments thread. This adventure depicts a haunted mansion, complete with undead servants and hidden sacrificial chambers in the caves below, all of which could easily be adapted for use in WFRP. The only way out, however, is to sufficiently entertain the ghost of the sadistic aristocrat who once lived there, which seems to me to cut directly against WFRP's themes of class struggle. Add some way for the PCs to turn the tables and send the fucker straight to hell and you should be fine.

Bringing Down the Hammer, part 12: my own private WFRP

This is a rather self-indulgent post, which serves as a kind of addendum to the last twelve, and won't necessarily be of much interest to anyone except myself. I'm just going to use it to sketch out how, if I were to run a WFRP campaign again, I might draw upon the collective resources of the game's first and second editions to do so.

My own personal vision of the WFRP world would be built around nine basic concepts:

1: From above, life in the Old World looks good.

This is an aspect of the setting which was present in the original corebook, but has been mostly neglected ever since. There's a Renaissance in progress! The cities are growing. The economy is booming. The tax receipts are up. Did you see the size of the cannon they wheeled out of the Artillery School the other week? Did you hear how much gold that Tilean treasure fleet carried back from Lustria the other year? (The natives? Who cares about the natives? Just a bunch of stupid lizard-men too dim to realise the value of their own treasure...) The colonies in the New World are multiplying. The land is just there for the taking. We're richer than our forefathers. We're less ignorant. We have printing presses and magnetic compasses and much, much bigger guns. The world is our oyster.

The social elite of the Old World is complacent, not because they're stupid, but because from their perspective everything is going great. They have no interest in hearing the complaints of some ignorant peasant about how bad things are. The ledgers of their bankers tell a very different story.

2: From below, life in the Old World looks terrifying.

Everything's changing. The old certainties are being questioned. The old order is falling apart. People are swarming together into filthy cities where they die in their thousands of waterbourne diseases. There are things lurking in the forests. One of the sewer workers swears he's seen rats down there that walk like men. Lustria is a green hell where the frog-men will shoot you full of poison darts and leave you to bleed out through your own eyeballs while your boss sails off with all the treasure. The New World is a brutal wilderness where half the settlers end up perishing of starvation. When the ships went out last year they found that one of the colonies had just flat-out vanished. The only sign of where everyone had gone was the word NAGGAROTH carved into the side of a tree.

The progress celebrated by the elites is real, but it has been purchased at a terrifying price in social dislocation and human suffering. The poor, unlike the rich, do not have the luxury of ignoring this fact.

3: The threat of chaos is systematically underestimated

The official narrative is that the forces of chaos were vanquished two hundred years ago by Magnus the Pious, and ever since then there's been nothing to worry about. Maybe the occasional cabal of delusional madmen still worships the old chaos gods, but the idea that chaos could still pose a serious threat to civilisation is ludicrous.

The fact is that chaos has seeped into all the cracks in the Old World's increasingly unstable social fabric. Deep in the woods, in the vast untravelled spaces between the new trade roads, the beastmen have been secretly multiplying for generations, their numbers supplemented by regular influxes of mutants driven out of human communities. In the boudoirs of the very rich, the jaded inheritors of wealth and luxury gather to enact the fashionable blasphemies of Slaanesh. Down in the slums, the truly desperate know that only Fat Father Nurgle can save you once the fevers start. The traumatised veterans of petty wars dream red dreams of a red god on a throne made of human skulls. They gather in psychopathic mercenary companies. They will work for anyone who gives them someone to kill.

'Chaos', in other words, serves as a metaphor for the costs of social change. The authorities ignore it because it suits them to ignore it, but the threat it poses is much greater than anyone recognises.

4: The social order is teetering on the edge of collapse

The Old World is a powderkeg. Think of France on the cusp of the Wars of Religion, or Germany just before the Thirty Years War. The whole society is a mass of barely contained contradictions - rich vs. poor, old vs. new, Ulrican vs. Sigmarite - and it won't take much of a spark to ignite a general conflagration. The feudal order of the Empire, Elector Counts and all, is hopelessly unequal to the task of actually governing the dynamic, rapidly-changing place that the Empire has become. They cling to their outmoded aristocratic trappings as though they still believed that all the world's problems can be solved by a man on a horse with a lance.

A game in this version of WFRP wouldn't have to involve an actual Empire civil war, Empire in Flames style. But the obvious fragility of the social order, and the ease with which acts of sabotage or provocation by the forces of chaos could lead to catastrophe, would be a major theme.

5: The PCs are the people on the margins who can see the world as it is

Rat catchers. Lamp lighters. Sewer jacks. Pamphlet sellers. Grave robbers. Bonepickers. Roadwardens. Bawds. Beggars. Agitators. Gamblers. Outlaws. These people are the protagonists, because they are the only ones in a position to see the truth.

The upper classes can't see it. They've insulated themselves from the world's unpleasant realities.

The lower classes can't see it. They keep to their shops, or their farms, or their workshops. They close the shutters after dark and make a virtue of incuriosity. Bad things happen to people who step out of line.

It's the marginal, semi-criminal classes, right on the edges of society, who are most likely to get glimpses of the truth. The skaven in the sewers. The beastmen in the woods. The ghouls burrowing under the old cemetery. The oddly-proportioned figures who squirm back into the darkness when the lamps are lit. The furtive men and women who gather at the old monolith whenever the moon is dark.

No-one ever wants to hear about what people like the PCs have discovered.

No-one ever wants to hear about what they had to do about it.

And yet, despised and disbelieved as they are, they are often all that stands between human society and the forces that would devour it from within.

6: Adventures take place in the shadows

Hooks are often a weakness in WFRP scenarios, with writers having to come up with all kinds of contrived reasons for why a boatman, a footpad, and a printer's apprentice would ever be picked as the people to deal with the current emergency. In this version, I envision the default adventure as being a bit like Shadowrun meets Call of Cthulhu, with PCs serving as deniable, disposable assets for people dealing with things that they cannot afford to either acknowledge or ignore. When a community leader is confronted with a string of disappearances that the authorities have no interest in solving, or when a cleric needs the disturbing irregularities of one of his colleagues investigated off the books, or when the roadwardens need to know what's eating all these travellers but can't possibly spare any manpower to go riding around in the woods... they reach out to the scum. People with broad minds, strong arms, and empty purses. People who won't scoff at stories of monsters in the sewers, and who won't flinch at risking their lives for a bag of gold and a bottle of rotgut whisky. People like the PCs.

The default PC party would be a friendship group: probably a gang of socially-marginal people who regularly meet up to drink at the same low tavern. They would have a local reputation, not as heroes, but as the sort of people who can get things done for the right price. That should suffice to get them entangled in all kinds of awfulness.

7: Superstition is sometimes right and sometimes wrong

The people used to have a densely-woven fabric of folk beliefs that helped them to survive in the world, but now that fabric lies in tatters, riven by religious reformation and social change. No-one is quite sure what to believe any more. The nobles and scholars may mock them for it, but the people, especially in rural areas, still cling to their beliefs about witches and mutants and the Evil Eye. The clergy bemoan the willingness of the peasantry to indulge the antics of the self-appointed witch hunters who plague the countryside. If only their ridiculous superstitions could be swept away once and for all!

Given the premises this version of WFRP is built around, I think it's really important that sometimes the crazy-looking guy ranting about witches is absolutely right, and sometimes he's just a delusional sadist itching to have the girl next door burned at the stake. The folk beliefs of the people are simultaneously a repository of ancient wisdom unjustly scorned by a complacent elite, and the product of countless generations of shocking ignorance and pointless cruelty, and from the perspective of the PCs it should never be too obvious which is which. The relative tolerance of the authorities towards mutants, for example, should be able to serve both be a metaphor for their increasingly enlightened attitudes towards the kind of people who had previously been the objects of unjust persecution, and for their contemptuous dismissal of the totally valid concerns of the poor. (After all, from the perspective of people like the PCs, why should it be easy to tell the two apart?) The game loses a lot of its bite if 'Burn the witch! Burn the mutant!' is either always right or always wrong.

8: The PCs may be scum, but they are socially mobile scum

This is where the careers system comes in. The world is changing. The old social hierarchies aren't as rigid as they used to be. Just because you're a rat-catcher today doesn't mean you'll be a rat-catcher forever. You just have to keep an eye out for opportunities and make sure you know when to jump ship.

I'd be inclined to couple regular career changes with campaigns that covered long stretches of game time, with months or years between adventures. I'd want the PCs to end up as the kind of people who could say: 'Well, as a kid I worked as a servant, but then in my early twenties I got really angry and became an agitator, except that after a few years things got too hot for me so I ran off into the woods and became an outlaw, but robbing people never really sat right with me so by the time I was thirty I was really more of a vagabond, and life on the road changed my perspective, so when I was thirty-two I took my vows as a friar...' I'd want a real sense that the characters were out there living a life, y'know?

9: The setting is low-fantasy and low-magic

Most people go their whole lives without seeing a non-human. Dark elves are a whispered horror story among New World colonists. High elves are a sailor's tale about an unreachable magical island with a tall white tower. Wood elves are a legend about fae enchanters in the forests. Goblins are a folk tale about the spiteful little creatures who live in caves beneath the hollow hills. Dwarves are proud and distant isolationists, utterly preoccupied with their own long and tragic history that no-one else knows or cares about. Chaos dwarves are a weird lost world civilisation somewhere over the mountains. Magic-using priests and magicians are rare and rather scary figures. (PC magic-users would be fine, but they'd be very much of the 'magical academy student drop-out' type rather than official magi.) Vampires are a horrible rumour in the eastern provinces, rather than the open rulers of Sylvania. Skaven officially don't exist. And so on.

The antagonists for almost all adventures would be criminals, cultists, magicians, religious fanatics, mutants, beastmen, skaven, and the undead. You could probably run a whole lengthy campaign without ever having to decide whether, say, ogres actually existed as anything more than a legend.

Other Miscellaneous bits and pieces

The setting as a whole would be pegged to the mid-seventeenth century, though with plenty of flexibility in either direction. In particular:

• The Empire would be primarily based on Germany just before the Thirty Years War. 
• Sylvania would be based on Transylvania during the unsettled years around 1600.
• Marienburg would be based on the Netherlands during its golden age in the mid-seventeenth century. 
• Bretonnia would be based on France just before the beginning of the Fronde. 
• Norsca would be based on Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus. 
• Kislev would be based on Russia under Peter the Great. 
• Albion would be based on Britain under James I. 
• Estalia would be based on Spain in the early 16th century, in the age of Cortés and Pizarro.
• Tilea would be based on Italy in the early 16th century, in the age of the Medici popes.

I'd use an unholy mash-up of the first and second edition rules, guided only by caprice and whim. In particular, I'd use all the starting careers from both editions, and put them onto a huge random table for starting PCs to roll on.

I'd use the first edition version of the colleges of magic, with 'colour magic' being a specialised form of magic used by Imperial battle wizards rather than the only form of magic permitted in the Empire. (I'd stick with the second-edition idea of colour magic inducing physical changes in its practitioners, though, which would ensure that the populace at large saw college magicians as little more than state-sanctioned chaos cultists.) 

I'd use the religions as detailed in the second edition Tome of Salvation, though with greater emphasis on the Sigmar / Ulric rivalry as the setting's equivalent of the split between Catholics and Protestants. I'd revert the four main chaos gods to their first edition status as 'four examples among many', rather than having them as the great powers of chaos. Malal would be back in. So would the gods of Law. 

I'd primarily use the first edition version of Bretonnia, though a shrunken version of second-edition Bretonnia could be included as the setting's equivalent of Brittany. I'd use the second edition versions of Mousillon and Kislev. I'd use the second edition skaven, but I don't think I'd bother with the second edition vampire clans. 

I'd keep 'dwarf trollslayer' as a default character type, but would dial back the presence of non-trollslayer dwarves in the setting. I might still have the sea elves hanging around in Marienburg for old time's sake, though. I find the idea of a bunch of elves lolling about in fantasy Amsterdam weirdly appealing. 

It would rain all the time. 'Protection from rain' would be the most prized spell in the game. 

All PCs would begin play as the owners of small but vicious dogs.

Bringing Down the Hammer part 10: Thousand Thrones, Shades of Empire, Career Compendium

I'm back! It's been a busy time at work, so sorry to all the people who've left comments that I haven't replied to. I'll try to catch up soon.

This post brings me to the end of the WFRP 2nd edition line. In 2008, Games Workshop decided, just as they had in 1990, that publishing RPG books really wasn't worth the effort involved when they could get better return on investment by reassigning resources to their more profitable wargame and fiction lines. Black Industries shut down, and the WFRP license was passed on to Fantasy Flight Games, who were also producing Warhammer-themed board and card games at the time. FFG claimed that they were going to continue the WFRP 2nd edition line, but in practise all they did was publish the already-written campaign book The Thousand Thrones, produce a single book of new miscellaneous material (Shades of Empire), and then bring out The Career Compendium, which mostly consisted of material reprinted from earlier WFRP 2nd edition titles. Then they shut the whole line down so they could bring out their own hugely divisive WFRP 3rd edition game. I gather that a lot of WFRP fans are still pretty bitter about it today.

Back in 2008-9, when all this went down, I don't remember caring much one way or the other. I still had my 1st edition books: what did it matter who was printing what for some superfluous new edition? Having now read the whole 2nd edition line, though, I can understand why people were annoyed. By 2007 WFRP 2nd edition had covered all the basics - the obligatory Empire book, the obligatory magic book, and so on - and was starting to move out into parts of the Warhammer setting that had never really been explored before. WFRP 3rd edition reset all that progress to zero.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Thousand Thrones (April 2008)

This huge (255-page) book details a nine-part campaign, which revolves around a nine-year-old boy with instinctive mind control powers and the popular crusade that gathers around him, convinced that he is Sigmar reborn. It's a good premise for an adventure: these sorts of spontaneous mass movements were a real feature of the early modern period, and there's plenty of dramatic potential in the clash between the idealism which often inspired such movements, and the violence and tragedy which they usually left in their wake. It's a less good premise for a campaign, though, because the campaign relies on the whole crusade staying on-track, so that everything can happen when and where it's supposed to. If there's one thing PCs are good at, it's derailing everything they touch.

The nine adventures which comprise this campaign are very episodic, and have different authors who write in very different styles, so I'll rattle through them one at a time:

1: The Call of Chaos. The PCs get hired to investigate the child, raid a cult temple in a swamp, and then raid another cult temple in a sewer. Supposedly an investigation, but actually very linear, with minimal freedom of movement or action. Some nice incidental colour along the way, though.

2: An Unquiet Peace. This adventure has the worst hook that I have ever seen: a bunch of NPCs jump out of the bushes and literally force the PCs at gunpoint to go to the adventure location, where they aren't allowed to leave until they investigate a stolen chicken. Cute cameos from expies of Johannes Kepler and (genderflipped) Voltaire can't make up for very coercive plotting, in which PCs are repeatedly punished if they step out of line.

3: The Crusade of the Child. The first part of this adventure has a nice Night of the Living Dead set-up, with the PCs, a wood elf, an inquisitor and his retinue, and a bunch of starving mutants all trapped in an abandoned inn under siege from beastmen. Then there's an awkward transition in which more elves turn up, save everyone, and lead them to the crusade, which then gets attacked by undead. No matter what the PCs do, they end up being dragged in front of the child and probably mind-controlled into his service. I cannot imagine this going down well with most players.

4: Written in Blood. This has to be a contender for the worst RPG adventure I have ever read. It opens with the worst 'investigation' ever: the PCs spend a couple of days asking fruitless questions, and then by pure chance they overhear the guilty party incriminating himself as he walks past them. Seriously, this stuff has to be seen to be believed:

Have any PCs who are amongst the crowd make a Very Easy (+30) Perception Test, but cheat. There’s no way they can miss this one. They overhear someone say, “Tobias.” When they look around, they see Butcher Groff speaking to one of Jan Vanderpeer’s guards in the gap between two closely set tents. Groff says, “Tell Tobias the soup is ready. The Death has become the Plague. When should I make the meal?

Anyway, after that the PCs have a chance to torture Nurgle cultists into deliberately infecting them with a horrible disease that has the side effect of immunising them against the child's mind control, which is refreshingly hardcore. Then there's an awful railroaded scene in which the child gets kidnapped by a cultist no matter what the PCs do, even if they're right there at the time. (What if they just shoot the cultist in the face? Is the GM supposed to cheat again, like with the Perception test?) Then there's another awful 'investigation' full of rigged situations to keep the plot on track, which ends with them finding a book. Then the book gets stolen (no matter what they do) and given to a vampire who turns up and monologues at them, and if they try to kill her or get the book back then an infinite number of minions 'appear from the shadows' and stop them. Then she drives off and the adventure ends.

5: Metamorphosis of Villa Hahn. A straight-up dungeon crawl through a Nurgle-blighted manor house, within which the boy is being held. It's pretty well-handled, with lots of memorably grotesque imagery and body-horror awfulness. (Did James Raggi read this? Parts of it read like a less extreme version of Death Love Doom, which came out three years later.) At the end there's a three-way fight between the PCs, vampire thralls, and Nurgle cultists over who gets the boy, and the adventure actually lets the actions of the PCs determine who ends up with him. Probably the only chapter of the book I'd consider running pretty much as written.

6: Heralds of the New Dawn. So from this point things get weird. The adventure proceeds on the assumption that the PCs rescued the boy and returned him to the crusade... but at the same time it acknowledges that maybe by this point he's dead, or a prisoner of the vampires, in which case the whole situation will be completely different. Then it just kind of shrugs helplessly and says 'make something up, I guess', which really highlights the inability of this kind of pre-scripted campaign to handle genuinely branching paths.

The adventure itself isn't bad. The crusade has gone to hell in the boy's absence, and is now camped out in a ruined city full of cripples and beggars, and the chapter does a good job of evoking the grimness of its setting. Against this dark backdrop the PCs must investigate a murder plot - a real investigation, this time, not a hamfisted railroad - ultimately learning that there's a plan to kill the boy during a play, and then being asked to act in the play so that they're present to prevent the murder, only to discover that some of the other actors have been replaced by assassins. It looks as though it could be a good, colourful scenario, although the creaking of the plot once again becomes obvious at the end when the author concedes that maybe the PCs will fail to save the boy, and maybe they'll even kill him themselves, but the campaign is just going to assume he's still alive, so if he's not then you're on your own from this point forwards.

I can't help wondering how many attempts to actually run this campaign must have already gone off the rails by this point. Did all twelve playtesters really stick meekly to their assigned scripts?

7: Death Do Us Part. This is mostly a send-up of The Da Vinci Code, with religious fanatics, conspiracies, symbols hidden in paintings, etc. It's also a massive side-trek from the main campaign, with the PCs tricked into believing that the boy has been kidnapped yet again when actually he's just taking a break at a farmhouse somewhere, and going all the way to Sylvania to save what turns out to be another kid entirely. Still, it's alright for what it is, with some vivid set-pieces and NPCs. It would probably work well as a stand-alone adventure.

Thankfully WFRP has no 'symbologist' career.

8: The Black Witch. By this point, most PCs will probably be sick to death of trailing around after this kid. His supernatural control over them will have long since faded; their original mission will have been completed several chapters ago, they keep risking their lives for him, and they never, ever get paid. Still, this chapter assumes that the PCs will be so interested in the boy that they'll follow his trail all the way from Sylvania to Kislev. Considered on its own merits, however, the scenario that unfolds there is quite good: a classic 'powderkeg' adventure that features vampires, wood elves, witch hunters, chaos monsters, Winged Lancers, and the doomed remnants of the crusade all converging on a miserable little Kislevite village that had plenty of problems of its own even before all these lunatics showed up. It's a bit heavy-handed about what's supposed to happen when, and rather nihilistic in its insistence on an EVERYONE DIES downer ending, but a small amount of rewriting could turn this into a memorably awful adventure.

9: Womb of the Black Witch. The PCs, the wood elves, the vampires, and a chaos sorcerer all descend into a final 76-room dungeon in pursuit of the boy. If the campaign has stayed on track, then by this point the PCs will have history with all of these guys, so this series of final confrontations should be immensely satisfying. Everything down here kills you or mutates you or drives you crazy, and there are plenty of rooms of the '12 Black Orcs attack and fight to the death' variety, so unless the GM has been giving out a whole lot of fate points I suspect PCs are going to die like flies; and the final confrontation with the Black Witch is likely to be a TPK unless the GM is prepared to drop some heavy hints about the 'right' way to deal with her. It's all very grim and icky and epic, but it feels much more like an adventure for high-level D&D characters than for WFRP PCs.

Overall: lots of individual 'good bits' let down by an overly restrictive linking plot. Its component pieces could probably be used to populate a pretty good WFRP-style hexcrawl, though.

Shades of Empire (January 2009)

This is a very miscellaneous book describing nine organisations in the Old World: a docker's guild, a revolutionary movement, a secret society, a Halfling mafia, the Roadwardens, etc. It feels as though it's been pieced together from scraps, and like the earlier Companion it never coheres into more than the sum of its parts. I also felt at times that the target audience was people who enjoy reading information about imaginary worlds as a form of fiction, rather than people who were actually running games set in them. So there's a chapter on the Imperial Navy, for example... but what's it for? How is all this information about the history and structure of the Imperial fleet supposed to help me run a game of WFRP?

And does this mean that Man O'War is still canon? Even the chaos ships with giant rotating blades instead of sails?

The chapters I liked most were the ones on the revolutionaries, the Dreamwalkers, the hedge wizards, and the roadwardens. Imperial authorities struggling to cope with seditious ideas disseminated via cheap pamphlets and scurrilous news sheets is the kind of early modern detail which I always feel the Old World could do with more of: anything which makes it feel as though the whole feudal system really might be on the brink of coming crashing down. The Dreamwalkers are followers of Morr whose leaders believe that their god sends them warnings of the undead in their dreams, and I think they're a great addition to the setting: trying to work out whether the band of dangerous religious zealots who've just rolled into town raving about vampires and necromancers are genuinely on a mission from God or just following the nightmares of some guy with an overactive imagination is exactly the sort of thing which good WFRP adventures are built on. The chapter on hedge wizards also saw the welcome re-introduction of non-collegiate magic to the setting, even if the idea of a formal Empire-wide organisation of village hedge wizards seems rather out of place.

Finally, the roadwardens chapter gives the clearest account yet of the 'big Empire' interpretation of the setting I've been commenting on in the last few posts: the Empire is enormous, only the areas around major cities are really under the control of the government, and the roads that connect them run through vast forests where the outlaws and mutants lurk. The city folk, who don't really believe all these stories about monsters in the woods, resent the roadwardens as little more than licensed bandits (which they frequently are); but the roadwardens understand that if they don't keep the roads open, the Empire will simply fall apart. This chapter singlehandedly convinced me that an all-roadwarden WFRP game would be a totally viable campaign concept. You have a fortified base, a stable of horses, a string of isolated roadside settlements which both rely upon you and resent you, a steady stream of grumbling travellers to protect and/or extort money from, and responsibility for keeping a hundred miles of road open despite the thousands of square miles of monster-haunted woodlands that lie on either side. Have fun with that.

The Career Compendium (February 2009)

This book just reprinted all the 'non-monstrous' careers from previous WFRP 2nd edition books, accompanied by a bit more information about each of them to allow one whole page to be devoted to each career. If your players enjoyed 'shopping' for new careers then I guess it would be handy to have them all in one place, and there's some nice 'day in the life' vignettes that hammer home the grinding misery of life in the Old World, but mostly this book feels pretty superfluous. A low note for the game-line to end on.

Coming next: that GM's pack thing from April 2005 I forgot to cover the first time around!