WHFRP 4E Enemy Within campaign as a player (not good)

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AwesomeLiesBlog said:
Yes, the campaign has always been railroady in some parts, though other parts have the opposite problem of a lack of hooks. Sadly the fourth-edition version has done almost nothing to fix these issues, and in at least one case has made them worse. They can be lessened or even solved with work from the GM. The Enemy Within is still unfortunately a campaign that requires the GM to fix a number of faults.

Where are you up to in the campaign?
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Sigmar’s Holy Hammer! How did I miss that Awesome Lies is here. Amazing blog! I was around for most,of it, but reading the inside baseball and the deep dives is really interesting.
 
CRKrueger said:
Sigmar’s Holy Hammer! How did I miss that Awesome Lies is here. Amazing blog! I was around for most,of it, but reading the inside baseball and the deep dives is really interesting.
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Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it. It's always nice to hear people like the material.
 
I'm currently mastering TEW 4th edition.
And boy, I hate it.

We started the campaign in Ubersreik to get a feeling for the system and the background. We played 5 of the Ubersreik Adventure modules from the first book + a sixth one only available as download.

What looks good on paper, simply won't work in real life. All the adventures are highly constructed and not very logical. Human beings with a good grasp on reality will simply not follow the breadcrumps thrown down by the authors. What's even worse is the absence of coherence. All Ubersreik products seem to be written by different authors without any connection.
It took a lot of improvising to make the scenarios work somehow.
I should have written my own stuff from the beginning.

TEW is even worse. The necessary information are all over the place.
It is great to find a flowchart on the Awesome Lies Blog, but the fact that TEW needs one says a lot.
But my biggest gripe is the fact that everything only works, if the players follow a narrow predetermined path.

**Spoiler Alert**
After following the goblin, my player group eventually found the hidden temple. With some lucky rolls they vanquished the demon and logically wanted to find the building on top of the temple. The books says a difficult Navigation roll with four successes is needed. None of my characters has a high enough navigation skill to make that work. But they came up with some clever ideas and a plan to figure it out. Denying them success would have resulted in some mayor frustration. So eventually I did let them end up in front of the Steinhäger office. But without any lock pick skill available, they basically have no way of finding the clues in the office (without resorting to violence or some serious destruction).
Without saving the goblin, they never ever considered going back to Mathusius or Richter. Instead, with one of the characters being war priest of Sigmar with a noble background, they tried to get support at least by the Sigmar temple, not something unreasonable. But giving them support would have ended the scenario immediately.
**Spoiler End**

In its core WHFRP suggests that any party of characters is viable to play. It even encourages you to create your character randomly. But with its continuous reliance on certain skills in its published adventures, it constantly undermines its own system.
And taking a look at the structure of the published material, it seems that roleplaying material never matured since the 80ies.
Nothing is neatly organized or playable out of the book.

IMHO Cubicle 7 is in serious need of a good editor.
 
Uferschnepfe said:
I'm currently mastering TEW 4th edition.
And boy, I hate it.

We started the campaign in Ubersreik to get a feeling for the system and the background. We played 5 of the Ubersreik Adventure modules from the first book + a sixth one only available as download.

What looks good on paper, simply won't work in real life. All the adventures are highly constructed and not very logical. Human beings with a good grasp on reality will simply not follow the breadcrumps thrown down by the authors. What's even worse is the absence of coherence. All Ubersreik products seem to be written by different authors without any connection.
It took a lot of improvising to make the scenarios work somehow.
I should have written my own stuff from the beginning.

TEW is even worse. The necessary information are all over the place.
It is great to find a flowchart on the Awesome Lies Blog, but the fact that TEW needs one says a lot.
But my biggest gripe is the fact that everything only works, if the players follow a narrow predetermined path.

**Spoiler Alert**
After following the goblin, my player group eventually found the hidden temple. With some lucky rolls they vanquished the demon and logically wanted to find the building on top of the temple. The books says a difficult Navigation roll with four successes is needed. None of my characters has a high enough navigation skill to make that work. But they came up with some clever ideas and a plan to figure it out. Denying them success would have resulted in some mayor frustration. So eventually I did let them end up in front of the Steinhäger office. But without any lock pick skill available, they basically have no way of finding the clues in the office (without resorting to violence or some serious destruction).
Without saving the goblin, they never ever considered going back to Mathusius or Richter. Instead, with one of the characters being war priest of Sigmar with a noble background, they tried to get support at least by the Sigmar temple, not something unreasonable. But giving them support would have ended the scenario immediately.
**Spoiler End**

In its core WHFRP suggests that any party of characters is viable to play. It even encourages you to create your character randomly. But with its continuous reliance on certain skills in its published adventures, it constantly undermines its own system.
And taking a look at the structure of the published material, it seems that roleplaying material never matured since the 80ies.
Nothing is neatly organized or playable out of the book.

IMHO Cubicle 7 is in serious need of a good editor.
Click to expand...
Well, The Enemy Within suffers, like the originals, from different authors. There was a change somewhere along the way. I don't know anything about the details at C7, but suffice it to say, Andy Law’s threads begun in Enemy in Shadows don’t continue. But, it’s way more coherent than say, SRiK from WFRP1. Also Enemy Within is infamous for beginning with a massive contrivance, one that isn’t explained until the last installment.

Starting with such a linear plot, Enemy Within drops you into a wide open sandbox with lots of things going on, and no one there to really provide clues. It’s one of the best as well as worst aspects of Graeme Davis adventures. You have to really internalize what’s going on, because without a clear path, your PCs are going to do some wildly off the wall things that can completely blow away the loosely constructed path.

That’s where the Companion books shine, I think. They give advice, changes, additional material to fill gaps, and basically are grab bags of stuff to help run these adventures, which are not easy to run. Although, they could have been organized way better, particularly in relating how each episode fits into the whole, somewhere other than the last book.

The individual Ubersreik adventures vary author by author. A couple of them, I’d argue, don’t have quite the grasp of the Warhammer Fantasy feel or the 4e era state of the Empire.

I don’t know if it was a C7 idea or a GW requirement, but having EW be basically how to start with the WFRP1 Empire and end with the WFB8 Empire wasn’t the best use of the material.
 
Uferschnepfe said:
I'm currently mastering TEW 4th edition.
And boy, I hate it.

We started the campaign in Ubersreik to get a feeling for the system and the background. We played 5 of the Ubersreik Adventure modules from the first book + a sixth one only available as download.

What looks good on paper, simply won't work in real life. All the adventures are highly constructed and not very logical. Human beings with a good grasp on reality will simply not follow the breadcrumps thrown down by the authors. What's even worse is the absence of coherence. All Ubersreik products seem to be written by different authors without any connection.
It took a lot of improvising to make the scenarios work somehow.
I should have written my own stuff from the beginning.

TEW is even worse. The necessary information are all over the place.
It is great to find a flowchart on the Awesome Lies Blog, but the fact that TEW needs one says a lot.
But my biggest gripe is the fact that everything only works, if the players follow a narrow predetermined path.

**Spoiler Alert**
After following the goblin, my player group eventually found the hidden temple. With some lucky rolls they vanquished the demon and logically wanted to find the building on top of the temple. The books says a difficult Navigation roll with four successes is needed. None of my characters has a high enough navigation skill to make that work. But they came up with some clever ideas and a plan to figure it out. Denying them success would have resulted in some mayor frustration. So eventually I did let them end up in front of the Steinhäger office. But without any lock pick skill available, they basically have no way of finding the clues in the office (without resorting to violence or some serious destruction).
Without saving the goblin, they never ever considered going back to Mathusius or Richter. Instead, with one of the characters being war priest of Sigmar with a noble background, they tried to get support at least by the Sigmar temple, not something unreasonable. But giving them support would have ended the scenario immediately.
**Spoiler End**

In its core WHFRP suggests that any party of characters is viable to play. It even encourages you to create your character randomly. But with its continuous reliance on certain skills in its published adventures, it constantly undermines its own system.
And taking a look at the structure of the published material, it seems that roleplaying material never matured since the 80ies.
Nothing is neatly organized or playable out of the book.

IMHO Cubicle 7 is in serious need of a good editor.
Click to expand...

WFRP is a particularly difficult game to write adventures for because you have such an unpredictable mix of characters. It's not like D&D where you can assume a party with fighter, wizard, thief and cleric of a particular level. It's not just the challenges, but it's hard to write hooks when one party might be wealthy courtiers and another a group of hobos.

Based on my observations, the most universally beloved books for the 4E line are the city books for Ubersreik, Altdorf and Middenheim. That's because they are big sandboxes rather than linear adventures. Most GMs can find something cool for their party to get up to in those books.

I still like the published adventures, but I mostly just strip mine them for NPCs, locations and ideas that I can put in my sandbox.

I do strongly agree that C7 could use better editing. I completely rewrote the core book for my personal use.
 
Baulderstone said:
Based on my observations, the most universally beloved books for the 4E line are the city books for Ubersreik, Altdorf and Middenheim. That's because they are big sandboxes rather than linear adventures. Most GMs can find something cool for their party to get up to in those books.

I still like the published adventures, but I mostly just strip mine them for NPCs, locations and ideas that I can put in my sandbox.
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I have recently become very interesting in running WFRP 4e, and have been considering two approaches: A) a sandboxy Ubersreik game using some of the Ubersreik adventures and otherwise catering to the professions of the PCs; or 2) A couple of basic adventures and then start into The Enemy Within.

I have been reading a number of conversations about how traditional random WFRP character creation process can conflict with the nature of TEW. It is hard to stick with some careers when advancing in them make little sense based on the mega-campaign's narrative. And so I have decided that if I do run TEW, I'd probably create career tables that are subsets of the full career table, ones that make more sense for a game where downtime is more of a premium.

Baulderstone said:
I do strongly agree that C7 could use better editing. I completely rewrote the core book for my personal use.
Click to expand...

It's funny that you say this, as I am currently doing the same thing. Initially not so much for house rules, but just to make the rules more clear, and bring things spread out into one location, when possible. I feel it will make getting the players to read the rules a lot easier. Having a background in layout and design really helps.
 
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I played through TEW over four years using 1e WFRP. I came into it with minimal prior exposure to WH. I fell in love with 1e, and enjoyed the heck out of TEW. Our GM did an amazing job. Were we frustrated and clueless at times? Sure. But that's gonna happen with long convoluted mysteries. Fortunately our GM could give us additional clues or information in-game, or bum-rush us out of town if that was the best thing to keep the campaign alive. We also started the campaign with the agreement that we were there to play TEW, not push to go satisfy any individual agendas. You can't go into a published adventure and then fight to turn it into a sandbox. As for PCs and careers, any game can benefit from some guidance about what types of characters will work in a particular campaign. GMs and authors should understand that.
 
Baron said:
You can't go into a published adventure and then fight to turn it into a sandbox.
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As a sandbox GM, this makes my teeth itch a little, but it is a very important point. As a GM, you have to make a decision.
  • Is your campaign a sandbox and The Enemy Within is just a very complicated situation that your players will engage with or miss?
  • Or are you running The Enemy Within and doing it as sandboxy as possible?
As far as the “adventuring buy-in“ goes, for me it really depends on one thing…

Is the GM going to accommodate the splitting of the party, running multiple groups of PCs as events drive certain PCs apart and bring others together?

One GM I know was generally as Living World as they come, but he would only run one group. So you either found a way for that PC to deal with the group or you made another one.

With the initial hook in Mistaken Identity (how The Enemy Within kicks off), it helps immensely if the PCs are already “a party”.
It doesn’t have to be the von Tasseninck expedition, that’s just there to get them to Altdorf, so they can be hooked deeper into Missing Identity.

Not having that cohesion though runs the risk of respectable PCs not wanting to go along with basically a fraud scheme. “Good luck Old Boy! I’ll be sure not to visit you in Mundsen Keep!

One thing to remember about Warhammer is, when things get dull, “Cultists Attack!” because of course they do. You can’t swing a dead cultist in Altdorf without hitting the cultists of at least two other cults. For those GMs that play more to genre or going commando, you can’t go wrong with an unprovoked attack. Never underestimate a party’s capacity for vengeance.
 
Important thing to remember about the 4e setting…

The 4e version of TEW has expanded upon the politics of the Empire and tied TEW and all the Ubersreik stuff together. Karl Franz has basically dropped a Nuke followed by a Thermobaric bomb into Empire Politics. The first decision was to seize Ubersreik from the Jungfreud family and send in the Army to enforce it.

Every single noble with land in the Empire, including the Elector Counts, now has to wonder if Karl Franz is mad or becoming a tyrant. He follows this up with the Mutant Edict, which declares that being a mutant is not a crime and is legal. You can’t just burn them at the stake anymore.

Everything that happens in all of the Ubersreik adventures as well as TEW, happens with this political upheaval as a backdrop if not the reason behind most events.

The PCs start off with a very small glimpse at what is behind the scenes through a seemingly random event (or is it)and slowly stumble their way/are very carefully maneuvered into positions where they may affect the outcome/play their roles to perfection.

As a result of this, you have many different factions, both Imperial and other, that are working knowingly and unknowingly together or at cross purposes or both in the public, political and behind the scenes conspiratorial arenas.

I would definitely read all 5 of The Enemy Within books as well as the 5 Companions before you start anything.
 
Personally, I’m finding Andy Law’s stream of The Enemy Within to be a good watch. Normally, I can’t really get into the professional streams like Critical Role, and other play streams - forget it. Just not my thing.

But I’m finding that my knowledge of the material as well as knowing that Andy is intending to modify it is the hook that drew me in. Also the group makeup of three Warhammer veterans (hell, professionals, they all worked at C7) and three complete Warhammer n00bs is interesting.
 
CRKrueger said:
I would definitely read all 5 of The Enemy Within books as well as the 5 Companions before you start anything.
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And THAT is why I never dived into TEW, but just play short interlinked adventures from Rough Nights or Uberreik Adventures instead.
5 Companions? That feels like doing someone's homework (plus paying an extra 150€ on top of the 200€ for the 5 campaign books).
 
Godfather Punk said:
And THAT is why I never dived into TEW, but just play short interlinked adventures from Rough Nights or Uberreik Adventures instead.
5 Companions? That feels like doing someone's homework (plus paying an extra 150€ on top of the 200€ for the 5 campaign books).
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That's not a game, that's a research project! ;-)
 
Godfather Punk said:
And THAT is why I never dived into TEW, but just play short interlinked adventures from Rough Nights or Uberreik Adventures instead.
5 Companions? That feels like doing someone's homework (plus paying an extra 150€ on top of the 200€ for the 5 campaign books).
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There’s lot of Epic and/or Iconic campaigns for various games. Masks of Nyarlathotep, GDQ (Giants, Drow, Queen), Temple of Elemental Evil, Harlequin/Harlequin’s Back, Horror on the Orient Express, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, hell even Classic Deadlands had one that bridged Deadlands and Hell on Earth. There’s a variable amount of reading for each, but none of them are easy. Just comes with the territory.

You could just pick up Enemy Within, scan it, make an outline and run with it. Personally I wouldn’t get as much enjoyment out of running it that way, but that‘s me.
 
I definitely suggest that if you have people new to Warhammer and WFRP that you start small, and don’t drop immediately into The Enemy Within.

D&D players are used to the “frontier of the American West“ type of culture with individual freedom, etc. and Warhammer hits you right in the face with the idea of Class, Nobility, etc. that definitely doesn’t come from an “all men are created equal” culture. While there is a Renaissance like rise of the merchant class, nobility is still very much a thing, so Warhammer is closer to medieval historical games than to other fantasy games.

Also the Career system is the hallmark of WFRP. It’s not a PC Class/Level type of thing, nor is it skill-based, nor is it cultural/cult based like RQ. It’s kind of like all of them but its own thing. WFRP 1, 2 and 4 all do careers differently, but it’s important to keep the access to certain careers open and more closed to others, as well as make sure to tell players when an opportunity presents itself naturally in the campaign to switch careers easily.
 
I'd say it all seems to be very much GM fault.

Our GM let us loose very much in first 3 episodes (prologue is quite linear indeed) - for instance we missed like half of content in Shadows of Bogenhafen, because we [ach dammit there is no spoiler hidden option so I won't tell you what)
 
Wicked Woodpecker of West said:
I'd say it all seems to be very much GM fault.

Our GM let us loose very much in first 3 episodes (prologue is quite linear indeed) - for instance we missed like half of content in Shadows of Bogenhafen, because we [ach dammit there is no spoiler hidden option so I won't tell you what)
Click to expand...
1700228957261.png
Click on the three dots (where the blue arrow is facing).
This opens up a second line where Spoiler option is (red arrow).
 
followed mutant goblin into channels, and found accidentally underground lair of cultists, without ever even interacting with them or other officials. Rather than do something that way, my alchemist/wizard apprentice created barrel of gunpowder, and we bomb the lair, in ensuing chaos our leader managed to kill cult leader who went down to investigate, we got arrested when we tried to explain ourselves to authorities, and when we were in jail cultists tried to assassinate it, but botched it utterly, and we promptly left city without trying to clean mess more.

I like never get most of stuff before reading adventure years later.

Simmilarily we very quickly found Slaaneshi cultist in Middleheim and hypnotized him to tell us everything, allowing us to act very quickly while not attending most of social stuff.

Thank you Baulderstone!

I'd also add:


"Yep, that's a definite problem with certain careers.

My character started as a Racketeer (Thug). I'm well into the second "level" of the career path. And while I've actually had success at various criminal side pursuits and see a certain appeal to setting up my character as a crime lord, I quickly realized (see list of urban locations above) that we would never be in one place long enough to really set down roots.

So I did some in game work to lay a path to obtain GM approval for a career exit into Witch Hunter. I think an itinerant Witch Hunter will be a better fit for this campaign than a Racketeer.

This campaign has basically forced us into the MurderHobo lifestyle, which as you say, is in many ways a contradiction to the career system at the heart of the WHFRP."
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Well that's feature and bug. I knew some OSR/SG (know weird combo) guys who tried went around it, alas I'd say in every case it leads to narrower scope of play. Because career system is meant to allow you to play anyone in the setting, and therefore run various campaigns. But with campaign desined in specific way scope of careers that make sense will always get narrower. Inevitable basically.
(Although from Thug I'd rather go with Protagonist-Assasin - we had Assasin in our 1e campaign, and he was very very useful).

Alas in my campaign GM narrowed careers from the start - so one guy started with Noble to go into Free Lance (mercenary cavalier), one with Grave Robber to move into Barber-Surgeon (and damn his surgeoning save our asses a lot), I was Alchemist Apprentice destined to Wizardry. One guy took this Explorer profession which had extreme number of advances, and he was basically Noble squire and he never really found his ground.

Alas I'd probably went with random professions, make some 0 session estabilishing mutual relations between team (for a team of five in CoC I once made this pentagram of mutual relations - each player knew 2 others giving some sense of coherence at start), and just change professions when adventure demands it.
 
We had great fun in the WFRP 4E game that our GM ran. I don't know enough about the published material to know if he was running something pre-designed or his own material or a mixture but it was great fun. My character started out as a cavalry soldier until the horse stumbled during a creek crossing, injured its leg and was then eaten by a troll. Aftwards I moved into the protagonist career as we were ever poor and the opporthunity to buy another horse wasn't very likely. Fun adventures and a great campaign (that hopefully we may resume in the future)
 
Exploderwizard said:
We had great fun in the WFRP 4E game that our GM ran. I don't know enough about the published material to know if he was running something pre-designed or his own material or a mixture but it was great fun. My character started out as a cavalry soldier until the horse stumbled during a creek crossing, injured its leg and was then eaten by a troll. Aftwards I moved into the protagonist career as we were ever poor and the opporthunity to buy another horse wasn't very likely. Fun adventures and a great campaign (that hopefully we may resume in the future)
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Shit, I lost my horse.
How much are they?
Time to change careers.

God I love WFRP.
 
Exploderwizard said:
We had great fun in the WFRP 4E game that our GM ran. I don't know enough about the published material to know if he was running something pre-designed or his own material or a mixture but it was great fun. My character started out as a cavalry soldier until the horse stumbled during a creek crossing, injured its leg and was then eaten by a troll. Aftwards I moved into the protagonist career as we were ever poor and the opporthunity to buy another horse wasn't very likely. Fun adventures and a great campaign (that hopefully we may resume in the future)
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I was wondering the same about the WFRP campaign I'm in. Then a friend of the GM told me that he never runs published modules. I can certainly understand the feeling, but either way, does it matter:thumbsup:?


BTW, it's a campaign I didn't intend to join...then I tried to hook a WFRP fan that I'd met in BJJ school with a game. He ended up not joining, but I got interested...:grin:
And now Anders, priest of Sigmar, is running around carrying artefacts in his right sock, having elf waters in his canteen (valued at 20 GP the cup) to make sure we can survive the Old World, and gambling both in the Temple of Ranald. I think it's my 3rd session:shade:.

CRKrueger said:
Shit, I lost my horse.
How much are they?
Time to change careers.

God I love WFRP.
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Makes total sense:tongue:!

"Who are you?", sayeth the innkeeper.
"I'm Bjorn, Cavalier extraordinaire!", the PC replied.
"Do you want to stable your horse in our establishment?"
"...well, shit, I just realized I'm lacking something!"
 
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CRKrueger said:
Shit, I lost my horse.
How much are they?
Time to change careers.

God I love WFRP.
Click to expand...
Heh. The fun is I rolled my character completely random and was like "oh cool I get a horse as part of my trappings!" I was actually shocked that the horse survived a dozen sessions or so. I still use horse training as the most lucrative endeavor during down time. My character stubbornly carried the saddle around for several sessions before finally selling it.
 
CRKrueger said:
Personally, I’m finding Andy Law’s stream of The Enemy Within to be a good watch. Normally, I can’t really get into the professional streams like Critical Role, and other play streams - forget it. Just not my thing.
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I'm enjoying it as well, although I don't often find time to watch it, so I am still back at the very beginning of Death on the Reik. While my ideas about the setting don't line up completely with Andy's, I admire the level of detail in his campaign.

I really like his take on the Mutant Edict, that an Imperial edict isn't a law. It's something similar to the American concept of an executive order unless it is ratified by the Diet. It creates so much more political confusion in the setting. I also like Andy Leask's Sigmarite character's conflict as a Sigmarite. He's torn between the Sigmarite duty to kill all mutants and the duty to be loyal to the Emperor.

I've just gotten to the part where they have decided to head to Ubersreik, completely diverting from the standard flow of the campaign. It's funny as that is where my players plan to go when my turn as GM rotates back again. However, my players have a completely different motivation for doing so.
 
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