The Inside Scoop on Gaming

(My apologies for the lateness of this review, as well as to those who were expecting it to deal with Vecna Lives! -- I felt that, rather than produce a succession of reviews of out-of-print products, it would be better to alternate with something current. Unfortunately, I didn't reach this conclusion until two weeks into the three-week window I'd left to do the review. Hence, this piece is late, and Vecna Lives! will be the subject of my next review, which should be done in two weeks. I would like to get reviews completed on at least a biweekly basis thereafter, but, until someone decides to start paying for them, I make no promises. :) )

In recent years, Games Workshop has been almost exclusively concerned with larger and more elaborate boardgames and miniatures rules, mainly based in the ever-expanding Warhammer 40,000 universe; but once upon a time fantasy warfare was the company's breadwinning line. In the early days of the 1990s, with the enormous success of Warhamer Fantasy Battle, GW created an RPG based on the same basic rules mechanics and set in the same Gothic medieval setting. This was Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (hereafter 'WFRP'), the anointed challenger to the mighty AD&D juggernaut, and for a while its prospects looked pretty good. But eventually it fell from grace -- the reasons for which are probably better discussed in a review of the game as a whole -- and was picked up by Hogshead Publishing, who currently print and support the game, most of the original GW material, and a fair amount of new items of their own.

The Enemy Within Campaign was the centerpiece of GW's WFRP efforts, a series of adventures and supplements that at the time won consistently high marks from industry reviewers and players alike. Hogshead now has virtually the entire sequence available again, with the exception of the final chapter, The Empire In Flames (scheduled for rerelease as The Empire in Chaos). How do these decade-old adventures stack up against more modern material? In the case of the first installment, Shadows Over Bögenhafen, the answer is "quite well, actually".

Shadows is actually two supplements in one; the original adventure, and its predecessor, The Enemy Within proper. Besides two scenarios, the book contains a fair amount of source material dealing with various aspects of the Empire, how it works, its history, and what it's like to live in on a day-by-day basis. All of this is crammed into a reasonably nice package; the cover painting is suitably spooky, the layout is very readable, and the interior artwork is generally well-done, atmospheric, and linked to the text. There are also a number of player handouts, conveniently collected at the back of the book on pages that can easily be photocopied and cut apart. The handout pages are printed only on one side -- probably so they can be cut out and used without a photocopier, which is a thoughtful touch if a bit wasteful of space.

The book does lack an index, but the table of contents is quite comprehensive. Shadows is also remarkably free of the errors one expects when two previously-published works are combined; there are a couple of nonsensical or erroneous page references, but very few. All in all, it's a readable and attractive package, at a not outrageous price. Some might wish for interior color, but I think the artwork as is suits WFRP's grim tone so well that the absence of color isn't a serious failing. My only real complaint is that the sections aren't always separated as well obviously as they could be.

'The Enemy Within', the first half of the book, is almost all source material and very little adventure. The summary of the situation in the Empire that starts things off is good, more than good, and does a nice job of setting the right tone as well as giving the reader an idea of what's going on. 'Enemy' was obviously written for an inexperienced GM, as the introduction is followed very quickly by an explanation of exactly what a campaign is, and a couple of pages of advice. Better yet, it's good advice. Some of it may seem obvious if you've been gaming for a long time, but it should be required reading for any new GM. The focus is exactly right; what's stressed is making the game fun, both for the GM and the players. It's the best kind of advice in that nearly all of it makes you nod and think, "Yeah, that makes sense." Certainly it doesn't tell you everything you need to know to be a great GM, but it's a very good place to start.

There's a section on how to get around in the Empire; very useful as at least this first part of the campaign involves a lot of travelling. Arguably, some of these rules should have been in the main rulebook, but none are so vital to play that their absence from it is going to cause GM apoplexy.

The source material on the Empire is also very good, although marked with some typical GW touches of humor -- naming the family of the Emperor 'Holswig-Schliestein', for instance -- that one tends to either love or hate. The history is entertainly told and in keeping with the feel of the WFRP world; it feels grimy and tangled enough to be real. The details of the Empire's political structure are drier and less readable, although the interweaving of entertaining and illustrative anecdotes keeps it from getting too dull. As one might expect from the rest of the setting, the Emperor's power is a lot more theoretical than actual, and the society is nicely structured in a way that believably explains why.

The Cult of Sigmar (the founder of the Empire) is detailed in the same format as the cults in the WFRP book, and some information on five of the main Chaos gods is also included; of all the source material, this latter most belonged in the core book. I suppose one could make the argument that keeping it out prevents players from finding out about things they really shouldn't know, but the struggle against Chaos is so central a theme of the game that these gods really shouldn't to have been left to a supplement. Two pages are spent on detailing typical members of Imperial military units -- which seems more useful to WFB players than WFRP -- but the section illustrating typical dress in the Empire is a great and very useful idea. Rules for herbs, random generation of mutants, and two pages of barebones NPC profiles round out the sourcebook section. In a system as comparatively elaborate as WFRP, the latter will be a help to all but the most methodical and well-prepared GMs.

'Mistaken Identity', the introductory adventure, is a fairly short and rather railroadish piece, but a well-executed one. Most of the adventure hinges on the clunky device of having a PC turn out to be the exact double of a key figure in the plot, but if you can get past this -- or get around it -- the rest is quite good. Although things are fairly heavily scripted, the authors take pains to cover a wide range of possibilities for what the players might do; this is an adventure that moves the players steadily along, yes, but it doesn't insist that they go a particular way. I wish a little more time had been spent on advice for how to get the players back into the adventure if they wander off track, but there aren't a whole lot of opportunities for them to.

The adventure itself follows a familiar pattern. The characters, on their way to Altdorf, stop at an inn where the players get a chance to familiarize themselves with their personae and the idea of roleplaying. They catch a coach to continue their journey (with accompanying hijinks), run across the remains of a dead man who just happens to be the exact duplicate of one of them, and discover papers on his corpse intimating that a large inheritance awaits the him. Most PCs will jump at the bait, and even the more suspicious ones will probably at least be interested in investigating. Once in Altdorf, they run across an assortment of folk who either genuinely do know one of them or mistakenly think they do, get into more trouble, and, hopefully, continue on to Bögenhafen, where the dead man's inheritance awaits.

Although it's certainly acceptable as an opening act to a campaign -- it reads like it would be fun both to run and to play in -- 'Mistaken Identity' isn't really spectacular. If I were going to use it, I think I'd dispense with the clumsy notion of the double and come up with some other way to have one of the players mistaken for the dead man, but that's really the extent of my complaints. Taken on its own, it's reasonably good, but it's in the second adventure, 'Shadows Over Bögenhafen' itself, that things really get rolling, and it's here that one begins to see why this campaign was so well-received.

Without giving too much away, the long and short is that someone in Bögenhafen is unwittingly being maneuvered into doing something Really Bad, and it's up to the players to follow up on the clues provided, put the pieces together, and stop the bad guy before all Hell breaks loose. It is indicative of the way the Old World (WFRP's name for the setting) works that the 'villain' the PCs need to stop is as much a victim of ignorance, greed, and selfishness as he is a genuine villain. There is hardly anyone in the adventure -- with one notable exception who at least has a good reason -- who is easily categorized with the labels of good or evil. In 'Shadows', it's almost all shades of grey, and that attitude on the part of the designers is part of what makes it so convincing and evocative.

The link between 'Mistaken Identity' and 'Shadows' is tenuous, and not really necessary, but the former does make a nice warmup before diving right into the complexities of the latter. Like its predecessor, 'Shadows' wisely assumes that the GM running it doesn't know everything about GMing, and the adventure takes pains to be clear and straightforward about what's happening, what the goals are, and how to keep players on the right path. The right path in this case is really fairly broad, and it's structured so that it's hard for the players to miss the really important events, but the advice can be useful nonetheless. It would be easy to run this adventure after only a reading or two, since the authors have already done and written out most of the required thinking for you.

Adventures like this have to be mostly non-linear to work right, because the players are almost certainly not going to do what the author thinks they are. 'Shadows' does very well on this score, providing plenty of information about the town and an assortment of optional encounters that can be thrown into the players' path as the adventure progresses. The one thing it conspicuously lacks is a supply of red herrings, although, given the number of choices available for real clues, providing any fakes might have made handling the situation completely impossible.

Reading through the adventure, two important points come through very clearly. The first is that the NPCs, as a rule, are portrayed as behaving in sensible, sane ways; these people aren't idiots and they aren't made to act like them. The other is the attention paid to the possible choices the players can make and what the results might be. There is almost always a nod made to the possibility that the adventurers won't do what's expected, and ways to handle things if they do. There's even details on exactly what happens if they can't stop the bad guy, and how to continue things in that event. Clearly, although this is in some ways a scripted adventure, it is at the same time crafted with more than lip service given to the idea of letting the players pick their own path.

If you like WFRP, or the Old World setting, or any form of medieval fantasy that isn't strongly heroic in tone, you owe it to yourself to buy this book. Yeah, 'Mistaken Identity' isn't spectacular, but the source material is a must for campaigns in the Empire, and 'Shadows Over Bögenhafen' is a great adventure that begs to be played. I was never all that fond of the Warhammer system before reading Shadows, but by the time I'd finished I was determined to run it some day. After writing this review, I'm even more determined. Get it, read it, love it. It's that good.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

The Enemy Within Campaign Volume I: Shadows Over Bogenhafen
Author: Phil Gallagher, Graeme Davis and Jim Bambra Category: game Company/Publisher: Hogshead Publishing Line: Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play Cost: $17.95 Page count: 128 pages ISBN: 1-899749-020 SKU: HP201 Capsule Review by Christopher Page on 11/08/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Gothic	(My apologies for the lateness of this review, as well as to those who were expecting it to deal with Vecna Lives! -- I felt that, rather than produce a succession of reviews of out-of-print products, it would be better to alternate with something current. Unfortunately, I didn't reach this conclusion until two weeks into the three-week window I'd left to do the review. Hence, this piece is late, and Vecna Lives! will be the subject of my next review, which should be done in two weeks. I would like to get reviews completed on at least a biweekly basis thereafter, but, until someone decides to start paying for them, I make no promises. :) ) In recent years, Games Workshop has been almost exclusively concerned with larger and more elaborate boardgames and miniatures rules, mainly based in the ever-expanding Warhammer 40,000 universe; but once upon a time fantasy warfare was the company's breadwinning line. In the early days of the 1990s, with the enormous success of Warhamer Fantasy Battle, GW created an RPG based on the same basic rules mechanics and set in the same Gothic medieval setting. This was Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (hereafter 'WFRP'), the anointed challenger to the mighty AD&D juggernaut, and for a while its prospects looked pretty good. But eventually it fell from grace -- the reasons for which are probably better discussed in a review of the game as a whole -- and was picked up by Hogshead Publishing, who currently print and support the game, most of the original GW material, and a fair amount of new items of their own. The Enemy Within Campaign was the centerpiece of GW's WFRP efforts, a series of adventures and supplements that at the time won consistently high marks from industry reviewers and players alike. Hogshead now has virtually the entire sequence available again, with the exception of the final chapter, The Empire In Flames (scheduled for rerelease as The Empire in Chaos). How do these decade-old adventures stack up against more modern material? In the case of the first installment, Shadows Over Bögenhafen, the answer is "quite well, actually". Shadows is actually two supplements in one; the original adventure, and its predecessor, The Enemy Within proper. Besides two scenarios, the book contains a fair amount of source material dealing with various aspects of the Empire, how it works, its history, and what it's like to live in on a day-by-day basis. All of this is crammed into a reasonably nice package; the cover painting is suitably spooky, the layout is very readable, and the interior artwork is generally well-done, atmospheric, and linked to the text. There are also a number of player handouts, conveniently collected at the back of the book on pages that can easily be photocopied and cut apart. The handout pages are printed only on one side -- probably so they can be cut out and used without a photocopier, which is a thoughtful touch if a bit wasteful of space. The book does lack an index, but the table of contents is quite comprehensive. Shadows is also remarkably free of the errors one expects when two previously-published works are combined; there are a couple of nonsensical or erroneous page references, but very few. All in all, it's a readable and attractive package, at a not outrageous price. Some might wish for interior color, but I think the artwork as is suits WFRP's grim tone so well that the absence of color isn't a serious failing. My only real complaint is that the sections aren't always separated as well obviously as they could be. 'The Enemy Within', the first half of the book, is almost all source material and very little adventure. The summary of the situation in the Empire that starts things off is good, more than good, and does a nice job of setting the right tone as well as giving the reader an idea of what's going on. 'Enemy' was obviously written for an inexperienced GM, as the introduction is followed very quickly by an explanation of exactly what a campaign is, and a couple of pages of advice. Better yet, it's good advice. Some of it may seem obvious if you've been gaming for a long time, but it should be required reading for any new GM. The focus is exactly right; what's stressed is making the game fun, both for the GM and the players. It's the best kind of advice in that nearly all of it makes you nod and think, "Yeah, that makes sense." Certainly it doesn't tell you everything you need to know to be a great GM, but it's a very good place to start. There's a section on how to get around in the Empire; very useful as at least this first part of the campaign involves a lot of travelling. Arguably, some of these rules should have been in the main rulebook, but none are so vital to play that their absence from it is going to cause GM apoplexy. The source material on the Empire is also very good, although marked with some typical GW touches of humor -- naming the family of the Emperor 'Holswig-Schliestein', for instance -- that one tends to either love or hate. The history is entertainly told and in keeping with the feel of the WFRP world; it feels grimy and tangled enough to be real. The details of the Empire's political structure are drier and less readable, although the interweaving of entertaining and illustrative anecdotes keeps it from getting too dull. As one might expect from the rest of the setting, the Emperor's power is a lot more theoretical than actual, and the society is nicely structured in a way that believably explains why. The Cult of Sigmar (the founder of the Empire) is detailed in the same format as the cults in the WFRP book, and some information on five of the main Chaos gods is also included; of all the source material, this latter most belonged in the core book. I suppose one could make the argument that keeping it out prevents players from finding out about things they really shouldn't know, but the struggle against Chaos is so central a theme of the game that these gods really shouldn't to have been left to a supplement. Two pages are spent on detailing typical members of Imperial military units -- which seems more useful to WFB players than WFRP -- but the section illustrating typical dress in the Empire is a great and very useful idea. Rules for herbs, random generation of mutants, and two pages of barebones NPC profiles round out the sourcebook section. In a system as comparatively elaborate as WFRP, the latter will be a help to all but the most methodical and well-prepared GMs. 'Mistaken Identity', the introductory adventure, is a fairly short and rather railroadish piece, but a well-executed one. Most of the adventure hinges on the clunky device of having a PC turn out to be the exact double of a key figure in the plot, but if you can get past this -- or get around it -- the rest is quite good. Although things are fairly heavily scripted, the authors take pains to cover a wide range of possibilities for what the players might do; this is an adventure that moves the players steadily along, yes, but it doesn't insist that they go a particular way. I wish a little more time had been spent on advice for how to get the players back into the adventure if they wander off track, but there aren't a whole lot of opportunities for them to. The adventure itself follows a familiar pattern. The characters, on their way to Altdorf, stop at an inn where the players get a chance to familiarize themselves with their personae and the idea of roleplaying. They catch a coach to continue their journey (with accompanying hijinks), run across the remains of a dead man who just happens to be the exact duplicate of one of them, and discover papers on his corpse intimating that a large inheritance awaits the him. Most PCs will jump at the bait, and even the more suspicious ones will probably at least be interested in investigating. Once in Altdorf, they run across an assortment of folk who either genuinely do know one of them or mistakenly think they do, get into more trouble, and, hopefully, continue on to Bögenhafen, where the dead man's inheritance awaits. Although it's certainly acceptable as an opening act to a campaign -- it reads like it would be fun both to run and to play in -- 'Mistaken Identity' isn't really spectacular. If I were going to use it, I think I'd dispense with the clumsy notion of the double and come up with some other way to have one of the players mistaken for the dead man, but that's really the extent of my complaints. Taken on its own, it's reasonably good, but it's in the second adventure, 'Shadows Over Bögenhafen' itself, that things really get rolling, and it's here that one begins to see why this campaign was so well-received. Without giving too much away, the long and short is that someone in Bögenhafen is unwittingly being maneuvered into doing something Really Bad, and it's up to the players to follow up on the clues provided, put the pieces together, and stop the bad guy before all Hell breaks loose. It is indicative of the way the Old World (WFRP's name for the setting) works that the 'villain' the PCs need to stop is as much a victim of ignorance, greed, and selfishness as he is a genuine villain. There is hardly anyone in the adventure -- with one notable exception who at least has a good reason -- who is easily categorized with the labels of good or evil. In 'Shadows', it's almost all shades of grey, and that attitude on the part of the designers is part of what makes it so convincing and evocative. The link between 'Mistaken Identity' and 'Shadows' is tenuous, and not really necessary, but the former does make a nice warmup before diving right into the complexities of the latter. Like its predecessor, 'Shadows' wisely assumes that the GM running it doesn't know everything about GMing, and the adventure takes pains to be clear and straightforward about what's happening, what the goals are, and how to keep players on the right path. The right path in this case is really fairly broad, and it's structured so that it's hard for the players to miss the really important events, but the advice can be useful nonetheless. It would be easy to run this adventure after only a reading or two, since the authors have already done and written out most of the required thinking for you. Adventures like this have to be mostly non-linear to work right, because the players are almost certainly not going to do what the author thinks they are. 'Shadows' does very well on this score, providing plenty of information about the town and an assortment of optional encounters that can be thrown into the players' path as the adventure progresses. The one thing it conspicuously lacks is a supply of red herrings, although, given the number of choices available for real clues, providing any fakes might have made handling the situation completely impossible. Reading through the adventure, two important points come through very clearly. The first is that the NPCs, as a rule, are portrayed as behaving in sensible, sane ways; these people aren't idiots and they aren't made to act like them. The other is the attention paid to the possible choices the players can make and what the results might be. There is almost always a nod made to the possibility that the adventurers won't do what's expected, and ways to handle things if they do. There's even details on exactly what happens if they can't stop the bad guy, and how to continue things in that event. Clearly, although this is in some ways a scripted adventure, it is at the same time crafted with more than lip service given to the idea of letting the players pick their own path. If you like WFRP, or the Old World setting, or any form of medieval fantasy that isn't strongly heroic in tone, you owe it to yourself to buy this book. Yeah, 'Mistaken Identity' isn't spectacular, but the source material is a must for campaigns in the Empire, and 'Shadows Over Bögenhafen' is a great adventure that begs to be played. I was never all that fond of the Warhammer system before reading Shadows, but by the time I'd finished I was determined to run it some day. After writing this review, I'm even more determined. Get it, read it, love it. It's that good. Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

The Enemy Within Campaign Volume I: Shadows Over Bogenhafen