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SRiK is the fourth and penultimate installment of the famed Enemy Within campaign and takes place outside the Empire's borders - in Kislev, the 'Russian' nation of WFRP's Old World. In campaign terms it allows the political chaos in the Empire to occur 'off-stage' and give our PCs something to do for several months before returning to the changed face of the Empire in 'Empire in Flames' (original GW edition) or 'Empire in Chaos' (revised Hogshead edition, supposedly imminent). And in that role SRiK runs the risk of falling very short of it's aims indeed. Specifically any GM using this campaign pack in order to advance the EW campaign runs the risk of bending his campaign so far out of whack as to make the EW impossible to continue with the same PCs. Not good.

Still, before I point this out I'll look at the good points and contents of SRiK. All the below is heavily SPOILERED, so if this means you go and read another review. Now!

SRiK is in four parts - a brief overview of Kislev (expanded from the rulebook, but certainly not exhaustive) and three linked scenarios. Oh, and pre-gens of course, but if you're playing this as part of the EW you probably won't use them.

The overview is nice, but too skimpy to be used for anything deeper than PC tourism which, since our PCs arrive in Kislev, experience the three scenarios and then go home, is pretty much what they are doing. There is no specific char-gen for Kislevite characters for example, no Kislev-specific careers, lists of names or the like. Rolston briefly looks at the three racial classes of Kislev, the majority and downtrodden Gospodar, the ruling Norse (roughly equivalent to history's Russ, Scandinavians who settled in Kiev) and the Dolgans, a broad umbrella category containing pseudo-Cossacks, pseudo-Tartars, pseudo-Mongols, pseudo-Asiatics etc.

All this is a little disappointingly unimaginative and accurately reflects the nature of Rolston's Kislev - it's just mediaeval Russia with the serial numbers filed off. Plus magic of course. And mutants.

Anyway on with the scenarios. Like Castle Drachenfels, the utility of this campaign is excellent. As well as the 'official' EW introduction there are several plot threads suggested to help work the scenarios in if you are not playing the EW, in order to allow for use of the full three-part campaign or just individual scenarios. Discussion is also included on how best to work an individual scenario into another part of the Old World. Full marks for this as it increases the usefulness of the campaign to all WFRP GMs.

Under the 'offical' EW plot thread, our gallant adventurers either saved the city of Middenheim from disaster or failed, but either way learned a lot of blackmail-worthy information about most of the Middenheim ruling classes. Accordingly the Graf decides to shunt them out of the way and hand them over to his co-religionist, the Tsar of All Kislev, as hired help. This might as be penal servitude or as low-ranking members of the Knights Panther depending on how well they did in Power Behind The Throne. Once in Kislev the PCs become agents of the Tsar, and his right-hand man acts as Patron sending them out on the three included missions.

Each of the three scenarios scores highly for presenting the PCs with original situations and downplaying the tropes and cliches that tend to spoil WFRP games (with the exception of the first scenario, The Beast Child) but, for me at least, all of them seem to fall short of being classics. The ending for example has the potential to be a real stinker, but I'll come to that later.

THE BEAST CHILD

Simple plot summary - There's a village, and the village is being attacked by Beastmen, and the Beastmen live in the woods, and the PCs go to the village, and then the PCs go to the woods, and then the PCs kill the Beastmen, and then the Beastmen stop attacking the village on account of being dead.

Stop me if this has been done before.

So, zero points for originality here. The only interest Beast Child does have is a couple of NPCs. The PCs lead to finding the Beastmen is a wild lunatic who lives in the woods and communicates by sign language which has the potential for good role-playing. There is also a foot race with the pagan nature spirits in order to acquire their aid, but this seems very High Fantasy to be found in a GW-published WFRP adventure. The text is somewhat quiet on what to do if the PCs lose though.

This scenario will work best with novice players, rather than WFRP veterans - mainly because the veterans will have done similar scenarios a dozen times and trying it on them again will fall flat. Fortunately the other two scenarios do not rely upon this one having taken place and it can be dropped with no problem. I actually recommend replacing it with White Dwarf 97's 'Grapes of Wrath' which has a similar 'village being attacked' plot but is far superior to this one and only needs the Germanic names of the original NPCs replaced with Russian ones. Grapes of Wrath might be republished in 'Acrophyca 2:Chart of Darkness' which, like Empire in Chaos, is also supposedly imminent.

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY

The PCs are sent to the abandoned town of Chernozavtra to deliver a verbal message. Sounds simple. Unfortunately Chernozavtra was wiped out by a plague decades ago and since occupied by a Necromancer and his undead. Then, a nomadic tribe of Dolgans arrived on the scene, considered the undead blasphemous and besieged the city to wipe out the blasphemy. Twenty years on, and in a situation reminiscent of the siege of Troy, the siege has still not cracked the Necromancers defenses and the Dolgan crusade is running out of steam. Racing through time to the present day and a horde of Hobgoblins (racial enemies of the Dolgans) have arrived and besieged the besiegers.

So our PCs have to talk nicely with the Hobgoblins to get through into the Dolgan camp. Then they discover that the message has to be delivered to no less a personage than the Necromancer himself. Then they break into the city, avoiding the clutches of near-unstoppable super zombies and confront the Necromancer. Who promptly welcomes the PCs and pours them a cup of tea.

Yes, in a classic piece of 'pulling-rug-from-under-PCs-feet' the Necromancer turns out not to be a classic black-hatted villain but a slightly mad but harmless old buffon. With the awesome power that he and his undead possess our PCs have little option but to grin and bear it and leave him to his own devices - they were after all only employed to deliver the message.

There is a logical flaw in this scenario - the walled town only has 18 buildings and is about as big as my large toenail. This is not a town, it's a village and villages are not important enough to be surrounded by fortified stone walls. To avoid staggering your players with disbelief it's best simply to assume that the town in this scenario is just the inner keep of a once much larger town, since flattened by the Dolgan besiegers. This will require that the GM mentions the presence of building ruins and ripped-up streets in and around the Dolgan and Hobgoblins camp.

The ending's a little anti-climatic, but a neat bit of reversal designed to catch the PCs off foot. You could, for instance, never get away with this trick twice. No one would ever write two scenarios like this. Except for Ken Rolston who promptly attempts the trick again in scenario three, The Champions of Death.

THE CHAMPIONS OF DEATH

Information from the benign Necromancer in part two primes the PCs with some useful information that they will need for part three where they travel to the rebel city of Bolgasgrad, there to meet up with a Tsarist spy who has broken contact with his Kislev controllers. Apart from that the PCs mission is a somewhat vaguely-defined 'gather intelligence' brief.

Bolgasgrad seceded from Kislev when the Tsar refused to take their defenses against the Incursions of Chaos (think:Moorcock) seriously. Under the prompting of their ruling family they seem to have allied with another necromancer and now the citizens of Bolgasgrad have zombies to do all the donkey work and provide a standing army, and the offical state religions have been ejected in favour of the mysterious Cult of Ancient Allies about which nobody says anything.

Again the situation turns out to be not as evil and chaotic as it might first appear. This of course will shock the PCs who have never had a similar 'pulling-rug-from-under-PCs-feet' experience or met a necromancer who wasn't a deranged psychotic. Oh.. hang on that was part two wasn't it?

Despite the fact that the impact is seriously lessened by this being a repeat of what was a neat trick first time round, this is a good investigative scenario with some excellent NPCs. What other WFRP scenario has an undead Witch Hunter, a vertically-challenged Dragon _and_ a Chaos god who appears to be something of an agnostic?

Investigations will eventually lead beneath the temple of the Cult of Ancient Allies (thanks to a map of the temple that convienently locates a secret door for the PCs to enter via). And it is here, in the last couple of rooms in a D*****n where you could potentially destroy your EW campaign utterly. The PCs arrive in these rooms a couple of minutes before the necromancer arrives from a shopping trip to get some mint for his lamb chop dinner (I kid you not...)

See, the necromancer is so powerful that he doesn't even have any stats - he just does whatever you the GM want him to do. This actually includes giving visiting/burgling PCs a cup of tea as they are such an infinitismal threat to him that he isn't even remotely worried. So Rolston, in his text, assumes that the smart thing is for the PCs to leave, go back to their patron and make a report stating "..and he's wasn't in, so we left thanking our incredible luck."

Now sensible, _real_ people like you and me would run off before we even got that far beneath the temple. Our PCs won't, not just because they are heroes and have larger testicles than you or I, but because they are RPG characters controlled by players who have been accustomed to knowing that in an D*****n the last rooms will always contain the epic finale of the scenario. Players won't retreat now, because they never do. In fact, I'll go as far as to suggest that should any player suggest retreating, then he's probably cheated and bought his own copy of SRiK. It's that bad.

It is grossly unfair for Rolston to decide at this point that the PCs should run off before meeting the necromancer if they want to live. It is also incredibly naive for a RPG writer of his experience to assume that any party ever will. And the real problem is that should the PCs decide to act like 99.9% of RPG players will do and decide to hang around for the final scrap, it is highly likely that your EW campaign will be buggered beyond all repair and you may as well use that copy of "Empire in Flames/Chaos" for stopping the kitchen table from rocking.

If the PCs do stay to meet the necromancer (and they will) they will more likely than not end up bound by oaths and lethal curses into his servitude (and possibly be approaching undeath into the bargain) and be sent around the globe recovering spell ingredients and arcane appartatus for his research. Great if you want to use SRiK as a launchboard to a campaign in Lustria or the Southlands, completely bloody useless if you wanted to PCs to return to 'Empire in Flames/Chaos' as free agents.

The epilogue of the campaign suggests ways that enslaved PCs can break these bonds, but these either involve further adventures (taking you further and further away from the EW) or they can just be lifted by a powerful NPC wizard, conveniently hanging around the Tsarist court. The former is useless if you want to continue with the EW and the latter just smacks of deus ex machina-ing. If the curses can be lifted that easily why bother threatening the PCs with them in the first place?

So there you have it - a campaign of mixed quality where the good bits are very good and the bad bits quite dull. As a chapter of the EW I'm sorry but the climax/anti-climax makes it near useless to advance the EW plot. It would work better as a standalone, especially as a one-off where leaving the PCs as undead slaves really isn't a problem.

Artwork is as good as you would expect from an ex-GW product, Martin McKenna's illustrations being particularly evocative. There are plenty of good handouts (although too many are just resumes of what an NPC tells the party - this is just lazy GMing) and the paper and binding quality is excellent. That might seem an odd point on which to conclude this review, but anybody who owned GW books when they were printed by GW will appreciate this!

(Don't take the Style and Substance ratings too seriously - I'm not really sure how we can rate this campaign on a system of good/ok/average etc.)

Owen Cooper

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 3 (Average)

Something Rotten in Kislev
Author: Ken Rolston, Graeme Davis (editor) Category: game Company/Publisher: Games Workshop/Hogshead Line: WFRP Page count: 144 ISBN: 1 899749 19 5 SKU: HP213 Capsule Review by Owen Cooper on 07/25/00. Genre tags: Fantasy Horror	SRiK is the fourth and penultimate installment of the famed Enemy Within campaign and takes place outside the Empire's borders - in Kislev, the 'Russian' nation of WFRP's Old World. In campaign terms it allows the political chaos in the Empire to occur 'off-stage' and give our PCs something to do for several months before returning to the changed face of the Empire in 'Empire in Flames' (original GW edition) or 'Empire in Chaos' (revised Hogshead edition, supposedly imminent). And in that role SRiK runs the risk of falling very short of it's aims indeed. Specifically any GM using this campaign pack in order to advance the EW campaign runs the risk of bending his campaign so far out of whack as to make the EW impossible to continue with the same PCs. Not good. Still, before I point this out I'll look at the good points and contents of SRiK. All the below is heavily SPOILERED, so if this means you go and read another review. Now! SRiK is in four parts - a brief overview of Kislev (expanded from the rulebook, but certainly not exhaustive) and three linked scenarios. Oh, and pre-gens of course, but if you're playing this as part of the EW you probably won't use them. The overview is nice, but too skimpy to be used for anything deeper than PC tourism which, since our PCs arrive in Kislev, experience the three scenarios and then go home, is pretty much what they are doing. There is no specific char-gen for Kislevite characters for example, no Kislev-specific careers, lists of names or the like. Rolston briefly looks at the three racial classes of Kislev, the majority and downtrodden Gospodar, the ruling Norse (roughly equivalent to history's Russ, Scandinavians who settled in Kiev) and the Dolgans, a broad umbrella category containing pseudo-Cossacks, pseudo-Tartars, pseudo-Mongols, pseudo-Asiatics etc. All this is a little disappointingly unimaginative and accurately reflects the nature of Rolston's Kislev - it's just mediaeval Russia with the serial numbers filed off. Plus magic of course. And mutants. Anyway on with the scenarios. Like Castle Drachenfels, the utility of this campaign is excellent. As well as the 'official' EW introduction there are several plot threads suggested to help work the scenarios in if you are not playing the EW, in order to allow for use of the full three-part campaign or just individual scenarios. Discussion is also included on how best to work an individual scenario into another part of the Old World. Full marks for this as it increases the usefulness of the campaign to all WFRP GMs. Under the 'offical' EW plot thread, our gallant adventurers either saved the city of Middenheim from disaster or failed, but either way learned a lot of blackmail-worthy information about most of the Middenheim ruling classes. Accordingly the Graf decides to shunt them out of the way and hand them over to his co-religionist, the Tsar of All Kislev, as hired help. This might as be penal servitude or as low-ranking members of the Knights Panther depending on how well they did in Power Behind The Throne. Once in Kislev the PCs become agents of the Tsar, and his right-hand man acts as Patron sending them out on the three included missions. Each of the three scenarios scores highly for presenting the PCs with original situations and downplaying the tropes and cliches that tend to spoil WFRP games (with the exception of the first scenario, The Beast Child) but, for me at least, all of them seem to fall short of being classics. The ending for example has the potential to be a real stinker, but I'll come to that later. THE BEAST CHILD Simple plot summary - There's a village, and the village is being attacked by Beastmen, and the Beastmen live in the woods, and the PCs go to the village, and then the PCs go to the woods, and then the PCs kill the Beastmen, and then the Beastmen stop attacking the village on account of being dead. Stop me if this has been done before. So, zero points for originality here. The only interest Beast Child does have is a couple of NPCs. The PCs lead to finding the Beastmen is a wild lunatic who lives in the woods and communicates by sign language which has the potential for good role-playing. There is also a foot race with the pagan nature spirits in order to acquire their aid, but this seems very High Fantasy to be found in a GW-published WFRP adventure. The text is somewhat quiet on what to do if the PCs lose though. This scenario will work best with novice players, rather than WFRP veterans - mainly because the veterans will have done similar scenarios a dozen times and trying it on them again will fall flat. Fortunately the other two scenarios do not rely upon this one having taken place and it can be dropped with no problem. I actually recommend replacing it with White Dwarf 97's 'Grapes of Wrath' which has a similar 'village being attacked' plot but is far superior to this one and only needs the Germanic names of the original NPCs replaced with Russian ones. Grapes of Wrath might be republished in 'Acrophyca 2:Chart of Darkness' which, like Empire in Chaos, is also supposedly imminent. DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY The PCs are sent to the abandoned town of Chernozavtra to deliver a verbal message. Sounds simple. Unfortunately Chernozavtra was wiped out by a plague decades ago and since occupied by a Necromancer and his undead. Then, a nomadic tribe of Dolgans arrived on the scene, considered the undead blasphemous and besieged the city to wipe out the blasphemy. Twenty years on, and in a situation reminiscent of the siege of Troy, the siege has still not cracked the Necromancers defenses and the Dolgan crusade is running out of steam. Racing through time to the present day and a horde of Hobgoblins (racial enemies of the Dolgans) have arrived and besieged the besiegers. So our PCs have to talk nicely with the Hobgoblins to get through into the Dolgan camp. Then they discover that the message has to be delivered to no less a personage than the Necromancer himself. Then they break into the city, avoiding the clutches of near-unstoppable super zombies and confront the Necromancer. Who promptly welcomes the PCs and pours them a cup of tea. Yes, in a classic piece of 'pulling-rug-from-under-PCs-feet' the Necromancer turns out not to be a classic black-hatted villain but a slightly mad but harmless old buffon. With the awesome power that he and his undead possess our PCs have little option but to grin and bear it and leave him to his own devices - they were after all only employed to deliver the message. There is a logical flaw in this scenario - the walled town only has 18 buildings and is about as big as my large toenail. This is not a town, it's a village and villages are not important enough to be surrounded by fortified stone walls. To avoid staggering your players with disbelief it's best simply to assume that the town in this scenario is just the inner keep of a once much larger town, since flattened by the Dolgan besiegers. This will require that the GM mentions the presence of building ruins and ripped-up streets in and around the Dolgan and Hobgoblins camp. The ending's a little anti-climatic, but a neat bit of reversal designed to catch the PCs off foot. You could, for instance, never get away with this trick twice. No one would ever write two scenarios like this. Except for Ken Rolston who promptly attempts the trick again in scenario three, The Champions of Death. THE CHAMPIONS OF DEATH Information from the benign Necromancer in part two primes the PCs with some useful information that they will need for part three where they travel to the rebel city of Bolgasgrad, there to meet up with a Tsarist spy who has broken contact with his Kislev controllers. Apart from that the PCs mission is a somewhat vaguely-defined 'gather intelligence' brief. Bolgasgrad seceded from Kislev when the Tsar refused to take their defenses against the Incursions of Chaos (think:Moorcock) seriously. Under the prompting of their ruling family they seem to have allied with another necromancer and now the citizens of Bolgasgrad have zombies to do all the donkey work and provide a standing army, and the offical state religions have been ejected in favour of the mysterious Cult of Ancient Allies about which nobody says anything. Again the situation turns out to be not as evil and chaotic as it might first appear. This of course will shock the PCs who have never had a similar 'pulling-rug-from-under-PCs-feet' experience or met a necromancer who wasn't a deranged psychotic. Oh.. hang on that was part two wasn't it? Despite the fact that the impact is seriously lessened by this being a repeat of what was a neat trick first time round, this is a good investigative scenario with some excellent NPCs. What other WFRP scenario has an undead Witch Hunter, a vertically-challenged Dragon _and_ a Chaos god who appears to be something of an agnostic? Investigations will eventually lead beneath the temple of the Cult of Ancient Allies (thanks to a map of the temple that convienently locates a secret door for the PCs to enter via). And it is here, in the last couple of rooms in a D***n where you could potentially destroy your EW campaign utterly. The PCs arrive in these rooms a couple of minutes before the necromancer arrives from a shopping trip to get some mint for his lamb chop dinner (I kid you not...) See, the necromancer is so powerful that he doesn't even have any stats - he just does whatever you the GM want him to do. This actually includes giving visiting/burgling PCs a cup of tea as they are such an infinitismal threat to him that he isn't even remotely worried. So Rolston, in his text, assumes that the smart thing is for the PCs to leave, go back to their patron and make a report stating "..and he's wasn't in, so we left thanking our incredible luck." Now sensible, _real_ people like you and me would run off before we even got that far beneath the temple. Our PCs won't, not just because they are heroes and have larger testicles than you or I, but because they are RPG characters controlled by players who have been accustomed to knowing that in an D**n the last rooms will always contain the epic finale of the scenario. Players won't retreat now, because they never do. In fact, I'll go as far as to suggest that should any player suggest retreating, then he's probably cheated and bought his own copy of SRiK. It's that bad. It is grossly unfair for Rolston to decide at this point that the PCs should run off before meeting the necromancer if they want to live. It is also incredibly naive for a RPG writer of his experience to assume that any party ever will. And the real problem is that should the PCs decide to act like 99.9% of RPG players will do and decide to hang around for the final scrap, it is highly likely that your EW campaign will be buggered beyond all repair and you may as well use that copy of "Empire in Flames/Chaos" for stopping the kitchen table from rocking. If the PCs do stay to meet the necromancer (and they will) they will more likely than not end up bound by oaths and lethal curses into his servitude (and possibly be approaching undeath into the bargain) and be sent around the globe recovering spell ingredients and arcane appartatus for his research. Great if you want to use SRiK as a launchboard to a campaign in Lustria or the Southlands, completely bloody useless if you wanted to PCs to return to 'Empire in Flames/Chaos' as free agents. The epilogue of the campaign suggests ways that enslaved PCs can break these bonds, but these either involve further adventures (taking you further and further away from the EW) or they can just be lifted by a powerful NPC wizard, conveniently hanging around the Tsarist court. The former is useless if you want to continue with the EW and the latter just smacks of deus ex machina*-ing. If the curses can be lifted that easily why bother threatening the PCs with them in the first place? So there you have it - a campaign of mixed quality where the good bits are very good and the bad bits quite dull. As a chapter of the EW I'm sorry but the climax/anti-climax makes it near useless to advance the EW plot. It would work better as a standalone, especially as a one-off where leaving the PCs as undead slaves really isn't a problem. Artwork is as good as you would expect from an ex-GW product, Martin McKenna's illustrations being particularly evocative. There are plenty of good handouts (although too many are just resumes of what an NPC tells the party - this is just lazy GMing) and the paper and binding quality is excellent. That might seem an odd point on which to conclude this review, but anybody who owned GW books when they were printed by GW will appreciate this! (Don't take the Style and Substance ratings too seriously - I'm not really sure how we can rate this campaign on a system of good/ok/average etc.) Owen Cooper Style: 3 (Average) Substance: 3 (Average)

Something Rotten in Kislev