*Warning: This review contains spoilers!*
Heart of Chaos is a new and original conclusion to the original Doomstones Campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The original series, published in four books by Flame Publications: Fire in the Mountains, Blood in the Darkness, Death Rock, and Dwarf Wars were all originally published as the complete Dungeon Master’s Series as a generic set of adventures for D&D. The WFRP Doomstones series betrays its roots, being little more than a series of glorified dungeon bashes in search of ancient artifacts of terrible power that could end the world. The conclusion, commissioned to complete the series, was intended to lift the series above its generic roots and give players an epic finale to the campaign. Sadly, Heart of Chaos fails miserably on both accounts.
I never cared for the Doomstones campaign, so I am inevitably a difficult person for Heart of Chaos’ author to please, nonetheless I was hoping that the adventure would rise above the series modest, generic, and dated origins.
This adventure details the efforts of the PCs to destroy the four artifacts that they have brought together that threatens the existence of the entire WFRP world. This adventure takes them from small villages, to dwarfen holds, to chaos cult complexes, and ultimately to a warpgate in the sky.
The cover was a disappointment. I remember being very pleased with Danny Willis’ beautiful computer generated map of the Old World, but here the computer generated art is unappealing. The cover features a rather lurid scene: a group of adventurers on board a flying ship being attacked by demons. The cover is lifeless and dull, the image is blurred, there is a big indistinguishable black blur at the top (a balloon), and the human figures look like poor images from a computer game circa 1992. There is a figure, a dwarf, standing on the wings, who looks comical, his head looks nearly twice the size of his body. Computer generated art for the cover, once the novelty wears off (and I was enjoyed the novelty in Marienburg) looks sterile and lifeless – I hope the publishers will resort to more traditional cover work in the future.
The book has three strengths:
First, the book is exceedingly well organized. The over-arching story is detailed at the beginning and the individual chapters have charts detailing additional information. In this respect the book is very user-friendly.
Second, the cartography in the book is good, some of it exceptional. Illustrations of villages and towns by Ralph Horsley are wonderful.
Third, the book provides some stats and details on Daemons of Tzeentch. Much of this has been covered in out of print books, but its inclusion here is useful for GMs who don’t have that information. The book also introduces “Heirs of Change” a new daemon that is essentially a recycled daemon, a sort of miniature “Lord of Change”, a sort of “mini-Me” Daemon.
Another nice thing about the book is the presence of the Knight career and its description and advance scheme, although this is hardly a strength, more of a nice perk.
Other than that, the book has a lot of failings…
Sadly, the story is one of them. The story itself is very linear, and involves rail-roading the players. At least one part of the adventure would be very difficult for many of the players, involving the infiltration of a chaos cult – a real problem with the original Doomstones party that included a Trollslayer and a Druid.
The story has a slew of continuity issues. At the start of the book two incidents are given to reveal the evil nature of the doomstones. One involves a pack of wolves attacking the players due to their unnatural aura. The book provides a picture of adventurers on horseback assaulted by wolves – which begs the question: If the wolves are so troubled by the presence of the doomstones, why are the players’ horses not perturbed? A second encounter involves strife in a village. However the evil influence of the doomstones is never again mentioned. No details are given at potential strife in the group. Nature is racked by pain at the joining of the doomstones, but other than a rain storm there is little other evidence of this.
Other internal contradictions exist as well. When the players near the end of the campaign, they are expected to steal a flying ship in order to hurl the Doomstones into a warp gate. The GM is instructed that the winds are too strong for a player to fly up and throw it in. Yet players who have never flown a flying ship are expected to pilot one in conditions where magical flight is impossible? Furthermore their archenemy who has just recently learned to fly a gyrocopter is expected to fly in such conditions, as are other daemons. Even stranger, the players can throw the stones back into the warp gate. How? Weren’t the winds too strong. Still the author insists that the GM foil any innovative attempt by PCs: “Obviously this would spoil an otherwise rip-roaring climax, and therefore needs to be stopped”. This whole thing seems contrived and inconsistent, in fact the whole adventure seems to be designed for the sole purpose of the players getting onboard a flying ship. No mention of the fact that a player could easily summon a wind elemental and instruct it to quickly fly up and plop the doomstones into the warp gate.
Another internal contradiction: The players are in the mountains – yet strangely enough the Dwarfs happen to have an airfield and be test piloting an experimental craft in the mountains. It seems to me like a mountainous area is one of the worst possible places to do something of this sort.
There is little continuity between the other parts of the Doomstones campaign. Two groups that could have been active in earlier parts, including an ancient Dwarfen order dedicated to keeping the stones apart suddenly appear out of nowhere. This is excusable, considering that they have been added retroactively. However there is almost no effort made at drawing in linkages from previous parts of the campaign. There is little mention of getting aid from the monks at the Eyrie or the Dwarfs in the campaign. None of the other groups that the players encountered in the past do not make an appearance – the appearance of them would have helped overcome the compartmentalized nature of the adventures.
There was also a few minor points of inconsistency between elements in the book and game background information, such as Dwarfs being the greatest foes of chaos (untrue), or that it was the use of the Doomstones that doomed the Dwarfen realms (easily disputed). These are more academic points and not likely to interest most.
Deja-vu! Two episodes of the campaign are uncannily familiar: Empire in Flames had the players encountering an ancient dwarf who was able to reveal the truth to them, and they encountered a dungeon full of Dwarfen ghosts, and this adventure has both as well.
Lack of roleplaying: This is one of the most egregious elements of this adventure. To learn the history of the adventure the GM is expected to read a page long entry to the bored players. Worse, a potential mystery as to who is responsible for the subverting of the artifacts to chaos is reduced to a handout driven sham. There are almost six pages of handouts where the players experience flashbacks. Discovering the mystery seems reduced to the players merely sitting through and reading all of the handouts.
The Linear Nature: A potential strength is actually a weakness. There are a lot of dubious conditions that have to be met for the players to succeed in the adventure. They include players who have been pestered and battling servants of chaos for a couple of adventures to accept a group of beastmen and infiltrate a chaos cult. In another part, Dwarfen PCs may have to contribute to the theft of a fellow Dwarf’s life work in a near suicidal display. The players are also expected to come into conflict with a group of Imperial Knights, a task that many groups may not want to do. The author makes a lot of assumptions about what the players will do.
Clichés are abundant: A blind character who is endlessly optimistic is introduced – and certain to die to invoke in the players a sense of outrage, an ancient hermit who resides on a mountaintop, an evil creature who repents his lifestyle and dies as the ultimate act of self sacrifice to save the players, and not one, but possibly two flying suicides (one by the archenemy, one by the players).
The Grease Creature: ‘nuff said!
The Evil Plan itself is notably…. under whelming. The great entity known as the Lord of Change who uses ambition and magic as a means of subverting human society decides to use a storm to induce a world wide famine to destroy the world. Not only is this not in the spirit of the chaos god Tzeentch, but its not even interesting. The potential ending of Shadows over Bogenhafen offers far more terror than this.
We’ve seen a lot of cults in WFRP – this one includes a cult as well, although it is poorly conceived with its ideology having little actual to do with the actual “theology” of Tzeentch. This is unfortunate, seeing as how it offers one of the few major non-scripted role-play encounters. The dogma of the cult was so far off from established canon as to make the cult rather indistinguishable from any band of nefarious do gooders. In fact the whole band seemed to convey little feel for the WFRP world at all.
The author’s cavalier attitude towards PC deaths was troubling. The point of an rpg is enjoyment, and the players may have spent years with their PCs, yet the author suggests killing off the PCs at a number of different points, and some parts of the adventure are almost certain to result in the players deaths (in particular an ambush).
Some may also complain about the level of magic in the game and the overly powerful NPCs. Some may not like the presence of gyrocopters or the flying ship, but some of the NPCs have stats that seem impossible under the current rules.
Complaints about the actual content aside, curious design decisions detract from the game itself:
One was to add bold faced text to indicate important points. At the beginning of the book there are a number of bold faced terms, many of them seemingly unimportant: “spitting” is one of these important “keywords”. Even more confusing is that other things are in bold as well. Some of the bold words reduce characters to caricatures: “hothead”, “dreamer”, “money”. Most of the characters are reduced to stereotypes, including a chart on one page “Character Quick Reference Chart” which reiterates the bold words, “Dreamier”, “Drinking”, “Money”, “Knows Many Stories”. Almost all of the characters in this book are two-dimensional and motivated by a single cause.
Even stranger is the use of the adventure as a sort of a manifesto on game design. Two pages of the book are spent in justifying the linear nature of the adventure and advice on how to run them, something unnecessary at the conclusion of a four part campaign! Furthermore the author introduces the term Gamemaster Character for NPC, which seems a bit distracting. Then, 85 pages into the book breaks the flow of the chapter to give advice on “Using Gamemaster Characters” and “Creating GM Characters”. Changing familiar jargon used in previous doomstone books was a poor idea, but lecturing on how to create a GM character in the final book of a pre-prepared adventure mid-chapter seems ill-advised and utterly unnecessary. Far worse is that the author’s advice reduced characters to simple concepts and a single goal. Not only is the location of the advice bad, but the content is as well.
There are a number of typos in the adventure, and it seems as if at least one note to the editor slipped in. For the major group serving as the players’ rivals, there are no trappings listed. Others have no skills listed at all, when they probably should have some sort of skills. One chart seems to be on the wrong page in one place, and a set of paragraphs were referred to later as a chart when they are not a chart, which was confusing before sorting the information out. Furthermore, none of the locations in the game are actually on the map at the start of the book!
Lastly, the author betrays contempt, not just for players’ deaths, but for GM themselves: “Do you indulge your players’ banal desire for a conventionally satisfying Hollywood-style conclusion…” is the most obvious example.
This book is so inferior on a number of levels. It’s not just the fact that there are typos, information is missing, or that the earlier part of the campaign left much to be desired. The NPCs are two-dimensional, elements are clichéd or ill-fitting for the parties, it is both inconsistent internally, between other parts of the campaign and contradicts other material in the world, the actual menace to the world is lame, it stifles player creativity to ensure that the author’s epic finale is carried out, replaces meaningful role-playing interaction with a dorky handout reading session, and the adventure is noticeably lacking in the Old World atmosphere. The flow of the book is interrupted by unnecessary advice that is in my opinion just plain bad.
The adventure that was supposed to be the crowning moment of the Doomstones campaign turns out to be its shame: it is actually the worst part of the campaign, possibly the worst of the entire WFRP line. This was certainly not worth waiting ten years for…
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