Review of A Day At the Races

This adventure puts the PCs in charge of a cart and pony, as participants in a wagon race between two villages. I read the introduction and was enraptured. Ah! Visions opened up about Ben Hur-style racing, with characters fighting the other drivers while trying to cross the finish line first, or careening their carts at perilous speed along narrow mountain paths. This adventure could make some of those standbys of adventure novels come alive and provide an exciting scenario for the group. Or it might not.

The scenario begins, as the text explains, with the PCs arriving at the small village of Eisfeld. This is a wholly unremarkable village, the author tells us, except for one day a year, when the annual cart-and-pony race from Eisfeld to Cursdorf (another wholly unremarkable village) is held. And guess on which day the PCs happen to pass by the village. Yep, that’s right.

The PCs are expected to enter the race – the organisers even provide a cart and pony, free of charge. If they win the race they can gain twenty gold, and if that’s not enough, they can place bets on themselves or other participants and gain money with that. Or, I guess, they could just ride away with the cart and pony – that should be worth more than the prize money and earnings from the wagers would provide. But the scenario doesn’t take that option into account.

The scenario is further divided into two parts; the preparation for the race and the race itself. In the first part the PCs can do several things. The scenario mentions modifying the cart, but doesn’t provide much support for it. Options that are worked out a bit better are the opportunity to gain information by gossiping, or to get to know their opponents (and possibly sabotage their carts).

The second part is the race itself. The PCs can choose between three paths that run between the two villages; following the road, cutting across the fields or going through the woods. Whichever path they take doesn’t matter one bit, though, as in reality no path is different from the others. Each path has the same two, rather uninspired, encounters, and in the end all carts arrive at the final straight at the same time. Whether the PCs win mostly depends on whether they make the right rolls. They will miss out on any prize money as that gets stolen by a competitor, but they can keep any money they bet on the winner.

By the time I got to the end of the scenario I had lost most of the enthousiasm that was waked up at the introduction. The idea of a coach race is brilliant, but I feel that too little effort was spent to make this idea into an adrenaline-pumping scenario. The opening gambit of “Here, we don’t know you at all and have no reason to trust you, but we will give you a cart and pony, just so that you can participate in the race” is too simplistic. Equally uninspired are the encounters along the race (you get attacked by five beastmen, who will rout if 50% of them have been killed. How do you kill exactly two and a half beastman?). The scenario could have benefitted from a few more optional, and better described, scenes along the way.

The option of sabotaging other people’s carts before the start of the race is mentioned, but barely more than that. If the group wants to have fun doing some B&E and work out a fiendish plan to sabotage the carts, the GM will have to improvise the whole thing. And any sabotaging only leads to a penalty in the Drive Cart skill. How fun would it have been if there had only been a little “Sabotage” table, that the PCs would have to roll against at several points during the race, with failures indicating that a wheel would get loose at a critical moment, or the pony would get sick.

But perhaps I’m not the intended audience; the scenario is inspired by the sixties’ cartoon “Wacky Races”, with participating NPCs being drawn straight from there (Dick Dastardly and Muttley, Peter Perfect, Penelope Pitstop and the Ant Hill Mob have been translated to WFRP). Never having seen that cartoon, I had to look up what the NPCs referred to. And perhaps I failed to capture its brilliance as a pastiche because of that. If you know “Wacky Races” and like it, then perhaps this scenario is precisely the adventure for you.