Review of Ubersreik Adventures

Extended blurbs from the publisher: 'Six Grim and Perilous Scenarios in the Duchy of Ubersreik.

- The Guilty Party: someone is sabotaging coaches, and a local investigator thinks he knows who.'

What you get: Your EUR 33,99 or equivalent will buy you Ubersreik Adventures, a 128-page adventure collection for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition in both its full colour hardback as well as its pdf edition.

The pdf version alone costs EUR 17,75. As the publisher's blurb states, the adventures contained in this volume have been published autonomously as pdf documents during the elaboration of the new edition of WFRP. In fact, one can still purchase each adventure separately in pdf form, with prices ranging from free ('If Looks Could Kill') to EUR 7,10 ('Heart of Glass'). As expected, buying them all together costs cheaper.

In a second twist, one can buy all adventures together in pdf form in two different ways. First, he can buy them as the pdf of the physical product. Alternatively, he can buy them as a bundle of autonomous adventures, a case in which the presentation and content somehow differs. In this latter case, if you already purchased some of the adventures in the past, the price of the bundle is appropriately reduced.

For the purposes of this review, I perused the physical product (as usual) along with the second, bundled pdf version which contains the adventures in ten different pdfs. I thus cannot pronounce myself on the pdf edition which translates the printed product into a unitary pdf.

Spoiler warning: even though I will not reveal the adventures' plot, I will discuss some of their strong and less strong points. If you wish to participate in these adventures as a player, stop reading now.

Contents: The underlying theme of these six adventures is that they all take place in Ubersreik, and that with minimal work they can precede or follow adventures found in Rough Nights & Hard Days and Enemy in Shadows. The six adventures range in size from 9 to 28 pages. Some will be resolved in a single session no matter how much you wish to stretch it, while others might take two long ones at the absolute maximum.

The adventures differ in theme and scope even though, like most WFRP adventures out there, the characters appear at the wrong place at the wrong time. As an example, in If Looks Could Kill the heroes will end up facing multiple issues, as opposed to the initial problem they were tasked to resolve. Mad Men of Gotheim is about the adventurers arriving too late in a village that has just been hit by a ferocious beast, and before dealing with that, they will have to deal with the villagers. Slaughter in Spittlefeld will find the characters quarantined, due to disease, inside a place they will hardly remember entering, while in The Guilty Party the characters entangle themselves in the political machinations and industrial sabotage of the stage coach companies that provide transport around the Old World.

The adventures can be played autonomously. Yet, extensive write-ups both before and after each adventure indicate where can the GM find additional information, which adventures to precede or follow, and even which NPCs to alter, if he wishes to make a coherent campaign out of them.

The book closes with a half-page index of all the NPCs that participate in these adventures.

The strong points: The more I see of WFRP, the more I fall in love with it. I started my GM career with the second edition of D&D, and I was thoroughly perplexed by the total incoherence of the adventures' backstories. Adventures were bubbles, with backgrounds and NPCs that did not touch upon one another even when they took place in the same location. Ubersreik Adventures goes the opposite way. It frames all the adventures in the same duchy, and takes the time to link everything for those who enjoy cohesive experiences. You can run them as one-offs, of course, and even as convention material, seeing how short some of them are. If however you want to run almost everything from Rough Nights & Hard Days and smoothen your entry into the Enemy Within campaign, you are in for a treat. Even though the plots of these adventures are not linked (and thankfully so), they make Ubersreik feel alive. The world around the heroes moves irrespective of whether they act or not.

The adventures' tone is as WFRP as it gets. There is a lot of interaction with NPCs and getting acquainted with the scenery, all balanced out with investigation and action. The characters are hardly heroes, nobody however expects WFRP to handle them differently. I enjoyed the twist in The Mad Men of Gotheim where the characters arrive in the area after the beast ravaged everything; think about it conceptually for a second. They will need to interact with almost all the residents of the village, and keep at least one point of advice from each one of them, if they are to successfully tackle the threat. I didn't expect to get a lesson from WFRP about how complex problems can usually be. Most adventures favour black-and-white, sledgehammer approaches without nuance. Here, a full adventure is built around a rather simple premise: everybody is right about one little thing and wrong about everything else. This turns the adventure into a thoughtful affair and provides a welcome change in pace. Slaughter in Spittlefeld's premise is gorgeous, and even though Cubicle 7 did not plan it, it is eerily contemporary. There is a highly infectious and deadly disease. What do you do when you find yourself in the wrong side of the quarantine cordon? If there is one RPG adventure to play with your group right now, this is it!

The Guilty Party deserves its own paragraph. It is one of a kind, really. Seen superficially, it looks like the great railroad. No matter what the characters do, they will not get paid for their job and will piss off important people. On the other hand, that's the adventure's premise: the characters are actively set up to fail, and they cannot do much to even understand it at first, let alone avoid it. Brilliant! You might be reading and thinking 'how will my players ever like that?', yet when it plays out it is as smooth as silk, awarding the characters for trying anyway. That's perfect entertainment, and a great lesson in how unfair life can be in a (grim and perilous) fantasy setting.

The writing is consistently good and at times reaches excellence. You are expected to put some work in each adventure, that however is to be expected. Yet, I have some issues with the presentation, and how it might make the GM's job harder at times. Keep reading about that.

Cubicle 7 knows how to do NPCs, and I am not only talking about each of them getting his own portrait and role-playing tips. The Mad Men of Gotheim uses some fairly obvious, yet extremely effective tricks in order for the players to feel that NPCs are living beings. One can be convinced by flattery, the other can only be bullied, the third needs common sense instructions while another still likes a friendly demeanor. Excellent stuff, and even more so in the context of a story where each NPCs holds a part of the key to its resolution.

I am very happy to see that a second collection of Ubersreik Adventures will be published in the future. That's the way of making a world feel live, not by random adventures set thousands of kilometres apart! If Cubicle 7 needs to keep one good practice from this collection, that is the practical links to previous and future adventures.

The weak points: WFRP adventures tend to feature many NPCs and plot twists. This, of course, is not a weak point per se. Yet, the GM should prepare well. If you don't want to fumble through these scenarios, even the smaller ones, devote to them the time they deserve. If you wish to create an adventure tree of sorts in order to play the most material possible before tackling the Enemy Within campaign, read the whole book multiple times and take extensive notes.

Setting subjective considerations aside, the adventures are not created equal. There is a certain amount of railroading, broadbrushing, and not elaborating on the consequences of player actions. The adventures hardly come with suggestions to the GM on how to handle more creative approaches. In a setting with a tone as unforgiving as WFRP, this might give new GMs the wrong idea about what they should do in order to avoid derailing the adventures. Failure can be fun, but only if the GM knows what he is doing without actively leading his players there. Many of these adventures could have benefited by staying on the drawing board longer, If Looks Could Kill being a prime example. This is a free adventure with a rather simple and linear approach. You might like it or not (I felt it was ok), yet it would be a pity if its shortcomings dissuaded you from playing the other ones.

I was rather surprised by the lack of player-oriented maps in both the physical edition as well as the pdf. Slaughter in Spittlefeld is the only adventure to provide one. Cubicle 7 got that aspect right in all its TOR products; why backtrack now? These maps might not be always 100% necessary, let's be honest however: there is a sense of achievement when the players slowly discover what they can do on a map, instead of the numbered entries telling them what they can visit or not. Fortunately, the only thing the publisher needs to do is publish the player-oriented maps as free downloads. The problem will be instantly solved.

I am not satisfied with the pdf edition, or rather, the many different pdfs that one gets if he purchases the 'bundle' version. I understand why they received varying levels of editorial TLC when they were first published. Yet, someone should have tried to homogenize their editing when the company decided to bundle them together. All appear to have extractable images to show to your players, yet only a few of them have electronic bookmarks for ease of navigation. Bait and Witch, The Mad Men of Gotheim and The Guilty Party require additional perseverance when preparing them, since they are devoid of bookmarks. Idem when it comes to the adventures' providing live links in their table of contents: some do, while others don't. None of these six adventures is particularly long, this doesn't mean however that pdfs should be published like this.

The line continues with the rather quaint practice of colouring all interior imagery except from the NPCs. I don't get it, honestly. The NPCs are the images I invariably show to my players, not the decorative fluff nor some action drawings which might or might not be pertinent to their actual situation. Leave those in black and white, and put some colour on the useful stuff, please.

I wish this collection were cheaper and came with an integrated cloth bookmark. It actually needs one, taking its contents into account. As I have stated in other reviews, if other publishers include one and you don't, it doesn't reflect well on your marketing. I get how the Warhammer license might be an expensive affair, for the salty price tag however one is in his rights to expect more.

The WFRP line has a very dense writing with an extremely small font. At the same time it uses rather large margins. How about using a bigger font and reducing the size of the margins, so that the word count per page remains the same? I am always perplexed by RPG books which are presented exclusively as reading material, even though they are supposed to be used interactively in the context of a lively game. There was a reason TSR of your put its read-aloud entries in coloured boxes. It looks 1980s, I get it. Yet, try to wade through these adventures with a rapid succession of italic read-aloud text and non-italic GM-only text during the chaos that usually accompanies a session. This is a pointless layer of complexity that could have been easily avoided.

You know you need to up your editing game when you misspell duchy as 'ducy' on the book's back cover, or when you insert references to chapters or subchapters that don't lead anywhere. I expected better from a collection of already published material.

Conclusion: Ubersreik Adventures is a fine set of solid adventures with numerous links and interesting plots. They are diverse affairs, true to WFRP's theme, and can be connected in numerous ways to one another, as well as to the adventures of other WFRP products. They miss perfection since their presentation is lacking at times, especially on the pdfs, and the details might not always be there. Even with those flaws however I wouldn't miss out. Back in the day I would have killed for interlinked adventures that weren't an obvious campaign.

For more info on Ubersreik Adventures, Warhammer Fantasy Role Play and Cubicle 7 visit its website at https://www.cubicle7games.com.

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