What makes a good WFRP adventure?

Writing reviews about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP) publications, I thought it would be helpful to lay out my criteria for what constitutes a good WFRP adventure.

For an RPG that’s now getting on for 40 years old and has gone through four editions, there is a huge amount of WFRP material out there. Not only that but the Warhammer wargame (which has always been far more mainstream than WFRP) has gone through huge changes over the decades, culminating in being blown up entirely in 2015 (with an eagerly-awaited return imminent in the form of The Old World).

Those changes are partly reflected in the editions of WFRP. First edition was quite scrappy, since the basic lore of the Warhammer world was literally being created at the same time as writing the rulebook. Second edition clearly attempted to align WFRP much more closely with the then-current stage of the Warhammer battle game (not least in its default background of the awful ‘Storm of Chaos’ event. Third edition was (from my limited understanding) a distinctly more heroic affair. Fourth edition appears to be an attempt to return to the first edition roots of the game (exemplified by Cubicle 7 issuing new versions of almost every decent first edition adventure!) and square the circle by allowing both grim-and-gritty and more heroic levels of play.

What this means is that WFRP means quite different things to different people – and I want to be clear that I don’t think anyone’s views are wrong. What follows are my opinions on what WFRP is. But it is quite legitimate to view WFRP as a high fantasy, high action game in which you seek to emulate the exploits of Gotrek and Felix – something which I understand the much-maligned 3rd edition attempted to do.

Where I came in

I came to WFRP 1st edition in 1991, five years after the rulebook was published (and sadly just as the edition was entering its dormancy until Hogshead rejuvenated it in 1995).

Those were strange times when both WFRP and the Warhammer world were still being nailed down, and that’s reflected in many of 1st edition publications which feature things that seem downright heretical compared to the canonical Warhammer that was settled on. For instance dwarfs and halflings could be wizards, and colour magic didn’t exist. The WFRP rulebook depicts flying galleons (!?) The daemons in Shadows Over Bogenhafen owe more to Judeo-Christian imagery than what we’d recognise as Chaos Daemons. And there is some really odd stuff in Something Rotten in Kislev. (Eventually I’ll do a review of that weird, wacky book.)

What?!

Boo!

WFRP for me is defined very strongly by the best of the adventures that were around at the time. Essentially this is first four parts of the Enemy Within (Mistaken Identity, Shadows Over Bogenhafen, Death on the Reik, Power Behind the Throne), plus Night of Blood, With A Little Help From My Friends, the Oldenhaller Contract, Rough Night at the Three Feathers, Grapes of Wrath, and (perhaps controversially) Lichemaster and The Haunting Horror. (Also Warhammer City, the Middenheim city guide.)

What was it about those adventures that I appreciated?

• Grounded – there is a real sense that you’re inhabiting a real world filled which operates similarly to historical 16th century Europe. Adventures are generally set in cities, coaching inns, temples; never in weird dungeons with minimal justification of their existence. Attention is given to culture, occupations and the mundanities of life – such as the sheep fair in Shadows over Bogenhafen; the blended Empire/Bretonnian village in Lichemaster; the fact that the adventure hook in Power Behind the Throne is ‘unjust taxes’!
• Related to that, adventures often limit their supernatural components – its very rare to find a cavalcade of different monsters – instead you often get one or two fantastical elements, which helps them feel more realistic than your average Dungeons & Dragons adventure.
• The means that adventures have a tangible atmosphere. That might be the horrific haunted house in The Haunting Horror, farce in Rough Night at the Three Feathers, sinister weirdness in Castle Wittgenstein, or black comedy in Night of Blood.
• Relevant detail – adventures feature decent maps where they’d be useful; gossip and rumours to help the world feel like it exists beyond the PCs and their current actions; details like what a city smells like or local customs; use of foreign languages etc etc. 
• Fun NPCs – adventures feature memorable NPCs who are fun to interact with. Examples are the various Purple Hand cultists in Death on the Reik, the village idiot in Grapes of Wrath, Gideon in Shadows over Bogenhafen, or Albi in Lichemaster.
• There are fun situations for the PCs to get involved – not just simple dungeon crawls or canned combat encounters (“suddenly five orcs appear and charge!”). Examples would be the rooftop chase in The Oldenhaller Contract; negotiating with Skaven in two adventures; planning the assault on the criminals in With A Little Help From my Friends.
• Freedom – adventures which allow the PCs freedom to approach situations in their own way rather than following a prescribed path or series of actions. Examples are all the investigation possibilities of Shadows Over Bogenhafen and Power Behind the Throne; interactions with the villagers in Grapes of Wrath; everything in Rough Night at the Three Feathers and With A Little Help From my Friends.
• Humour – dreadful puns were prevalent in almost all the first edition adventures, but you also had silly situations and amusing characters, such as the ridiculous cultists in Death on the Reik, Alphonse the Outrageous Expy in With a Little Help, or the emergent farce in Rough Night.

Notably, not all of these classic adventures actually meet all of these criteria. Death on the Reik provides very sparse information about some locations – Grissenwald gets almost nothing, while Delberz and Kemperbad are given a map and a paragraph or two. Similarly, Rough Night at the Three Feathers has very limited details for each NPC. Conversely Lichemaster, is a pretty shameless railroad. And both Lichemaster and Death on the Reik include lots of supernatural elements (undead, Skaven, magic items, daemons etc).

Nevertheless it is these publications that really shape what I want to see out of WFRP adventures. There’s no doubt that there is a huge element of nostalgia in this. The time I first read them I was at a highly impressionable age (early teenage years) – and they were some of the first RPG adventures I’d ever read to boot, so I probably glossed over some of their deficiencies. But I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that these are RPG greats – the Enemy Within is regularly listed as one of the great RPG campaigns, and adventures like Rough Night and Grapes of Wrath are regularly recommended as some WFRP’s best.

So these are the criteria I’m judging newer WFRP adventures on. What I haven’t said a lot about are the themes of WFRP 1st edition, which I’ll say more about in another post.