No Strings Attached, written by Clive Oldfield, is one of Cubicle 7’s numerous adventures in the Ubersreik Adventures line, which slightly confusingly does not appear in any of the Ubersreik Adventures compilations. As usual there are major spoilers for the adventure, so if you might play it one day, stop reading now.
The adventure has the PCs protecting a terrified cobbler while investigating the murders of his three fellow tradesmen, the perpetrators turning out to be three Daemonic puppets working for a disgraced cobbler. It’s quite a nice setup – I love the idea of the evil puppets, which feels extremely Warhammery – but ultimately it feels like something that would work better as short story than an adventure.
The strengths are that we get a few decently-drawn characters (particularly the major antagonist, the daemonic puppets, and the unimaginative town investigator who the victim-to-be is exasperated by) as well as a decent amount of details on a nicely put-together travelling fair (in which the antagonist is hiding). We also get reasonable descriptions of the crime scenes for the three previous murders – with a nice table of clues for the first two (though oddly not the third, for some reason), plus some options for what the bad guys might do in the event of various PC actions.
Conversely however we have a disappointing lack of maps – none for the major locations (e.g the fair, or the patron’s house where the puppets will attempt to murder him); granted, the adventure reproduces the (excellent) Starter Set map of Ubersreik, but this isn’t marked with the locations of the murders or the fair, making it largely useless. There is also an odd assumption that the PCs will visit the fair on a specific day several days after it arrives in town (giving time for the first three murders to happen).
Sadly there is just not that much here in 16 pages of adventure. The crime scenes don’t have a great deal to discover in them. There are a few possible suspects amongst the fair but absolutely no suspects are suggested outside that (no suspicious-looking neighbours, customers with a grudge, townsfolk acting weird who might be worshippers of Khaine etc), and no suggestions are provided for how the PCs might investigate other members of the fair, or how they might react if the PCs start interrogating them. The adventure effectively spoils its culprits on the cover1 (once you’ve seen the image of a trio of creepy puppets and the title, its not hard to guess what’s going on). And the bad guy is a classic case where we get over a page of backstory which the PCs are unlikely ever to discover (which feels like a real waste of space when you only have 16 pages to work with!)
So all in all it is not a particularly great adventure in my opinion. I rather like the concept (the dual challenges of protecting your patron while also investigating a murder) and I love the puppet daemons. Quite possibly you could expand it into something better. My suggestion would be introduce it as background colour to a campaign, with the PCs hearing rumours of unsolved murders; then if you introduce the carnival and the weird puppets completely separately it should make their involvement rather less obvious.
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- The greatest thing about this adventure is the cover art, by Sam Manley, which is absolutely incredible ↩︎
Ill Met by Morrslieb 
Thanks for the review. This adventure does look like it has very promising ingredients – especially since I’m just looking for a short urban scenario as an interlude for my modified TEW campaign – but it’s a shame that the actual scenario seems disappointing. Not uncommon with WFRP scenarios, sadly.
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I assume you’ve already run or considered With a Little Help from my Friends?
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It’s on the list of scenarios I’m considering, but I haven’t had time to reread it properly yet.
The context is that my PCs, after Power Behind the Throne (I’m not going to run either Something Rotten in Kislev or The Horned Rat) are going to Wolfenburg to report to Heinrich Todbringer, who will find some use for them. He’ll eventually send them on a far-ranging mission outside the Empire (substituting for SRiK), but I figured he’d want to test whether these new troubleshooters are any good on a more local, lower-stakes mission first.
My most promising candidates for this “try-out mission” so far are relocalised versions of ‘The Blessing That Drew Blood’ (looking forward to your review of that!) and ‘Slaughter in Spittlefeld’, but “Help” is definitely a possibility as well.
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(Replying to your other comment about context) I’d say A Litte Help… fits pretty well for this: it is very short and low stakes but that might suit your purposes well. I really like Slaughter in Spittlefeld and Blessing That Drew Blood too.
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