There are two more adventures here plus some appendices. As mentioned in my previous post (in which I reviewed A Rough Night at the Three Feathers, A Day at the Trials and A Night at the Opera) these last two have both been published before, respectively as a First Edition adventure in Pyramid magazine1 and a Third Edition adventure. Again, both are written by Graeme Davis.
As usual, spoilers follow.
Nastassia’s Wedding
Another cracking short adventure in the style of A Rough Night at the Three Feathers. Once again, we have a situation centred around the nobility, this being the wedding of Gravin Ambosstein’s younger brother to a closeted young noblewoman, for reasons of money. But the bride-to-be is in love with a commoner and they plan to elope on the night before the wedding; a vengeful Neherakhan spirit seeks a blade to be returned to him which is destined to be a gift from the bride’s father to his new son-in-law; multiple parties want to steal a ruby; that rogue Dammenblatz is trying to frame the Gravin for the murder; a couple of thugs are exacting revenge on a noble’s gambling debts; and a bunch of Slaaneshi cultist intend to – guess what? – summon a load of daemons. And then there’s the hidden heir, where the bride’s secret idiot older brother escapes from a cellar where he’s imprisoned to try to murder his father.
This is a return to the “lots of parties sneak around at night-time, potentially bumping into each other” idea of A Rough Night, which I like. What I really appreciate about this scenario is that there are lot of potential for the PCs to get tasked with specific jobs by various nobles, rather than just running into situations at random which may potentially lead to them acting as observers for a lot of the time. And a lot of these situations are about nobles saving face. So the bride’s father may task them to get rid of the sword so that the Nehekharan Wraith doesn’t start haunting his new son-in-law, but with plausible deniability since its already been promised as a wedding present. The Gravin may send the PCs after the eloping couple, but asks them to do it quietly to avoid a scandal. Handling the mad brother calls for tact since he’s technically a noble, and if he’s discovered it may ruin the wedding since the bride will no longer be the legal heir.
Again there a perhaps a couple of plots too many – I’m not really sure the thugs add a lot, for instance – and I’m utterly bored of the “cultists summon daemons” plot point; I think it’d be more fun just to have the cultists trying to tempt other nobles into their debauched revels (perhaps involving a friend of the PCs?), and maybe summoning a Daemonette simply to participate in their fun, rather than specifically to set upon the other guests.
But all in all I think this is a fantastic scenario with plenty of potential for lots of fun mix-ups and hooks for continuing plots.
Lord of Ubersreik
The fifth and final adventure in the book is a costume ball at an Ubersreik mansion, featuring political shenanigans plus a Skaven plot to mutate the guests using warpstone. It’s follows the familiar format, although like A Day at the Trials it feels like it very much has a “main plot”, plus several minor ones.
The basic plot of “four families of nobles try to gain influence with the Emperor’s representative” is good. The recommended plot hook is that the PCs are engaged by one of the families to protect their interests and keep an eye on the other families, which is pleasingly wide brief (as well as being believable, provided the PCs have an existing relationship). There are a lot of good characters here, and the costumes are really fun, although all the nobles get rather confusing (especially since the book frequently refers to them by their first name and expects you to remember which family they belong to). The situation is complicated since the ostensible Herald of the Emperor is actually not the real power in Ubersreik – that’s Emmanuel Nacht, who is here in disguise to observe. There are some lovely touches here, like the minor noble who turns up dressed as a mutant in the colours of a rival family, and the noble who is trying to embarrass all his rivals by slipping emetic into their drink… although that becomes repetitive given that he does is four times!
There is also a lecherous noble (which could prove a tricky problem for commoners to deal with), a Grey Wizard causing mischief, a flagellant who turns up to try and denounce the nobles, and the old saw of a jilted husband confronting his adulterous wife and her lover (i.e. basically a copy of the same plot thread in Rough Night). Finally near the end, the mad heir from the previous adventure turns up to disrupt the party.
And then there’s the Skaven. Their motivation is a little flimsy (“weaken Ubersreik by mutating its leaders”), but I appreciate a Skaven plot that isn’t either “search for Warpstone” or “attack”). There’s potentially plenty of fun intercepting ratmen skulking about and trying to poison the food. However its arguably a bit of a problem that the PCs could easily miss this plot thread (there’s no hint that they should be on the watch for Skaven), and that its consequences are so dire that they will immediately take over the whole adventure. After all, there’s not likely to be a lot of political manoeuvring if mutations are breaking out in multiple guests! I feel like this plot thread needs to be toned down a little, and it could easily be linked in to the main plot. What if one of the nobles was actually in league with the Skaven, and the Ratmen are only there to mutate a particular rival?
I’m also less than impressed that the wizard and Emmanuelle Nacht don’t get profiles for rather spurious reasons (the PC’s “aren’t supposed to interact with them” – which seems bizarre given that the Wizard is causing trouble all night!)
At the end of the day this feels like an adventure with lots of good ideas, but not quite enough guidance on how to make them all work. That said, it’s very nice to see an adventure that links in with the Ubersreik setting2 (and ), and with a bit of work from the GM I think this could be a very memorable adventure.
Appendices
The book includes two decently-sized appendices, one detailing Gnomes as a player race, and one providing a list of pub games. I don’t have a lot to say about the latter: I can see that they might be hand for adding some verisimilitude to PCs’ time in the various inns of the Empire, but I’m always a bit uncertain about how these “games within a game” would play at the table. Is it really fun to roll dice to simulate playing a pub game? Wouldn’t it be more fun to actually play the game itself? (Or maybe play the RPG that we gathered to play?)
The Gnome appendix is much more interesting. Gnomes were a First Edition race (in a White Dwarf article) which as far as I’m aware never appeared since3. Here they’re reimagined slightly, with an emphasis on secrecy – often passing themselves off as Halflings and magic (every character can take Channelling (Ulgu) and Language (Magick) and can try to Dispel spells.) We get brief details on three Gnome gods, including Miracles of other gods that can sub in as the Gnomish detiy’s miracles. I can’t say I was bothered by the omission of Gnomes in WFRP 4E, but its nice to have options and they fit in with the other non-humans perfectly well.
Conclusion
This is a fantastic book which is well worth the price. A Rough Night at the Three Feathers is deservedly a classic, and for my money Nastassia’s Wedding is equally great. A Night at the Opera and Lord of Ubersreik are also both excellent adventures (though the latter might prove quite challenging to run). The only adventure I don’t wholeheartedly recommend is A Day at the Trials – and even then there is some good material here, it just needs a bit of work to make it shine.
One caveat is that I’m not convinced that running the five adventures as a campaign (one of the ways that the book suggests using them) is a great idea. One of the aspects that made A Rough Night at the Three Feathers so brilliant was that it was novel: there weren’t any other WFRP adventures like it! I suspect that running five adventures in a row which all have the same structure might prove tiresome. I’d recommend using these adventures as bit more sparingly and sprinkling them into a larger campaign.
Buy Rough Nights and Hard Days from DriveThruRPG. This is an affiliate link so I receive a small payment for purchases made using it.
- Credit to Wolf, commenting on my previous post, for pointing out that it was Pyramid, not White Dwarf ↩︎
- Indeed I imagine that it will link very nicely with Eye for an Eye and Mirror of Desire, Third Edition adventures which have been recently released for Fourth Edition in Ubersreik Adventures 3, given that both deal with noble houses represented in Lord of Ubersreik. ↩︎
- And they seem to have been phased out of Fourth Edition again, based on the species of the main NPC in the Fourth Edition version of With a Little Help from my Friends being inexplicably changed from Gnome to Halfling ↩︎
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I thought the latter two scenarios had a weakness in the daemon-summoning and skaven plots.
The previous ones had plots of comparable stakes – not identical, but comparable – in Rough Night, it’s unlikely that the PC’s would consider the thefts as important as the murders, but depending on what’s stolen, it’s not impossible that they might.
However, when it comes to a horde of demons or mass poisoning with warpstone, it becomes harder to see the other plots as anything but a distraction from what’s really going on. Although the skaven having attempts repeatedly thwarted by bad luck is amusing.
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Indeed. Either plot can simply be omitted without much trouble. Or in the case of the Skaven one you could just accept it as the main point of the adventure and run with it. (I suspect that would work better if they’d previously been established as active in the town.)
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