Review: Ubersreik Adventures 2 (part 2)

The second part of my review of Ubersreik Adventures 2. The first part – covering the initial three adventures – can be found here.

Spoilers follow.

The Blessing That Drew Blood (by Dave Allen)

A very nice investigation adventure which is slightly let down by a rather perfunctory ending. There’s another really great concept: an entertainer made a drunken pact with Slaanesh, providing her with a cittern that plays supernaturally well – but needs “recharging” every year by the murders of six religious people. Being a somewhat moral person, she is choosing sacrifices that are themselves morally deficient. So this provides a pattern to the recent killings in Ubersreik for PCs to follow.

The adventure is nicely structured around a series of clues and murder sites for the PCs to investigate, each of which contains a key NPC for them to interview. Charm tests are liberally used to elicit information, and there’s a clear list of possible questions with their answers, plus a bit of detail on the NPC’s character and opinions. Pleasingly, there’s also a little summary box saying what relevant information the PCs may gather from each NPC.

The NPCs are decent, and they include one stand-out, a veteran agitator named Ottokar who feels like a classic conspiracy theorist, believing wizards, Elves or foreigners to be behind most of the Empire’s ills (including these murders). We also have a Morrite priest who can act as an optional patron for the PCs, a classic fiery Sigmarite Warrior Priest with a hidden shame, and a bartender in a shady party of town who is very hard to get information out of since he doesn’t want to get a reputation as a snitch!

OK, he’s got a point about the college buildings. Copyright Cubicle 7

Complicating things are three Slaaneshi daemons who have been incarnated into mortal bodies as punishments (a dog, a cat and a human). These are subtly helping the murderer by distracting potential witnesses, and will try to hamper PCs efforts mainly through spellcasting. This has the potential for plenty of fun (with the animals barking or yowling spells, and PCs randomly falling asleep, bemoaning their life, or discharging bodily fluids in response to them.

There are a couple of issues. One is that Charm is so important to the adventure that almost no other skill matters! I think if I were running this I would want to put in some more opportunities for other skills to be useful. Another is that the adventure has a few sloppy errors: at least two places that reference “page @@”, and a couple of places where summaries of “what information can be found here” doesn’t actually quite match the information that NPC can give. The biggest issue is probably that the ending is a bit simple: the PCs figure out the murderer (hopefully) in time to intercept her trying to assault one of their contacts and stop her. She’s not especially proficient in combat, and even with the aid of the Slaaneshi daemons I can’t see her being a challenge for 4-6 PCs, so I suspect the adventure may end a bit quickly. In spite of those gripes, I think this is pretty excellent.

Grey Mountain Gold (by Mac Dara Mac Donnacha)

The final adventure of Ubersreik Adventures 2 is a classic switcheroo – it purports to be an adventure in which the PCs are hired to accompany an expedition to the lost Karak of House Harataken (currently based in Ubersreik), but actually its a con by a charlatan and his accomplices. I have extremely mixed feelings about this: I feel like an expedition to a lost Dwarf hold would be really cool so the fact that it didn’t happen was a disappointment. On the other hand the con is actually pretty clever – get the patsy (an NPC) to commit to the expedition by forking out for a bunch of equipment; then have the map to the hold “stolen” and ransom it back. Result: the conmen end up wit the ransom money, the patsy gets a useless fake map. Complicating things is the fact that House Harataken gets wind of the plan and are none too pleased at outsiders trying to raid their ancestral hold! 

I’ve seen the Starter Set pregens so often that it feels weird seeing a different adventuring party! Copyright Cubicle 7

So what’s good? There’s a decent amount of detail here on the principle NPCs: the three con artists, the patsy, and a boatman member of House Harataken. I rather enjoyed the shopping trip, where PCs have the opportunity to pick up on the fact that none of the NPCs seem to have any idea what to buy for a mountain expedition; they can also try to fleece their employers for additional equipment for their own benefit. There follows a rather railroaded chase scene, where the PCs and their employer are chased by a mob of irate Harataken Dwarfs; this has the potential to be reasonably fun, but the fact that its nigh-unavoidable rankles. (Oh, and it lacks a map, obviously.) The PCs then get summoned for an audience with the queen of House Harataken, which makes sense narratively, but might as well be a cutscene for all that the PCs can influence anything. Then we have the finale, the ransom handover. This, at least, has a bit of leeway, since its entirely open whether the PCs passively cooperate (leading to a very anticlimactic ending!), attack, attempt to negotiate, or something else. It should be noted that the “attack” option will also be rather anticlimactic, since of the three conmen, one will immediately flee and one is an avowed pacifist (the Dwarf, nicely playing against type), so the party will get to fight a single moderately-capable NPC. (For some reason the adventure is listed as being suitable for PCs in their second careers – I’ve no idea why the writer thought that was the case!)

So, in the end its a bit of a damp squib. As I say, the con itself it pretty nice; the NPCs are all rather decent (the charlatan in particular is a great character); and the opportunity to interact with grumpy Dwarfs could be quite fun. I can’t help but feel that most players will feel pretty irritated to be duped out of an actual fun expedition to a Dwarfhold. It’s one thing for the characters to be irritated by events in an adventure; its rather another to deliberately irritate your players!

Conclusion

This is a very decent collection of adventures with a couple of standouts. I’m noticing that a consistent theme of Cubicle 7’s adventures is that they have excellent NPCs and really good concepts¹. These are both things that I really appreciate in adventures, and I think that you can get plenty of mileage out of re-using some of the great NPCs here elsewhere (my favourite being Ottokar from The Blessing that Drew Blood).

In terms of my own preferences for WFRP adventures, these ones feature some nice setting detail, they all feel grounded (only one or two supernatural elements – in fact, a couple of these have none at all) and they all feature some great atmosphere. As with Ubersreik Adventures 1, player freedom varies from adventure to adventure.

Recommendations

I think this collection is well worth getting. In terms of individual adventures, I would strongly recommend The Blessing That Drew Blood and Double Trouble. But I think the other three all have good concepts and look entirely playable as well (provided you can work out how to deal with the potential issue of Fishrook Returns ending prematurely if a canny player guesses the twist!)

Buy Ubersreik Adventures 2 from DriveThruRPG. This is an affiliate link so I receive a small payment for purchases made using it. 

1. There’s a really interesting post on C7’s blog providing guidance on how to turn an adventure hook into a full adventure, and one of the author’s suggestions is to always discard the most obvious explanation – and I feel like all the Ubersreik Adventures bear out that advice really well. ↩︎