It’s nearly Hallowe’en, which means its time to take a look at one of the spookier adventures for WFRP Fourth Edition. The Headless Horseman has come to the Reikland town of Hallt, and already claimed the lives of several townspeople. Can the PCs stop him?
A short adventure (by Chris Handley and David Whitworth) clearly intended for Hallowe’en use, Hell Rides to Hallt is an atmospheric adventure clearly inspired by the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. As usual, spoilers follow.
This is an adventure with a fantastic atmosphere which really is suited well for Hallowe’en (and fits perfectly with that classic WFRP atmosphere too). I loved the detail that the Horseman speaks only in rhyme1. We get a table of rumours (another WFRP classic that I’m very glad to see). The climax takes place at a windmill, which just feels right to me. There are also some lovely weird details about time distortions going on around the town, like a clock striking out of time and crops growing out of season. We also get some well-written NPCs, thought sadly very little detail to Hallt itself.
The basic plot outline is great – there’s a nice WFRP twist on the classic Headless Horseman tale, and I like the idea that ostensible villain actually turns out to be on the side of justice (something that the PCs may or may not work out). Unfortunately aside from the atmosphere and the basic plot outline, there are plenty of problems too.
Most significant is that the investigation is really very linear, with very little opportunity for the PCs to take multiple approaches. While theoretically they can approach things in any order, there just isn’t a lot for them to do really. It is entirely possible that they’ll get sidetracked investigating the various distortions (I was fully expecting that the clock striking out of time – which the townspeople seem strangely oblivious too – would lead to some crucial encounter in the clocktower) – yet this possibility isn’t even entertained. Compounding this is that the adventure has to climax on Hexenstag, so if the PCs are too slow, they’ll fail the investigation even if they have got the right track. Admittedly, this doesn’t completely end the adventure – instead, the PCs will be alerted to the Thrilling Climax by the Horseman noisily dispatching his latest cultist victim – but it is definitely a limitation.
There other problems too. There are no maps – not for the town of Hallt, nor for the windmill or any other locations. Encounters are written in a very prescribed fashion – e.g. an investigation into the isolated house of one victim leads to a thrilling scene where a cultist sets fire to it and waits to attack them as they exit, but we get no plan of the house, no details about the effects of the fire, and no suggestions for what might happen if any PCs are standing watch, or try to exit any way apart from a front window. This is a real disappointment – a classic case of an author who has a very clear picture of how the encounter will play out, player intentions be damned.
Lastly, the cultists’ have the most boring evil plan ever – to summon a big monster! I got tired of “cultists try to summon a daemon” decades ago in WFRP. This time the monster is a Chaos Spawn actually made out of the combined cultists, rather than the traditional daemon, which is admittedly a little bit original, but at the end of the day it makes little difference from the players’ perspective.
As you can probably tell, this adventure was a big disappointment to me. As I say, I love the atmosphere and the concept, but the actual execution is lacking. I feel this would need a lot of work by a GM to make it a satisfying experience.
Addendum:
On Reddit, VHDamien expressed interest in my thoughts on how to improve the adventure. Here are some brief ideas:
- Perhaps most importantly, provide maps for the key locations e.g. the Calm Toad inn, the farmstead, and the windmill.
- It’s a bigger ask, but I would also really appreciate a map of the town of Hallt (I find that even a fairly sketchy map of a town with a few major landmarks listed is incredibly helpful for bringing it alive – even if those locations have no more than a name and one sentence of information)
- Re-write the sequence at the farmstead where the executioner corners the characters. His actions are fine but it would be good to rework them so they don’t assume that all the characters are all inside the house. What do they do if they’ve set a watch? What happens if they create another exit to the house (e.g. by using an axe to chop their way through a wall)? What can they learn if they capture him?
- Ideally add a least one alternative option for the PCs to investigate to make it a less linear investigation. E.g. a friend of Friedwart (the mortal who became the Headless Horseman) or of Ute’s (whose murder one year ago was pinned on Friedwart) who can provide background on them; a learned NPC who the PCs can talk to meaningfully about the time distortions or the encoded diary.
- In particular it would be nice for there to be better support for the PCs figuring out that one (or more) of the NPCs are cult members and concluding the adventure that way – perhaps they could even use the captured cultist as bait for the Horseman!
- I would love it if the time distortions played a meaningful part in the adventure – ideally in a way that improves the climax. Perhaps the cultists’ final ritual could result in the inhabitants of the windmill travelling back in time – maybe a year ago to the murder of Ute or the execution of Friedwart? Could the PCs change history, and what would be the results when they return to the present day?
Buy Hell Rides to Hallt from DriveThruRPG.
NB this adventure is currently on sale, along with a number of other spooky WFRP titles, either separately or in a bundle for extra savings.
Links to DriveThruRPG are affiliate links so I receive a small payment for purchases made using them.
- Though it has to be said that this is likely to cause problems for most GMs if they have to ad lib any dialogue for him ↩︎
Ill Met by Morrslieb 
(Not sure if my previous posting of this comment is still pending or didn’t go properly – apologies if it’s still under review.)
I’ve not read ‘Hell Rides to Halt’, so I can’t comment specifically in this case, but I can speak of my own experience, so I thought I’d talk a bit about linearity and set encounters.
I wrote a lot of stuff for ‘Warpstone’. The great thing about writing fan material is that you can write as much as you want and pretty much whatever you want. However, writing stuff for publication as a business is another matter. The problem is, projects have budgets. There’s an art budget and writing budget, and I’m sure layout budgets, and so fourth. For me as a writer, the writing budget translates as ‘word count’ and that’s where a difficulty lies.
When I was writing for ‘Warpstone’ what would happen is that I’d spend months (in the case of the Fimir project, years) writing, rewriting, having additional ideas, coming up with different approaches, alternative perspectives, adding this, developing that, and so on. It kind of didn’t matter if the original idea was a four page article, but turns into seven or eight. But you can’t do that with a project where there’s a financial limit to how many words you can use.
To give you an example, my scenario ‘Feast of Blood’ has a pretty clear pathway through it and scenes that seem to have a this-is-how-to-play-them quality. As I was writing them, I could think of half a dozen different approaches players could take, all those ‘what if’ moments you get. If I was writing ‘Feast of Blood’ for ‘Warpstone’ I would have included them. However, that would likely have added more than 50% to the word count, and possibly breached the deadline. Also, based on experience, every new idea or possibility would probably have inspired two more, which would turn into yet another text box.
One could argue I should have cut other things – in ‘Feast of Blood’ I spent a lot of time describing locations. Some people absolutely hate description or consider it unnecessary. Personally, I think it’s important to create atmosphere and that a sense of place is vital… but cutting it might have provided words to provide alternative possibilities in the scenario. Ultimately, it’s a judgment call, and you have to have to hope for the best.
For me, it’s interesting that of my two scenarios for C7, ‘Something Knocking’ and ‘Feast of Blood’, the former seems more consistently rated, while the latter seems more divisive (based on DriveThru’s star rating). Ironically, while I’m perfectly happy with ‘Something Knocking’, I think that ‘Feast of Blood’ is a lot more ‘me’.
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Thank you Robin, it’s great to get the inside scoop.
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Thanks for the insights, that is really helpful and interesting. (No sign of your previous comment I’m afraid!)
It is good for me to keep in mind that professional writers have pretty strict limitations, and it may be that I don’t recognise that enough in my reviews. (Certainly I’m aware that reviewing adventures is much easier than creating them!)
I absolutely agree that it’s important to provide atmosphere and it’s one of the things I regard as being crucial to WFRP, so I do appreciate nice atmospheric descriptions 🙂
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Thank you for the review.
As mentioned by the other commentator as a writer for this scenario there are clear limitations put in place for a publication of this type. Word count. Budgets for art etc. So while yes, we could have made the scenario more winding with options and side plots, there just is not the page count/word count to accommodate that.
As for linear nature of the plot, for context this scenario was originally designed by myself for a demo event, where it was tested on a half dozen tables. So while sure, more options in the plot are good, for the length of the game play intended, we wanted something more direct, where the player choices didn’t prevent they from getting to the end of the scenario in the time slot allocated, but did impact the quality of the ending they could get.
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Thanks so much for commenting, I really appreciate it!
I recognise that you’re under a lot of restrictions when writing a product for publication, and some of the ideas I mentioned at the end of the review would be well beyond the scope of that (plus of course the inclusion of a map is not under your control).
It’s really interesting to hear this was original created for a demo event, since that does have its own additional restrictions.
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